How do I choose?

First, just like any campaign, you need to define your goals and identify your audience. Begin by answering the question: Who are you trying to reach and what are you asking them to do?

Goals: What are you trying to do with mobile?

Once you have a better understanding of who of your audience is and which platform they're using, it is time to define your goals and figure out which of the mobile platforms can help you achieve them. 

In part one, we identified three types of mobile tools available for supporter engagement: SMS, mobile web, and mobile apps. Each platform has strengths and weaknesses.  

SMS

Is great for:

• Driving calls
• Real-time reaction 
• Coordination, such as running group/house parties
• Visibility events 
• Emergency donations, like we're seeing now for Japan

SMS does have it's limits and isn't good for:

• Driving email sign-up
• Info-heavy messages
• Large or non-emergency donations

Mobile web

• This is a must-have as web traffic is increasingly from mobile devices
• It isn't good for push/urgent messages

Apps (iPhone, Android)

The pluses for app creation are numerous:

• Apps offer location-based functionality, so have potential for:
  • neighborhood organizing 
  • driving consumer-choice at point-of-purchase
  • helping supporters find local information or services
  • "checking in" to an event or location
• Apps offer an increasing array of functionality that can be used creatively, including: barcode scanning, photo and video capture, forms, voice translation, etc.
• They can drive revenue 
• Relatively few organizations have successfully launched a mobile app, so they can help you establish a reputation and leadership within this area

But it does have some down sides:

• Interesting mobile apps can be expensive to develop and deploy
• There are currently three different opperating systems: iPhone/iPad OS, Android and Blackberry, as well as numerous Android and Blackberry versions which you'll need to choose to develop an app for.
• Compared to SMS and mobile web, finding and installing an app is a high ask

Audience: Your Would-Be Supporters

Knowing your audience -- as defined by the age, ethnicity, geographic, and psychographic(s) of your would-be supporters -- will help you figure out where to invest your time and money.

There is a lot of data available regarding who mobile usage patterns. Let's dig in and see who is on which platform, to help idenitfy the best one for interacting with your particular audience.

SMS

Are you looking to reach Latinos, African-Americans and teens? They are all regular SMS users.

Apps

The ideal audience for a mobile app is one that has smartphones -- preferably iPhones or Android phones (Blackberry apps are less popular and the marketplace is not as active). 

Currently, 28% of the cell phone market is held by smartphones and their use is on the rise. It is predicted that over 50% of the market will be smartphones by the end of the year. 

But where does your audience fit in this picture? Are they ahead of, or behind, the adoption curve? You can dig a little deeper and see smartphone use by age, gender and income:

Hispanics and Asians are most likely smartphone owners within the U.S.

You can break it down even further by finding out which smartphones your audience is using. 

Blackberry devices are on the decline, Apple iPhone remains steady and Android continues to win market share. 

But while Adroid operating usage continues to rise overall, device preference varies by age, ethnicity, and gender.

To figure out whether to invest in creating a mobile app, find your audience in this matrix. If your audience is ahead of the curve in smartphone adoption and are heavy users of iPhones (or Android phones) -- and your goals are a good fit for apps -- then consider it seriously!

Mobile Web

The easiest way to tell who is using the mobile web is to view your Google analytics. These stats can be found under Vistors. If the number of people viewing your website via a mobile phone is enough to justify some investment in creating a mobile-friendly version of your website, then now is the time. (Actual costs vary widely based on your web platform and content.)

If the numbers are too small to justify an investment now, consider building that into fundraising and budget planning over the next 12-18 months.  Because as you can see in the example below, the difference between a webite optimized for mobile versus non-optomized is stark. 

Putting It All Together

To recap, look first at what tools are best for reaching your goals and then at which are best for reaching your audience -- and use this information to help drive your decision on where to focus your budget. Mainly this should help you narrow down:

1) How heavily to invest in mobile vs other communications channels, and

2) Where to focus.

For example, if you're trying to pass the DREAM Act -- your goal is to drive calls to the White House and Congress and on investigation it turns out you have a largely Hispanic audience under 35 -- then investing in an SMS network seems like an obvious choice. 

If you are an urban health organization trying to drive consumer choice towards organic foods -- and you discover one of your target audiences is young Asian moms -- then consider creating an iPhone app that offers to scan barcodes for helpful info about toxic chemicals on various products at the grocery store. 

If your goal is to influence thinking about healthcare plan selection by business owners, and your audience is 65+ year-old white businessmen -- forget SMS; consider an iPhone app for calculating healthplan ROI that incorporates your organization's math/values; but also consider investing (for now) those dollars in offline advertising in industry magazines or an organizer with connections to that community instead of mobile.

Of course, this is not hard science -- just a way we've found helpful for thinking about where to invest your limited dollars effectively when looking at mobile. We'd love to hear about your experience in the comments below.

In part three in the series, we'll offer suggestions on how to budget for mobile including some tips on how to test your audience's taste for mobile on the cheap. Stay tuned. 

Read from the begining: part one.