Excuse Me, My Cause is Calling

Since I last wrote about YouthNoise in June, the social activism networking site for teens has continued to innovate new ways to appeal to youth. The Wall Street Journal (online subscribers’ access only) on Saturday describes a new partnership between YouthNoise and Virgin Mobile USA to send a text novella in 160-character installments to cellphone users who sign up.

The story is aimed at raising awareness of teenage homelessness, and was written by copywriters rather than a published author. Here’s how they describe it:

Ghost Town is the first interactive text novella from Virgin Mobile and YouthNoise. It’s the gripping story of a teenage football player named Ghost who is hiding a dark secret—he’s homeless. This secret will shock his classmates as he tries to manage the ins and outs of high school, an uncertain future, and just trying to stay alive.

The characters from the story each have a profile and blog on youthnoise.com, interacting with readers and each other in the comments. They also each have a MySpace page.

In the past week about 10,000 people have read the beginning of this text-message fiction. It’s not free, though, costing anywhere from $.025-.05 per message (depending on the messaging plan they have); those who sign up will receive two text messages a day for five weeks.

This is a novel way of getting the message out (yes, pun intended), and I expect that we will be seeing more of this type of text messaging and/or interactive fiction directed at teens through the media they use most.

And while we’re on the subject of social activism via mobile phones, I just read at Strategic Public Relations about a line of mobile phone personalization products called Just Cause from Airborne Entertainment. These products include “socially-relevant, environmentally-concerned and politically attuned ringtones, ringbacks and wallpapers.”

Sample “Protestones” include “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “Viva La Revolution!” while “Stop and Thinktones” include “Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger” and “Nearly one in four people live on less than $1 per day.” Ringbacks include factual information about subjects as diverse as the depletion of the planet’s rainforests and cruelty to animals, while wallpapers include graphic illustrations accompanied by statements such as “Pollution Stinks,” “Change Your Habits, Not the Climate” and “Dissent is NOT Un-American.”

Over and above its basic messages, Airborne will work in conjunction with socially-responsible groups across the continent to create cause-specific products. In addition, the company will select one group to which it will donate 10% of all Just Cause net proceeds each month.

Kids love to be able to personalize their phones, and this presents an opportunity for nonprofits to be able to give their teen supporters a way to express their affinity for the cause. YouthNoise knows this too, and they just had a contest to design a phone charm that embodies the site’s philosophy. If you are working with youth, how can you make their mobile phone — one of their main methods of communication — into a way of getting your message out?

Technorati Tags: phones, youthnoise, homelessness, virgin, social activism, marketing