Who would not want to save this guy, right? As the seal hunting season opens the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) is launching a major campaign at stopthesealhunt.com and on cell phones all across the UK. Starting yesterday, IFAW launched advertisements, like the one showed above in the Sunday Mirror and has already received well over 10, 000 responses which, according to Jed Alpert, CEO of Politxt (the political arm of his Rights-Group media) the company responsible for the back end technology of the campaign, is an unbelievable response rate for a newspaper ad. IFAW will be displaying the add in various UK newspapers throughout the week and will be putting them up in the London tube some time in early April.

When sending the txt message "Ban It" to the short code 60123 mobile users receive the following message:

"Thank for helping stop the seal hunt. Please reply with "ban" and your name to have it included in the petition and to receive further updates from IFAW."

93 percent of people who sent the initial text message followed through providing their names. "That is unfathomable as a response rate," Alpert tells me, "They didnt ask me to predict how many but If I did I would have guessed 25 percent and would have been nervous hitting that."

As of yesterday when I spoke first to Jed about this he told me that SMS#039 where coming in at a rate of 6 per minute.

Alpert predicts that by the end of the month he will have created a data base of around 400 thousand people who have sent in their name and are interested in more action as well as petition of 400 thousand signatures to send to the UK parliament.

"I think these mobile SMS programs work well when its immediately understood what and organization is t trying to do and when the subject matter is timely and around an issue that people are interested in," Alpert points out enthusiastically, "People are very aware that the Seal Hunt is going on now."

New York based Alpert is not sure he would get the same reaction here in the States but he is sure the number would be high.

An American version of the campaign is in works.

Alpert and Rights-Group/Politixt is best known for its involvement in the People for American#039s Way Mass Immediate Response team in which PFAW activists could sign up to receive SMS activist alerts during the Supreme Court nominations. The political use of the SMS technology was 10X more successful than the Brittany Spears horoscope campaign is was originally written for.

While the entertainment side of Rights-Media wanes and wavers with mix results every political use of the medium has resulted in mind blowing surprising numbers.

"Its all about passion," Alpert tells me, "people are passionate about politics, they are not passionate about an SMS diaper coupon"

Technorati Tags: IFAW, jed alpert, jed.alpert, linux, mobile, mobileactive, pfaw, politxt, rights-group, sealhunt, SMS, stopthesealhunt, uk

Grassroots Activism | Mobile | Non-Profits
Justin Oberman's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati