Having been in the mobile space a long time, seeing a lot of the conversation center around what happens simply on smartphones is kind of disheartening. Not just because smartphones still make up well less than a third of total mobile phones in use, but because I think we all end up not getting the kind of experience with a mobile that should be default.

Donald Stidwell also offers some thoughts on this. His is based more around the plans and other devices that he uses:

Well, on further reflection the question comes to me, why do I even need a smartphone at all? My iPad Mini is my most used gadget by a long shot. I also have an 5th generation iPod Touch as well as an iPod Classic (which stays in the car attached to the car stereo). I make almost no phone calls with my iPhone and seldom use it at all in the house since I have the iPad. And in point of fact, the only reason I don’t use the iPad more outside the house is because it’s a WiFi only model. The iPad Mini is small enough and light enough to carry just about anywhere and with an LTE model I could use it anywhere.

Read the rest of Why Do I Even Need A Smartphone Anymore at Donald Stidwell’s blog

Tablets with additional cellular abilities. Feature phones that do almost as much as smartphones (apps, service access) and do a bit more (battery, durability). Why not consider a non-smatphone and take those funds and do something more with your mobile expression?

Read something the other day: there are as many years between 1947 and 1980 as there are from 1980 to today.

33 years.

What did life look like in the USA in 1947? A few items come to mind:

• The idea of a TV in every home was not fully marketed yet
• Kids who were born during the Great Depression were in the middle of their teens and/or just entering adulthood
• There was no such thing as rock and roll music
• There were fewer than 10 English Bible translations used across churches
• There were no such thing as interstate highways
• You still called the switchboard operator to connect you to another by phone

By 1980, those points changed incredibly:

• The question wasn’t a TV in every home, but how many TVs were in your home
• If you were hitting your teens in 1980, that would make you a child of the end of the Civil Rights Era; if you were hitting adulthood, there’s a good chance your father was absent for fighting in Vietnam for some part of your childhood/teen years
• Rock and roll entered its down period (would come back by mid-decade), disco just about hit its end, and rap music wasn’t quite here yet
• Bible translations since 1980: ~5 NIV versions, ~7 RSV versions, ~14 KJV versions, ~8 dynamic translations, 2 internet-based versions, ~11 Messaniac versions, ~6 Catholic versions, 3 public domain versions… I think you get the picture (see Wikipedia article for complete breakdown)
• We’ve got a pretty expansive interstate highway system
• People don’t make phone calls like they used to

Consider what we have going for us today and what will happen in another 33 years. That’s a bit longer than a generation (20-25yrs). Does your work in mobile reflect that the world will change? Or, are you using mobile like an island, hoping that folks don’t go any further?

It would seem that many of us who fiddle with mobile have a bit of a culture problem. We latch onto the ideas of liberty and independence that mobile and the connected web offer, but then also tether ourselves to a tradition that’s not as free.

You disagree? I’d get that. We say things like, “how can we use mobile to evangelize to ‘x’ audience?” But, in saying that, we neglect one of the very key elements of mobile – its personal. Personal doesn’t mean we change the person’s mind when we want them to change, but that we open a door and let them come in when they are ready.

We do things like create mobile apps, but neglect those folks who already have mobiles, have already transformed aspects of their behavior by those mobiles, and will not own a mobile that is able to utilize such an application. Apps are logical entry points, but not everyone is going to do mobile in that way. Sometimes, more often than we want to admit, we have to think about the other ways folks can and would come into our content/event spaces – then design an accessible point that way. There’s a lot of hype towards apps, but, definitely ways we can think differently.

Parts of our faith tradition require that we do some things – celebrate the Lord in a shared meal, administer grace and provisions to those impoverished physically, socially, and spiritually, and extend the life of the faith through education and activity. The parts that don’t matter as much, which usually are the parts we hang onto the most, are the ones in which we try too hard to fit mobile into a shell that it doesn’t belong. In this wise, mobile has to equal liberty to develop new expressions of the faith, independence to discover these in the safety of the faith, and then develop new or refined traditions that speak towards a pursuit of that eternal fellowship, that eternal reward which makes this faith something worth living.

While the message that comes from MMM and others is that you should consider that someone might come to your website or web properties via a mobile device, we don’t always highlight the challenges that could result from doing so. Consider this a bit of a move to reconcile that.

Brad Frost is a very famous UI/UX designer, and has done considerable work making it possible for many in the mobile/mobile web/mobile app space to make sense of what’s going on. He’s recently put up a post titled Mobile Web Problems and How to Avoid Them that should sit as your go-to-guide for mobile web and mobile app development. Here’s a snippet:

the problem
Being denied access to an experience is easily the biggest problem mobile web users face. They come to websites on their mobile devices looking for information, looking to solve problems, looking to complete tasks, looking for answers. And they don’t get it. That’s a huge issue.

Read the rest of Mobile Web Problems and How to Avoid Them at Brad Frost’s website

There are a ton of these which aren’t just familiar to church and ministry sites, but even copied as if they are best practices. What are some of the mobile web problems you’ve seen?

Yesterday, while doing some customary reflection on things here and beyond, I asked myself a question about mobile and mobile ministry that I think is good for many of us to consider. I don’t haven an answer for it, but it does lend towards some considerable reflection towards what is happening here and whether its the right perspective to continue in:

White it seems to be true that each media shift has had some kind of economic impact, there are only a few that have gone the route of seemingly directly seeding new moments in humanity.

 

The rise of accessible printing facilities opened the door for literacy and education in a fashion that had never happened before. Radio’s invention and monetization created the entertainment and advertising industries. TV was a direct precursor to what many economists consider a middle class-driven economy.

 

But when we look at the Internet and mobile, we don’t (yet?) see the same thing happening. If anything, we see a shuffling of the chairs from those previous media elements.

 

If mobile is going to be considered a suitable endeavor, what about it will permanently reshape humanity? And if it doesn’t, are we wasting time calling it a profitable posture for ministry activity?

My weekends usually consist of these kinds of (internal) questions. But, this one stuck around and I felt it enough to share. Do respond in the comments or on Twitter with your thoughts, I’m interested in hearing what you think of all of this.

When I look at the way MMM has gone about defining mobile ministry, one of the pieces of this definition is looking at the way we look at the connection of mobile to other technologies and behaviors. Now, I can be a bit contentious here and say that there’s a bit more to connecting than social networks and the analytics they inspire. Yet, when we look at much of the activity that people focus on when we get to mobile, its either social, like Facebook, Twtter, or content-pushing  – like the former media mediums of TV and radio.

As such, there’s a connection between mobile and social that does need to be looked at. Some of those connections look at data such as how people are coming to the social website. There’s data that looks at the potential and use of APIs to connect more things on the device. And there’s scores more just waiting to be mined.

I’m glad that there are some people paying attention to some of the data that’s just laying out there to be gleaned. For example, take the perspective of Twitter usage and smartphone adoption that was linked to by Ben Evans and this graphic that looks at Twitter + African smartphone distribution:

There are several more of these linked over at Ben Evans’s website. Mapbox is the producer of these maps.

Given all of the context information that’s available from social networking analytics (for example, ever consider what all is included in a tweet), something like this shouldn’t be too hard to pull off – if you have the developers and data scientists in-house who know how to look at data differently like this.

Are you and your orgs/ministries pulling out data like this? If so, share with us and we can add that to the listing of resources we maintain.

As mentioned yesterday, MMM is participating in part 2 of a webinar series coordinated by the Mobile Ministry Forum. This webinar series is designed to build awareness towards issues, projects, best practices, and success stories related to mobile ministry. MMM’s section of the webinar looks at mobile ministry strategy.

View the accompanying slide deck

For more information about the Mobile Ministry Forum, visit their website. The webinar is getting started right now, so you can probably still sign up and join in. Now, if you missed the webinar, you can ask questions and jump into the discussion on Twitter – using the #mobmin hashtag. Or, if you are a bit further along, take a look at the Mobile Ministry Methodology to see where your activities project to go forward.

Tomorrow, MMM’s Antoine RJ Wright will be one of the special guests contributing to the Mobile Ministry Forum’s Mobile Ministry Awareness Webinar series. Part two of the discussion looks at Steps to Get Started in Mobile Ministry – Strategy, Social Media, and Apps. We’ll be joining a representative from Renew Outreach who will also be speaking towards this topic. We’ll post a slidedeck that goes along with our section at the same time this webinar starts.

Signup for the webinar, then stay tuned to the Mobile Ministry Forum’s blog and the #mobmin Event Calendar for additional webinars and conferences.

Conferences make for a good time to hear about new projects and opportunities. At ICCM, of the projects that I was exposed to, two of them caught my attention enough to highlight them a bit here.

GospelFunder

The first is called GospelFunder. GospelFunder is

a non-profit organization, dedicated to creating advocacy for non-profits, and helping advocates grow advocacy for their non-profit’s campaigns and causes. We do this through our Non-profit crowd funding and Advocacy building platforms.

GospelFunder™ focuses on helping Christian Gospel-oriented projects reach their funding goals so that innovative gospel projects can be enacted and the gospel proclaimed around the world.

What really impressed me about GospelFunder wasn’t just the quality of its funding engine (technically, its really well done; socially, its got a broad and deep analytic base; theologically, its meant to address a big need missionaries have of which it seems part of the faith drop the ball), but the integrity of the founder. He and I spent several conversations not just talking about what GospelFunder does, but also how his life had been impacted by God and how that motivated this and other ventures. Given the founder, seems like a very solid organization to support.

View the GospelFunder website and take note of some of the projects that are looking for funding.

Givelify

The other project we connected with came by chance and a tweet. Givelify had followed us on Twitter a week before ICCM and so I found it pretty interesting when one of the founders showed up in my presentation. Apparently, he was notified that ICCM was going on, and by luck of the draw, made his way into the building and room where I was presenting A Theology of Mobile Ministry.

Givelify will be a donation platform for churches which starts at the practice of the giving basket. Where some solutions require you to either hand over your credit/debit card or access the church’s website in order to do the donation, Givelify essentially turns all faith-based organizations that can be found on a map/Google/Yellow Pages listing into a digital donation recipient.

As it was explained and demoed to me at ICCM, Givelify uses a similar payment processing backend to products such as Square, etc. However, Givelify facilitates the transaction happening. Inside of the app (Android first, mobile web then iOS I think was the roadmap explained), you choose the destination of your donation, and then receive a confirmation that it was given. The church/organization receives the offering/donation from Givelify. As a giver, your receipt of the gift comes from Givelify, and as a receiving church/organization, you receive a report of those who used the service in order to send finances. For both groups, there is an easy to use dashboard component to monitor what comes in and trends against that.

Givelify had an interesting solution to the behavior that many churches still engage in in terms of a public passing of the basket and then putting something into it. There are these paper slips which look like checks that you write on it that you made the donation via Givelify – am guessing that putting a transaction ID on there helps to identify your gift amongst others. In this way, those communities who equate the public act with the heart gift (there’s a Matthew 6 contention in me there), this doesn’t trip up the moment. Its just about a digital-first, mobile-unique method of giving.

For more information about Givelify, visit their website and signup for the soon-coming beta.

Just two products, and to some degree they are similar. To another degree, they aren’t and there are cultural and social backends to why they caught my eye. I’d encourage you to check out both GospelFunder and Givelify. While the latter isn’t quite here yet, the former is, and both offer a chance to get some decent momentum in the space of funding faith efforts in a manner that respects the faith, but moves us all forward.

At the recent ICCM USA Conference, one of the presentations done was about sharing content from your mobile device to others. One of the reasons for doing this presentation was that there are many in the missions space who get on the field, and then cannot use the familiar methods of email, Dropbox, etc. to share content between team members or even to others. Other methods have to be explored, and it was in this session that we took a glance at those mobile-centric ways of sharing. Following the demo/deck is one way to see what was going on, but we want to address a question from Twitter that asked how we actually did the demo/presentation, and how that follows along with this concept of being able to share content from your mobile device. Here are the elements used to make and execute the demo/deck:

• Nokia N9 smartphone
• N9 software: Personal Web Server, MeeTxtEdit
• iPad and Kindle Fire HD (w/HTML editing software on both, Textastic and DroidEdit Pro)
• Shared WiFi at the conference area

Essentially, I just made a webpage that others in the presentation would be able to look at. The page used HTML5 and jQuery features for making the page usable when my server was turned off and for transitions. That’s the simple explanation, here’s the more detailed way it happened:

I wanted to make a slide deck that both led the participant into the topic of understanding how content can be shared from a mobile device while also being a living demonstration of what that can look like. However, in making the decision that it had to be a living demo, it had to be a demo that was far enough “out there” that the simpler methods of sharing content from one’s mobile were more acceptable.

I settled on a simple outline that iterated the story of sharing content on a mobile. I wanted to focus a bit more on the history of sharing and what makes sense to share in specific contexts. The outline was done in a combination of a personal TiddlyWiki website and Evernote.

After setting the outline in HTML – specific to use HTML 5 for this, I then looked to enable the path one would go through the slides using jQuery-enabled buttons…

The next step was to utilize the specific feature, AppCache, in order to allow for the presentation to be usable when access to my mobile server was no longer available. I do admit that I’m banking on the unsafe tendency of persons to not clean the browser cache so that this would be available well after the fact.

Finally, it was simply making any final edits (using MeeTxtEdit) and then launching the mobile sever. I went the low-tech route of just writing the IP address of my mobile and the username and password on the whiteboard behind me. From there, it was just a matter of making sure that everyone could log in.

Lessons Learned

• For some reason, a person using a Windows Phone device (the Nokia Lumia 920) was not able to access the site. That’s something for me to look into
• Making sure that the site worked was not difficult, though I did have to pay attention to the room we were in and if there were more than one access point folks could come through. In another application of this, I ran a mobile hotspot from my phone, then let the server IP address get assigned from that. Its a bigger hit on the battery that way, but more controlled.
• Leveraging the internet-abilities of the devices present was key for some of the assets; but I made sure that all needed assets (images, jQuery file, etc) were downloaded from my device, not from the Internet
• Trying this with an Android device would work, possibly with an older BlackBerry device, and definitely a Nokia Symbian device; but you’d need to jailbreak an iPhone (or iPod Touch), and you can almost forget trying this using a feature phone (Nokia’s Asha series, etc.).

As I point to in the demo/deck, its actually possible to share content from your mobile using several methods. The thing with mobile to mobile sharing is that you will have to interact with people to figure out what works best, if you don’t already know the social norms. Once you’ve gotten that figured out, making something like this would work without fail.

Take a look again at the demo/deck from the ICCM USA Conference, and feel free to ask questions and offer feedback.