Is engaging underserved communities part of your mission? Increasingly you’ll need to reach them via mobile media. A new white paper from the ZeroDivide Foundation explains how can you do this well—and how can funders support mobile community media efforts…

Last week the ZeroDivide Foundation published a white paper I co-authored: Funding Mobile Strategies for Social Impact. The aim of this paper was to educate foundations and other funders about the ways that mobile technology can help people in underserved communities. It also advised funders on ways to help grantees seize mobile opportunities that can help fulfill their community mission.

Most of these grantees are nonprofit and community organizations which focus on traditional service delivery (health, education, employment, etc.). But some of them are—and more could be—community media. Also, funders might be in a position to support special projects run by, or in collaboration with, community media.

Here are a few highlights to consider:

1. Mobile is hugely popular with key demographics within traditionally underserved communities.

Cell phones are already a primary tool for how many people get online and access all sorts of news, information, services, and entertainment. This is especially likely in communities and demographics that are “underserved”—poor or otherwise marginalized by language, geography, educational, or cultural barriers.

About a year ago research by the Pew Internet and American Life project found that 25% of smartphone owners mostly go online using their cell phone, even though many have other access options (such as a computer) available to them. These “cell mostly” internet users are disproportionately young (42% are age 18-29), black or Latino (38%) and low income (40% come from households with an annual income of $30,000 or less). Also, 33% went no further than high school in education.

When Pew revisited U.S. digital divide issues this February, they found that smartphone ownership had increased markedly across all key demographics for “cell mostly” internet access—although Latinos and African Americans already showed disproporrtionately high rates of smartphone ownership for a few years previously.

Most of these demographics also doubled—or more—their ownership of tablets (from the new Kindle Fire to the iPad) in the most recent holiday buying season.

2. Text messaging is especially ubiquitous and popular—and underutilized.

In the U.S., 72% of adult cell phone users send and receive text messages, and the rate is higher for teenagers. Most people use text messaging for strictly interpersonal communication. However, texting also can be used to transmit news, alerts, or reminders—or to provide interactivity or customized services.

Text messaging is the most ubiquitous of mobile channels—it works on almost every cell phone. Around the globe (and especially in the developing world) this has made texting a vital tool for delivering services and information.

But in the U.S., the way wireless carriers here bill for text messaging (charging both the sender and recipients for each message) plus the U.S. requirement to use a common shortcode for virtually any text messaging other than interpersonal communication makes it relatively costly and complex to add a texting component to programs.

Community members also often hesitate to sign up for services delivered via texting—they have real concerns about spam and privacy. And such programs typically require substantial outreach and education to encourage adoption.

Still, texting is such a potentially powerful communication channel that it’s important to push past these obstacles, especially to reach underserved communities or demographics.

The ZeroDivide paper explains how programs such as Mobile Voices in South Los Angeles, and the transit info service NextBus (available in several cities), use text messaging and other mobile media channels to deliver services and information—and also to empower underserved communities by giving them more of a voice online.

Funders can help nonprofits and community media overcome obstacles to using texting in their offerings by helping to cover the cost to develop, deploy, promote and support texting services. They also can lease shortcodes which then could be shared among their grantees or partners at low/no cost, and educate grantees about texting opportunities.

3. Build powerful partnerships.

Mobile almost never stands alone. It tends to work best as part of the overall experience of a service—and for underserved communities and demographics, relevant media and information are vital services.

Similarly, mobile offerings often represent a prime opportunity to bring together partners—funders, nonprofits, institutions (schools, etc.), media outlets, government, community leaders, and more. This can deepen ties and foster further collaboration of all kinds to aid and empower communities.

For instance, the national Text4Baby campaign (aimed at supporting maternal and infant health) worked with the wireless carrier association CTIA to convince all North American carriers to deliver all of the program’s text messages (over 20 million so far) completely free of charge to both the sender and recipient.

Of course, Text4Baby is a well funded national campaign with sponsors like Johnson & Johnson and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, so they were able to wrangle a special deal.

However, at a recent conference on nonprofit technology, CTIA vice president David Diggs told me that the Text4Baby arrangement is a pilot test of a lower-cost texting service (rather like an 800 number for texting) that carriers plan to make available to nonprofits.

Consequently, now might be an opportune time for funders, community media, nonprofits, and their partners and constituencies might lobby the CTIA to roll out this service sooner rather than later. Also, carriers could experiment more now with similar pilot tests involving a variety of types of media, service providers, programs, and constituencies.

...This paper covers much, much more. As a cofounder of the nonprofit community site OaklandLocal.com, I tried hard to make it relevant to community media as well as funders and service organizations. You can download the paper, and you might want to pass it along to your current and prospective funders and partners.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.