I was lucky enough to spend yesterday at the Google DC office attending the Mobile Tech 4 Social Change barcamp hosted by MobileActive.org. As is always the case when you get a room full of smart people who do cool things, there was a lot to be learned and many interesting conversations to be had.

In my opinion, the most important point of the day was made by Ian Schuler from the National Democratic Institute at the beginning of his kick-off presentation: Before you adopt mobile tools (or any tool, for that matter), you first need to stop and consider your model of change and your target audience, and then think about how the new tool will benefit them. Just because some shiny new technology is cool or popular at the moment, doesn't mean its necessarily right one to achieve your goals or reach your audience.

That being said, it also important not to be scared of adopting new tactics and new technologies. The key is to figure out what makes these tools unique, and how you can take advantage of those attributes to create a better model for change. On that note, there was no shortage of cool new mobile tools and strategies discussed yesterday, with purposes ranging from government transparency to tracking swine flu.

The first breakout session I attended was a discussion of mobile fundraising led by Chris from Mobile Commons. Mobile giving makes it incredibly easy for donors to make a small (either $5 or $10) gift to a non-profit by texting a keyword to an SMS shortcode which will add the donation to their phone bill.

The key takeaways from the session were the differences between mobile advocacy (not just fundraising) and email campaigns: 1) your message will reach people no matter where they are (this is obvious but important); 2) the open rate for text messages is much higher than email (there's no spam); and 3) while the overall rate of response for a call to action is generally similar, the response to text messages is much faster -- the majority of responses come in the first hour. These are all key factors to consider when deciding how/if you want to use SMS in your communications strategy

The most exciting use of mobile technology I saw yesterday though, came in another session where Jacob Colker demoed The Extraordinaries, an upcoming iPhone app for crowdourced micro-volunteerism. The app is targeted at the millions of people who would like to volunteer but don't have the time, or more specifically don't have large enough blocks of free time to go meet up with others to do traditional volunteer work. The Extraordinaries takes advantage of the always present, always connected nature of the iPhone to allow these people to volunteer during the small chunks of spare time that everyone has everyday.

Waiting on line at the post office? Tag some images from your favorite museum. Riding the bus to work? Add captions to a two-minute chunk of video from your favorite non-profit's archive. Can't stand listening to the broadcaster's commentary during halftime of a football game? Put it on mute and record a short, personal thank you message to a donor for your favorite charity.

The possibilities are pretty much endless, and even if each individual chunk is small, this exciting new outlet for volunteer energy could potentially harness millions of volunteer-hours which would otherwise be wasted. If that's not a model for change, I don't know what is.