A team consisting of myself, Luke Razzell, Improbulus, Karina Brisby, Priya Prakash, and a few other lovely people whose names have slipped my mind were tasked with finding a way to raise money for clean water.  Specifically targeting families and using mobile payments.

Me describing our team's idea

The Proposition

1. The ability to donate your unused minutes to charity.  Text “10″ to NNNNN to donate 10 minutes to help dig a well.
2. Feedback from the project.  “Since digging the well, 500 people have got access to clean water”.
3. Rewards for donating.  Free ringtone, a wallpaper of your project, mobile videos.  Possibly even extending to tax benefits.
4. Social Network. “@edent just donated 15 minutes to build a water sanitation plant. Donate by texting …..”
5. Ensuring local people are employed to staff the project – giving training in building, maintaining and IT skills

Here’s how it looked when we were done with it.

The finished article

There are two end goals

1. You see a poster which says “It takes 6 hours to drill a well. Donate 10 minutes – text 10 to [SHORTCODE]“.
2. You text “Unused” to [SHORTCODE], any unused minutes at the end of the month get donated to charity.

I was really excited with what we’d come up with in just 30 minutes.  However, it’s not all plain sailing.

The Problem

What constitutes “unused” minutes, what are they worth, how are they donated?

Pre-Pay Customers (where you load your account with credit):

With pre-pay, you may only have a set time period in which you can use your credit. If your credit expires after, say, 30 days, that amount is donated to the charity.

The “donation” question is quite easy.  If you have £9.37 on your account and you donate £1.00, you’re left with £8.37 to spend.

The “minutes” question is quite tricky. On some plans, the first few minutes are charged at a high rate, subsequent minutes at a lower one.  Minutes to mobile phones are often cost more than to landlines.  How do we get a standard definition of what a minute is in order that donors understand how much they’re spending?

Contract Customers (where you pay at the end of the month):

The “minutes” question is easy.  You have a plan which gives you 600 minutes, you donate 10 minutes, you’re left with 590 minutes until the end of the month.  If you go over 590 minutes you’re charged your out of bundle rate (making a nice little earner for the operator).

The “worth” question is trickier. If you have a £35 plan which gives you 500 minutes domestic calls, 100 minutes international calls,  700 text, 500MB data, and insurance – how much is one minute worth?  To you it’s simple – fewer minutes on your plan.  But how much is given to the charity?

The “donation” question is also tricky. If your plan includes different types of minutes – domestic, mobile, international, video calling – from which class is the donation taken?

Operators

[Disclaimer: I work for Vodafone Group - this is my personal blog. All opinions are my own and represent no one other than myself. I really have very little idea how operators plan their airtime budgets]

MNOs (Mobile Network Operator) get some great benefits from a scheme like this.  The good PR that comes with highly visible CSR is one – the fact that charitable donations can be tax deductible is another.

Again, there are some downsides.

The main problem comes with unused credit. I am sure (but I don’t categorically know) that MNOs budget for the average user only utilising 80% of their inclusive minutes.  Most people err on the side of caution and will take more minutes than they’ll actually use to ensure they don’t get bill-shock.

(No doubt there are some customers who regularly exceed their inclusive allowance – but they can’t donate what they’ve already used!)

So the customer thinks they’re paying £30 for 600 minutes (5p per minute) whereas the operator knows that they’ll probable only use 480 minutes (so they’re being charged 6.25ppm).  Is an operator really going to be happy donating £6 (5p * 120 unused minutes)  from their profit margin every month? Probably not.  Even the tax breaks won’t help there.

For that reason, I think donating “unused” minutes as cash idea is probably a non-starter. It’s the most attractive – you literally do nothing and you get to make a donation – but it directly attacks the MNOs business model.

A Solution?

We’ve already discussed how much a minute is worth.  Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to charge customers – pre-pay and contract for the donation.  If a contract customer donated 10 minutes, she find an extra £1.50 charge on her phone bill that month?

Perhaps the “unused” minutes could be donated to the charity in the form of minutes. Literally.  You donate 10 minutes, the charity has 10 minutes worth of calls wiped from its monthly phone bill.  The MNO gets to write off the bill to charity, the charity has money freed up for good causes.

Next Steps

I’m going to be thinking more about this issue throughout the week – I really want to take this idea further. I’d welcome any thoughts, feedback or criticism.

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Organised by MobileActive.org, this was a BarCamp for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.  This was a step change from most BarCamps which – if we’re honest – are often about showing off. Whether it’s grandstanding on a particular topic or demoing something cool they’ve found, BarCamps can feel a bit like a grown-up version of “Show and Tell”.  Because this BarCamp was aimed tightly on the twin subjects of Mobile and Social Change, I found it refreshingly focussed.  There was a real sense that everyone there wanted to make a difference.

First up, a massive thanks to Katrin and Dan for getting the event up and running.  Organisers can make or break a BarCamp and these two were the perfect mix of cat herder and presenter.

We started with a presentation from Karina Brisby, G20Voice project founder and Oxfam Digital Campaigns Manager. I wasn’t surprised that Oxfam have a dedicated digital team – what did surprise me is that the team is so small and yet was able to organise events like G20Voice.

Some points I picked up on

• Oxfam used SpinVox and AudioBoo to empower people around the world to communicate with G20Voice. These technologies enable people to literally have their voice heard. In many ways, voice is more powerful than a traditional petition.
• I wonder if a service like Phreadz could be used with 3G phones to make this sort of campaigning more powerful. Obviously, it requires a higher technology base.
• Oxfam are looking to embed their applications & content into mobiles.
• Interesting. Would you buy an Oxfam co-branded Nokia (for example)?
• In some places, being seen to talk to Oxfam can be dangerous. Mobile is discreet & more importantly fast. Essential for NGOs
• Targeting is key to campaigning. While millions march against war, it only take a few high profile people to whisper in the right ears to make a difference.
• Perhaps the most inspiring statement of the day “Even in repressive regimes, nerds find a way to get around restriction!” Because SMS can be monitored by the state, nerds in some countries use Bluetooth transmitters hidden in flowerpots to spread their message.  Nerd are nerds wherever you go!
• If you’re in the UK, you can donate £5 to Oxfam RIGHT NOW! Text “HUNGRY” to 87099.

Next up, Scott Smith, a “Futurist”. Scott had organised a game for us…

I’ll admit to being a bit sceptical; usually team “bonding” games are a huge turn-off for me. This was no ordinary team game.
We had cards with specific tasks and restrictions. We had to come up with a solution to a problem – in our case, raising money from families to help provide clean drinking water. We had to consider factors like m-banking, open source, anonymity, NFC, etc.
Here’s the result – a service which lets you donate unused minutes from your airtime plan to a charity.

Combined with social network integration, “rewards”, reporting, usage of local labour. I was astounded with what we had devised in just 30 minutes. All the other teams had similarly inspiring ideas. I really feel that we could leverage our idea to change fund-raising in this country. Kudos to Scott for a brilliant and thought provoking session.

I flitted between several of the sessions, chatting to people. Here are two of the most memorable session.

The-Latest.com is a Citizen Journalist / UGC website with a heavy focus on non-reported or under-reported news. Marc Wadsworth and Deborah Hobson were very open in how the site works and what its challenges are.

Citizen journalism is a rapidly growing field. I don’t want to go in to details about the failing of mainstream media – failings that blogs often have – but it has become clear that we urgently need alternative news sources. Allowing people to report on stories which interest and impact them is much needed.

Finally, Dan set up a session on open sourced, crowd sourced news gathering for crisis zones. A heavy topic, but one with increasing relevance. In particular, this looked at Ushahidi and ways in which it can be improved and expanded.

The one thing which worries me about ideas like this is how you manage trust in an anonymous network. You need anonymity to protect people from recriminations – but you need trust to ensure that you’re not being used as a vector for misinformation.

I want to give my thanks to everyone who was at M4ChangeUK – far too many to mention individually. BarCamps live or die based on the attendees; this one soared into the sky.

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