For non-profit organisations, charities and cause related marketing the mobile can provide the best integrated marketing solution for campaigns. There are a number of tools and techniques which can be used to promote your cause or help to raise donations.

This article is a followup to our feature post about Mobile Marketing for Non Profits & Charities

1. SMS Premium Text Donations

Making donations using your mobile is as simple as sending a text to a special number. For the not so concerned and the lazy its a quick way to send a few dollars, euros or pounds to a worthy cause. The SMS premium text solutions that you choose must work across all major operators and the solution should mean that the service provider and operator minimise their cost for the charity. mmCHANNEL has been working with charities and mobile operators in Spain since 2004 with a cross operator solution called Movilaridad.

2. Mobile Apps & Games – Branded Content

For cause related marketing and integrated marketing, mobile apps and branded games are a viral marketing tool. Today’s mobile phones allow for fun based games which also can teach the user about your cause (ie teaching people how to take care of their land or water supply). Development of an app does take budget – but the reward is something fun that can be easily promoted via the iTunes Store, Android Market or your own web or mobile site.

Of course any app should link to your mobile site and allow the user to sign-up for email alerts or status updates.

3. Mobile Internet and Websites

Mobile websites are no longer the little brother. As more people get smartphones with richer functions a fully ‘grown up’ website can be created for customers to experience. The same points apply – allow people to sign up for alerts to stay in contact or to download any mobile app straight to their phone.

4. Campaign Tools & SMS Status Alerts

Once you have people opted-in to receive status alerts, using the mmCHANNEL Alerts Console you will be able to quickly notify them of important events and invite them back to your mobile website to make a donation or find out how they can help. It makes sense to have a solution that integrates with a mobile and email CRM allowing for campaign promotions.

5. Branded Content – Videos, Music, Tones, Images & Wallpapers

Branded content is one of the best ways to get recognition of your brand. Wallpapers can be downloaded to desktops or saved on phones (even shared with friends!). Content like videos can also feature your brand as part of the digital overlay or a pre-roll or post-roll sequence

It is also easy to build your own digital download content shop into any existing web or mobile site using solutions that mmCHANNEL provides.

Recent humanitarian disasters like the earthquake of Haiti or the tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004 have demonstrated the ability of the Internet and Mobile to bring together social movements.

mmCHANNEL can provide charities and relief organisations with our Alerts Console and Mobile Marketing Campaign services to facilitate the dissemination of information and help to raise funds and donations by the monetization of these causes. In Spain we are working with organizations such as Plan Spain, ONCE and more.

Social Networks have moved from being a mere vehicle of personal interaction to become the most comprehensive means of dissemination of any good cause, and there is NGOs or charitable organization which does not thinks about its presence in these networks as these are key to let the people know the situation of the needy and their efforts to combat such situations. Not in vain, and under this pretext, the Internet has been proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Italian version of the magazine Wired on the grounds that “it is a tool that allows advanced dialogue, debate and consensus through communication, and promote democracy. ”

Ask for a free needs assessment or get more information on our case studies: contact us or visit the Spanish website for www.movilaridad.org.

Marketing Agencies and their Brands need to go and reconsider their mobile strategy – and if you’ve already built a mobile app – you maybe disappointed how it looks on the larger screen devices.

The announcement of a large screen Apple iPad and netbooks running Google Android will be exciting for consumers – essentially these are mobile devices with wifi and 3G mobile broadband. For marketers its another screen that needs its own plan.

Recently, I attended a workshop on an Android powered Netbook – the developers present, some of them with popular music apps were, with one voice crying foul about the screen size. It’s one thing to make an app work on small mobile screens – its another to make an app work on a 7″ wide screen notebook thingy.

2010 will bring a number of problems for mobile apps – the easiest strategy is to get someone in to help you build up your mobile website.

mmCHANNEL launches its Build-Your-Own Digital Entertainment Shop for Agencies and Consumer Brands

mmCHANNEL, experts in mobile marketing and digital content has launched a new b2b API Service.

Damien Saunders, Director of Sales & Marketing said, “Using the b2b API means its possible for any digital agency or brand to launch their own digital download store as part of any marketing campaign”.

Using our API’s you can build a digital shop into your existing mobile portal or website which means you’re in control of the design and user experience. Your Customers & End users can choose to get your content pushed to their phone via SMS or saved to their PC.

For many businesses and digital agencies creating a mobile or PC content shop as part of a marketing campaign is now in their reach and this fits in any mobile, web or social media campaign.

The b2b API service removes many traditional headaches such as delivery management, tracking and reporting content sales or managing digital rights.

Benefits to Digital Agencies, Consumer Brands or Operators

• Cost effective solution for just about any agency or FMCG brand to build a digital content shop.
• Variable agreement to support 3, 6 or 12 month campaigns
• Usage of the b2b API means you own the design and user experience
• Easily integrates with social media services for sending updates about featured content or recommendations.

The service features include:

Content Management – Using mmCHANNEL’s own content agreements or your own content agreements we will manage the content catalogue and updates to the content on a weekly basis for the duration of the campaign.

Content Delivery – mmCHANNEL will integrate with your existing SMS marketing tools or you can use our own.

Usage Metrics – mmCHANNEL provides a business statistics console to check real-time service usage.

Payment Collection – mmCHANNEL can manage payment collection if you want to sell content using Premium SMS, Paypal or Google Checkout.

The ‘end user’ consumer functions that are accessible using the b2b API are content browsing, searching, content delivery and handset recognition.

To find out more … visit our b2b API Service page or click here bit.ly/b2b_API

Customers already know how to use social media to stay up to date with friends and events. Businesses running competitions using the mobile and social media benefit from increased traffic to their online sites.

Many agencies and brands say that its easier to understand the benefits of SMS based competitions – but the costs of bulk sms now mean this is not so cost effective.

Social Media and the Mobile Internet creates a great opportuntiy to engage your customers on the sites they are visiting. Using competitions on the fan pages or a twitter treasure hunt is a great method to build a modern successful mobile marketing campaign.

mmCHANNEL’s clients can also benefit as we make it easy to promote featured content or weekly top sales is able to create and manage Facebook pages and Twitter accounts as our content solutions are integrated with these social networks.

mmCHANNEL are experts in mobile marketing – building digital entertainment stores for mobile operators and service providers. We also build and manage mobile websites and mobile apps and games.

Should you be worried that you don’t have an iPhone app? Do you know if you’re website works on a mobile? what about mobile SEO? It is very important for CEO’s and CMO’s to add mobile to their communications and marketing strategy.

The fact that most companies have yet to build a mobile website shows you are not alone and many companies want to know what they should do first. Build an app. Build a mobile strategy or do something. Considering each three …

Build an app

Answer Yes to these questions and you’ll know that building an app is right for you:

1. Is your company always first to market?
2. Do you want to get some PR effect?
3. Interested in winning a Mobile or Advertising industry Award

Choosing iPhone is the natural option for good PR or awards material. We build apps and games for iPhone and any other smartphones

Build a strategy

Want to understand mobile better, then consider how ‘mobile’ fits in your marketing mix. Could you get better PR? Leverage a viral campaign? Link mobile to your social media approach? Or want smartphone users to find your brand. We then suggest you build a mobile website and maybe build an app too.

Do something

Yes actually, doing something is a strategy – build a mobile friendly site, build an app and start to learn from them. Stay motivated and maybe expect the same results as the early web pioneers. Once you’ve done something you’ll still need to promote it.

For your next discussion on mobile advertising, apps and strategy – give mmCHANNEL a call. We’ll be happy to setup a workshop to help you get mobile.

Mobile games provide media companies with an effective way to promote digital content, products and brands to vital segments of their base.

Advergaming-on-the-fly makes it easy to develop your own game. With the net result of boosting brand impact from unique and engaging mobile game experiences.

Games are a rapidly developing segment of the global mobile market. The impact from iPhone and improved handset capabilities mark an important turning point. This means more people buying smartphones or feature-phones.

Mobile has become a way to express your personality and lifestyle and more importantly to provide entertainment when hanging out with friends, waiting around or travelling. Advertisers and agencies benefit from advergaming with effective, measurable and non-intrusive solutions to connect with their audience when they are immerse in mobile leisure.

Mobile advergaming will…

-        Complement your advertising scope with a new medium with penetration indexes above other media like TV or radio.

-        Allow you to interact with the user: making phone calls, participate in a ranking online, send SMS or collect data.

-        Create advertising mixed with entertainment, as the advertiser’s brand appears throughout the game

-        Create a community around the brand, shared and connected with main social networks such Facebook.

mmCHANNEL and its sister company Unkasoft are experienced partners for helping you to build your mobile apps, games or website. We’ve worked with over 100 household brands and their ad and creative agencies.

Imagine Steve, Bill, the Google Boys, Warren (Buffet) and myself get together to chat about 2010 and the Telco space. Warren is not really in the mood for TMT investments but he is listening. Bill believes that Windows will finally make a play in the mobile space with their first good product – Windows Mobile 7.0. The rest smile and say ‘good luck’ to him because being good most of your handset suppliers like HTC are now with the Google Boys and Android.

The Google boys look puzzled but excited. They brought to the chat more than 50 devices with Android for 2010. However they’ve not got enough apps and transactions yet (why is Steve managing to do this just with one device?) and it is still unclear how long it will take for mobile advertising to become a reality. There is still not enough money on mobile search, “… No worries, we just bought AdMob and there is lots of room for smaller companies to play in this space and find interesting niches and then we will buy them”. How many companies will they buy in 2010?

Warren is watching the Advercontent (advertising based games and applications) space, but just watching and learning and maybe China, India, Brazil and South Africa is where real scale will happen for this (paired with finally fast enough networks and accessible medium end handsets, we can imagine the big smiles of the Huawei and ZTE fellas). The internet boys don’t make any money on social media but he does believe mobile in these territories may be the place to monetize social media (content, analytics, location based). He also took several calls to listen to some interesting ventures on m-payments and micro-transactions in Africa and the Middle East. Hmmmmm

Why did we not invite Nokia to the meeting? They are too busy sorting out their house. It is true, first they shout OVI for president, now Symbian is not good enough, and now instead of embracing Android or buying Palm OS they are going to create another Linux based OS!!! Now we start understanding why they did not come today or they are not going to WMC 2010

Hey the RIM boys got to the meeting late. The rest have already divided the mass market application space between them and some upcoming startups. However vertical oriented apps is going to be an upcoming segment and the blackberry device is king here. Can their OS and their app store be a business oriented apps thriving space and take upcoming tech young companies on the ride. Warren is listening and nods

Where is Steve? Did he leave to launch another Apple phone or they were just getting ready to open up the app store next year. We agree to give him the 2009 champion, will he win again in 2010?

As we were walking out the room, Warren says ‘What about the operators?’ I said we need to get together again for lunch to figure that one out.