Amnesty International USA tapped the mobile medium today with a full page ad in today's NYT asking citizens or anyone with a US number to sign a petition asking Congress to close Guantanamo Bay with their cell phones. The ad, which appears on page A22, is one of the first by a major political non-profit to fully display and make a big deal about a short code in a major newspaper add (seen above). The the bottom of the page says: "Sign The Pledge. Text "Believe" to 30644. It then provides other information like the website etc etc. For those of you who may find that short-code familiar it should come as no real surprise. It belongs to Rights-Group, a company founded by Jed Alpert that focuses almost exclusively on the political mobile market. Jed has been working closely with Amnesty and 45 other groups for some time now (it's also the same shortcode used for the John Edwards OneCorps campaign). Rights-Group has great experience with these SMS petitions. They did a similar mobile campaign with IFAW in England a couple months ago that went along splendidly. After texting "Believe" to 30644 you receive the following message:

"U joined Amnestys "I Believe" campaign against U.S torture. Reply with yr e-mail 2 sign the petition. Reply Stop 2 unsubscribe. Amnesty International USA."

Katrin Verclas over at MobileActive.org has some interesting thoughts on this which I somewhat agree with:

A better use of sms for this campaign would be to sign the petition VIA sms and show the responses in REAL TIME on an sms ticker on the Amnesty website - and in the next ad. Make me participate and show me the power of the many responding -- but do not lure me into the organizational void of your database by asking for my email.

But Katrin and I both agree, that at least its a step in the mobile activist direction.
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Technorati Tags: 30644, amnesty, believe, guantanamo bay, jed alpert, mobileactive, new york times, petition, rights-group, sms, text

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