One of the commonly heard statements when I speak with various ministries and organizations is that there’s a lack of case studies and research towards the use of mobile in ministry practices (#mobmin) or just mobile technology as it relates to various community/culture initiatives (#mhealth, #ict4d, #m4d). Part of that is because many who are doing the projects haven’t published their data yet, and part of that is because there’s interest for more. Here are two items that jumped on the reading list this week which may help both of those parts become whole information.
Movirtu: Life at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) Study
Life at the BoP study is a joint work of the team here at Movirtu and our strategic research partners TNS. We listened in detail to nearly a hundred end users in Senegal, Tanzania and India during the course of this work. We selected ‘leading edge’ users: those likely to be engaged with and influential in technology. We spoke with women entrepreneurs, smallholder farmers, and youth.
There are many stories and characters here: a Senegalese student who lives far from her family, prays every day and is as rapturously devout in her study as she is in her life. There are a group of teens in Coimbatore, a city akin to the UK’s Manchester, where boys can quote you an ad for the latest megapixel phone. Women entrepreneurs in Senegal shake their heads and commiserate about the increased cost of living.
Call for Expressions of Interest for case studies of Mobile use at the Base of the Pyramid
infoDev is looking for organizations with experience in rigorous research directly related to the topic and who are able to design and execute the studies from start to finish. Please note that we will shortlist proposals for Kenya and South Africa first, as these studies will be completed in the first phase of the project, with the remaining proposals (for Armenia, Pakistan and Vietnam) shortlisted later. Organizations may submit proposals for any number of the selected countries.
This request for expressions of interest (EOI) concerns research and production of five case studies (one each in Kenya, South Africa, Armenia, Pakistan and Vietnam) to examine the economic and social potential of mobile devices in the “base of the pyramid” market segment, i.e. among the poor who live on less than $2.50 a day. infoDev is looking for organizations with experience in rigorous research directly related to the topic and who are able to design and execute the studies from start to finish. Please note that we will shortlist proposals for Kenya and South Africa first, as these studies will be completed in the first phase of the project, with the remaining proposals (for Armenia, Pakistan and Vietnam) shortlisted later. Organizations may submit proposals for any number of the selected countries.
Proposals need to be submitted by October 10; read more about this call for interest/proposals at infoDev.
Additional Cases Studies and Research Materials
We also have a listing here of several cases studies, statistics, and other types of research material. Yes, there’s not a lot, but again, that’s because there’s not been a lot written to date. View our resources and if you have something that should be noted here, submit it to us or point to it using the #mobmin, #ict4d, and #m4d Twitter hashtags so that it can be searchable and shared to all.
I was drawn to an article by a 
In some recent conversations around mobile ministry, one of the more pressing concerns was how to measure the impact of mobile. Frankly speaking, metrics/analytics for mobile aren’t as mature and usually content providers need to be more creative in collecting and more descriptive in interpreting mobile data. 
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How to Find Out What’s Happening with Mobile Ministry
Sunday, October 2nd, 2011Of course, we’ll also get the statement, “who has time to do that?” And so, here’s one tip towards keeping track of the conversation: follow what’s being talked about in the following Twitter searches:
So now you have the searches, what can you do with them?
First, if you have a Twitter account, these are searches that you will want to save and just make a part of your daily/weekly timeline. Simply seeing the discussions and bringing those items to the forefront in your organizations (meetings, conversations, etc.) will help enable conversation and activity in mobile ministry.
Second, you might not have a Twitter account, so here you can take advantage of RSS to keep you informed on these conversations. RSS is a format used online for syndicated data. In reference to these searches, they have an RSS (news)feed available in which you can use your browser (like Firefox, Opera, etc.) or a web service (like Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) to save each of these searches and you’d have them for reference.
Third, you can save the links into the favorites/bookmarks area of your browser. This way you can just peek in on the conversations as they happen to have interest for you.
Now, the aspect of interpreting that data and turning it into actionable items is something that you will have to discern against your organization’s goals, issues, and available resources. You can’t expect all of your questions to be answered at this juncture – mobile ministry is a wide, not deep, conversation. But, there are elements of understanding what’s possible, what has happened, and what you can do if you engage some of the conversations taking place.
If you have other ways in which you keep up with conversations about mobile ministry, feel free to drop those in the comments as others will want to glean from your methods and share some of their own.
Tags: conversations, mobile ministry, mobility, research, RSS, search, tech, Twitter
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