With the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards ceremony now just three days away, we continue our daily round-up of the contenders in each category with a look at the Most Effective Mobile Charity Campaign/Solution and Most Effective Mobile Ticketing Solution categories.

There are six contenders for the Charity Award. First up is Macmillan Cancer Support and bemoko for the redesigned Macmillan mobile site, which offers a new design, user experience and page flow. The site delivers rapid load times and fast, intuitive navigation. bemoko’s platform detects the type of device being used to access the site, and configures the individual elements, user flows and preferences, before compressing the data and sending it to the phone or tablet.

The next contender is OpenMarket and OpenFundraising for the Faberge Big Egg Hunt  fundraising campaign, which saw specially decorated Faberge eggs placed around London. Each egg had a unique SMS keyword that could be sent to a five-digit shortcode, in order to enter a prize draw to win the Diamond Jubilee Faberge egg. It cost £3 to enter the competition, and then 25p for each additional SMS entry, with profits shared between the two charities. Over the course of six weeks, more than 12,770 members of the public entered the Diamond Jubilee Egg SMS prize draw and submitted almost 160,000 entries via SMS.

Next up is Prostate Action and Reading Room for the iWee mobile web app, designed to help men track their toilet habits to assist in the diagnosis of Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH). It is a digital version of the paper ‘Bladder Diary’ which doctors ask patients to fill in to share data which can help identify urinary problems.
Reading Room tapped into its office around the globe by way of a 48-hour ‘hackathon’ to create the app. Initial results have been highly encouraging, and the project has also been successful in generating social media buzz.

The next contender is Samsung and Velti for the Samsung Hope Relay App. Samsung was a sponsor of the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay that toured the length and breadth of the UK in the 70 days leading up to the London Olympics. The company decided to work with Velti to create a tie-in running app for iOS, Android, Bada and Facebook. The app logged distance run by GPS and Samsung agreed to donate £1 to charity for each mile recorded. Users were free to fundraise by running, walking or cycling. Samsung aimed to raise $1m for charity, a figure that has been comfortably surpassed.

Sport, and Velti, also feature in the next entry up for this Awards. The nominees are Sport Relief and Velti for the text donation element of the 2012 Sport Relief campaign. Velti first worked with Comic Relief four years ago, and this year, made the most of the latest developments in mobile technology to add short code Premium SMS to the mix as another way for donors to give £1, £5 or £10.

All SMS donations benefitted from 100 per cent out payments thanks to the mobile network operators on-going support for the third sector. The results of the campaign were hugely impressive, with almost £8m raised via SMS donations, more than double the 2010 figure.

The final contender in the Charity category is Vodafone for JustTextGiving. This is a partnership between Vodafone, the Vodafone Foundation and the online fundraising platform, JustGiving.  Launched in May 2011, the service unlocks the power of text donations for Britain’s 184,000 charities by enabling anyone to donate to individual fundraisers and charities via a unique, personalised textcode, such as LUKE01. It also helps target mobile-savvy younger consumers, who donate less than older consumers through traditional channels.

Charities and fundraisers request their own text code, which they can then use in their fundraising materials or activities. Individuals can then donate by sending a text, free of charge, with the charity or fundraiser code plus donation amount to the shortcode, 70070. A return text acknowledges the donation and offers the option of adding Gift Aid. Every penny raised goes to charity.

Since launch, more than 16,000 charities and over 40,000 individual fundraisers have signed up to JustTextGiving, raising more than £4m in the process.

Another very strong category then, and today, we are also looking at an additional category, the Most Effective Mobile Ticketing solution, in which there is just one contender, Samsung, Kilimanjaro Live and Intellitix for their RFID Ticketless Technology Project. Working in association with festival organizer Kilimanjaro Live and tech firm Intellitix, Samsung brought RFID technology to festival-goers for the first time this summer at two events – a Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ gig at Knebworth, and the Wakestock music and wakeboarding festival. RFID wristbands were used to process thousands of fans though custom-built entrance portals very quickly. At the Knebworth event, 15,000 people were processed in one hour, using 30 handheld RFID readers.

Ticket-holders could register their RFID wristband in advance and link it to their Facebook profile. If they did so, when they gained entry to the event, a check-in message was posted on their Facebook wall.The Facebook posts generated an online audience of 3m people, and a significant amount of press interest.

So why only one finalist in this category? Well there were initially three, but two were withdrawn at the request of the agency that submitted them on the eve of the shortlist announcement, leaving us with just one contender, and we didnt feel it was fair to deny this entry its shot at glory because of the actions of the other two nominees. That’s not to say it’s a surefire winner, of course. The judges have the right to declare no winner in any category if they feel there is not a sufficiently strong contender.

As with all the other categories, all will be revealed at the Awards ceremony, which takes place on 29 November at the London Film Museum on the site of County Hall on South Bank, a stones throw from the London Eye.

To book your place at the event, contact Lisa Slavin by email or telephone +44 (0) 20 7183 5285. Individual seats cost £250; a table of 10 costs £2,150.

The 2012 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are sponsored by  Openmarket, 7Digital, Celtra and Propel. To find out more about how to get your business or brand involved, contact John Owen by email or telephone on +44 (0) 77696 74824.