In this interview, Ben Rigby talks about the idea behind Mobile Voter, an initiative to engage youth on political action through the use of mobile media. He talks about their experience launching a voter registration campaign with different non-profits in the United States. He also talks about Gen 2.0, a book they're working on. The book will be a guide for non-profits that are looking for ways to engage youth using web technology such as blogging, online video and text messaging.

Summary:

Ben Rigby
Executive Director, Mobile Voter
http://mobilevoter.org/

We started in 2004 realizing that young people were communicating through text messaging as a language that bound people together. We saw the opportunity to use that web of communication to engage young people in political and civil life. The first idea was to allow young people to register to vote using text messages, enable voting registration at the places where people live their lives. We ran a registration campaign in 2004 to 2006. We had funding to do a national campaign and develop software that would develop organizations to define a keyword and make people text that keyword in by SMS. We gave them the tool to register people to vote additional to the efforts they had been doing. We also provided metrics for organizations to account for the results of their efforts.

The hardest part was getting people to text in. You need to have the right incentive package in place in order to motivate people to participate via text, for example Bono had The One campaign with the right kind of incentives and that was very effective. The organizations had a couple barriers, they had to learn about texting and then they actually had to use it, and being non-profits on election year they didn't have much time. Some organizations like the League of Young Voters had very good results promoting text registration at events. The rates surged near the registration deadline.

In the process of doing the voter registration campaigns we found that a lot of non-profits had no idea what texting was and how to use it, it was a difficult process of education. The idea behind the book is to take all these Web 2.0 technologies that businesses are using, that business have resources to use strategically, and creating a handbook telling non profits what they can do with blogging, texting, social networks, what has worked and what hasn't worked and put it in a handbook for non-profits and political campaigns, levelling the field between non-profit and businesses a little bit. In the book we talk about blogging, social networks, virtual worlds, podcasting, RSS and programmable web but on la language that is not scary for non-profit and showing the actual uses you can make of these technologies. As a non profit you can have small results in your day to day operations, you can make a difference in your local level.