Q-and-A With Michael Kondratick, Director of Grassroots Advocacy, JDRF

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), the largest charitable funder and advocate of type 1 diabetes research, recently launched a mobile-marketing campaign that uses wireless technology to enhance communication with and generate involvement from its advocates across the country. Called DiabeTXT, the program sends information to JDRF constituents via text messages, alerting them about important legislation news, diabetes research news and upcoming events.

We recently caught up with Michael Kondratick, director of grassroots advocacy for JDRF, to talk with him a bit about how the program is working and what he sees for its future.

FundRaising Success: When did your organization decide to use mobile technology?
Michael Kondratick: We've been experimenting with text messaging for [about] six months. We've started here in the advocacy program as a way to pilot the technology, to try to gauge how our audience would respond to it and then make the decisions further on on how we wanted to expand its use. So for the six months we've been working on it, it's been focused on its advocacy efforts. Although here and there we've tested in some broader JDRF venues.

FS: What are you hoping mobile helps you achieve?
MK: You know for us specifically within advocacy, the biggest aspect that we were focused on was the potential to more effectively mobilize people. Obviously, a very high percentage of people have their cell phones with them essentially at all times. Having the ability to build a database of mobile followers that we can communicate with instantaniously and then have a decent percentage of them communicate instantly with their legislator, we just thought it was too important of a channel to ignore from that perspective.

And as mobile technology advances and more of the cell phone market becomes dominated by the smart phone -- you know iPhone, Blackberrys, etc. -- the more elaborate we can be with what we can ask people to do over their cell phone. So now in a lot of cases you can use instant messaging saying, "Hey, we need you to call this 800 number so you can connect to your legislator." I mean that still obviously adds value. They can do that immediately. They don't need to get back to their computer, whenever that may be, to complete an advocacy action. There are a decent amount of times where we only have 24 hours or less to generate some type of a response. So someone getting back to their computer that night to see our actual alert may have missed out.

As things get more elaborate, we can have them do more elaborate things. Whether it's submitting e-mails to their legislator, we're actually using it to help us. We have an underground program that we're doing right now that is called the Promise To Remember Me campaign where we're trying to generate district meetings with our advocates and [representatives] when they're home on breaks. It's helped us to coordinate those activities as well.

Another thing we've been able to do since we've been experimenting with it is make a lot of our existing programs easier to participate in. For instance, JDRF's big fundraising event at the chapter level is a walk. So we've got probably over the course of a year 100 [events] nationwide. Without mobile, our efforts to engage people in the advocacy program at the walk and to collect information all center around filling out what many people at the walk would find to be a kind of annoying registration form. It's a carnival-like atmosphere at these walks, like most fundraising events. Most people have their cell phones with them, so given the option to sign up via mobile, all they simply have to do is text a key word to our short code. We register the mobile number, ping them back a thank-you message via mobile, and ask them to submit their e-mail to us in a second text message and then they're done. And then we can take the opportunity later to follow up and get the rest of their information. So it's been an invaluable tool in instances like that to make our existing programs more efficient.

FS: Do you plan on using mobile for fundraising at all?
MK: I think of our mobile efforts in two separate channels. The channel I just discussed and the mobile giving channel. The mobile giving channel has not been used by JDRF. It actually took us a good while to get all of it approved through all the mobile carriers through the Mobile Giving Foundation. That was actually wrapped up two weeks ago. So really at this point we're looking for our first opportunity to really use it. My guess is it's going to come up in one form or another during November for National Diabetes Awareness Month. I actually already had a conversation with one chapter that is interested in using it for their national awareness activities, and I assume we will have more conversations like that in between then and now.

FS: What communications have been replaced by mobile?
MK: We would rely heavily obviously upon e-mail. We also had to follow up with direct phone calls to people, to encourage them to take action. So it's a little bit clunky and time consuming for the staff. We have a big advocacy event every other year in June called Children's Congress where we have 150 families across the country attend. The highlight is we have a hearing on Capitol Hill, and those families lobby their congressmen for more diabetes funding. So it's a pretty competitive environment to get chosen for the program. We select 150 families out of about 1,500 applications. So basically they have a one in 10 chance. We accumulate all of those applications through a lot of standard channels. We used more social media this time around as we were getting the applications; we started collecting them last summer.

And so we were using social media and e-mail to collect them. But as the event got closer, we needed more attention on the event and the next one that will be coming down the pike, which will be in June of 2011. So we were able to add a mobile component to our communication efforts around the execution of the 2009 Children's Congress event, telling people if they were interested in signing up to get an application for the next event they could just simply text us and enter a keyword and they could text in their application request.

We already generated over 200 application requests for the event in two years. So we're already well on our way now to expanding upon the 1,500 applications we had for this 2009 event through this use of mobile. So that was a significant advantage. We also integrated it with the Promise campaign to help us coordinate meeting logistics with the legislators. But we also used it as another way to get people on our Web site to register to attend meetings in their local area. We were able to use mobile so they could just simply text the keyword into our short code to register their interest in attending. So that's probably got us a couple extra hundred people in terms of noting an interest in attending meetings.

So, like I said, it really streamlined our approach, and we have been able to effectively integrate it with our Web properties. On our Promise site, we have a widget that people can use to both sign up to attend a meeting, and they could then work that into their own social networks as they choose to. So we can use it to spread the word virally online. We have done a pretty decent job of integrating the technology so far.

FS: What about the costs of mobile? Is it prohibitive?
MK: The cost structure varies widely for how you want to set up a campaign, and a lot of it comes down to the decision over whether you'd like to have a dedicated short code or you would like to share a short code with another organization. Obviously there are limitations and potential pitfalls with sharing a short code. There is actually a good article floating online about the decisions that were made by the Clinton and the Obama campaigns to set up their mobile channels. The Clinton campaign did the shared approach, and Obama did the dedicated, obviously. And so Clinton ran into some problems with people texting into her shared code and getting messages back from a different organization.

JDRF is a reasonably large organization, so we made a decision to go with a dedicated short code, which increased our cost by at least a few thousand dollars, to get the infrastructure set up. But that's it. It's an investment that's been worth it for us. Our vendor worked with us to craft a pricing structure that made sense for JDRF to be able to make use of this dedicated short code to test the technology, to see if we can make a go of it and then build upon the equity we built up over the last six months, and now start to expand. So that's what we're going to do.

FS: What kind of advice can you offer other organizations that are maybe considering using mobile?
MK: It all comes down to that organization's target audience. The sweet spots for us are families who typically have children with Type 1. Our message of a cure kind of resonates obviously with parents who are going to look at their kids with Type 1 and have a strong belief that a cure is going to be found in their lifetime. That's kind of our sweet spot. We have been slowly expanding and getting more adults with Type 1 in our core group as well, although it is still a smaller percentage compared to those families. But in any case, that is a perfect kind of sweet spot for mobile. I mean obviously, young parents — particularly late 20s through early 40s — that's a prime mobile audience who are going to be comfortable using text. They're also going to have such busy lives, always on the go, given the fact they need to take care of a child with Type 1 on top of all the typical busy family stuff, and it is hard to find a channel that is convenient for them. Mobile kind of serves that need perfectly for us. So that's pretty much what we found over the course of these six months.

I think ultimately, like anything else, it comes down to understanding your audience, whether or not mobile is going to be a good channel. But I think that a corollary to that is watching what the statistics say now and where the mobile audience is going are in some cases two different things. Because I think you have growth in the use of mobile technology across age demographics. And because you start from a lower base at those older age ranges — let's say the 50s into the early 60s age range — the highest growth rates are in that older demographic.

So I think taking a careful look at where you're at now and where your core audience might be heading over time are important things. And like I said, technology is making it easier for people to interact over their mobile device through smart phones. It creates some significant advantages. To the point where I think, strictly from an advocacy perspective, when people start to demand that type of interaction and communication to be really streamlined in the palm of their hand at all times and not wanting to have to get back to that desktop, I need to take a close look at how the demand in that area is developing and make sure [JDRF has] a plan to address it.