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We met Ben and Bart from Mobile Voter recently and spoke about potential synergy between the two projects and the possibility of integrating SMS communication with CiviCRM. Mobile Voter has been running some pretty impressive SMS campaigns around the US, especially around Voter Registration Issues. Ben has developed the platform using LAMP and basically integrates with an "SMS aggregator". Some of the more popular aggregators are ClikaTell and SimpleWire. Aspiration organized a Mobile Active Conference in Toronto recently, the proceedings are definitely worth a read.
Ben recently threw out some ideas for a project which utilizes SMS communication and tracking data with CiviCRM. The rough plan is:
- identify 10 communities in the US with low computer penetration and low voter registration rates
- conduct register to vote via text msg campaigns in these area (they have been doing flyers, radio, billboards and concerts)
- have one of the professional voter analysis guys run an empirical study to evaluate effectiveness - and then publish results
- for the campaign, develop an open src voter-reg/sms module for civicrm
- coordinate with international partners to run simultaneous campaigns or campaigns after bugs are worked out in US campaign
- Other potential applications include collecting donations via SMS (big thing in Europe)
I'll be maintaining a link of SMS links on my delicious
6 Comments
Hide/Show CommentsNov 08, 2005
Tobias Eigen
Hi -
I'm very glad to see this is happening. I was also at the Mobile Active Convergence, which was an intense and meaningful event. When I returned to work from there we immediately wrote something about SMS and civicrm into a proposal we are working on to develop an Online Community Website for Kabissa members.
We proposed to include mobile phones in the member data our members provide when they sign up, along with their e-mail addresses and snail mail address. This number can then be verified via a code sent via SMS - this would enable us (and our partners) to then use SMS to contact them for various purposes such as membership management, training opportunities, petitions, information dissemination about human rights issues, and so on.
We have learned that SMS is already being used a great deal as a communications tool by many of our members.. for an example, see member spotlight on Media Rights Agenda in Nigeria:
http://www.kabissa.org/gong_gong/member_spotlight/mra.html
Another interesting example from Fahamu is here: http://www.pambazuka.org/petition/smssocial.php
Since many Africans in the civil society sector have a cell phone, which they are more readily able to access than e-mail, the impact could be revolutionary.
Happy to brainstorm more with you all about how we could make this a reality.
Cheers,
Tobias
May 15, 2007
Andrew Perry
Has this idea slipped by the wayside? It would be a handy feature in many countries.
May 16, 2007
David Greenberg
Andrew - We are still interested in seeing this functionality become part of CiviCRM. However, we need one or more partners with real use cases and domain expertise in this area (and ideally some financial resources as well) to make this a reality. Please contact us via the forums and/or civicrm-dev mailing list if you are interested in driving this forward.
Apr 03, 2008
Didac Royo
Hello!
It's more than 2 YEARS from the first post (added by Donald A. Lobo) suggesting the CIVISMS new feature!
I'm trying to figure out what is the actual development staus of this great new feature and I finally have found this resource
http://svn.civicrm.org/civicrm/trunk/CRM/SMS/
The documents and files contained under this location specifies that this is part of version CiviCRM 2.1 which I supose is "under construction", since it is not available to download (not even as Beta release).
Does anybody know when this new release CiviCRM 2.1 is supposed to be released??
Cheers,
Dídac Royo
Apr 04, 2008
Donald A. Lobo
SMS does not seem to be very popular among CiviCRM users
The code is quite old and CiviSMS is definitely not part of 2.1. there are no plans to do anything with it in the short term (other than potentially deleting the code from svn!)
Apr 04, 2008
David Greenberg
The code you've found in our svn repository was experimental and was written quite a while ago (so is almost certainly not compatible with our current releases). This feature is currently on the back-burner until such time as an organization or individual steps up with domain expertise and financial or developer resources to sponsor it. Contact us via the community forum or IRC if you want to discuss this if you have interest and resources to push this forward.