The Social Mobile Long Tail

A simple way of looking at who mobile tools for social good are built for, what they cost, and who gets left out.

The Social Mobile Long Tail is a theory about where effort, money and attention in the social mobile space are concentrated, and where they are needed most. It argues that if mobile phones are to live up to their potential for grassroots non-profits, most of our energy has to go into the long tail. First sketched on this website in 2008, it has shaped the thinking behind FrontlineSMS and kiwanja’s work ever since.

The diagram

Social Mobile’s Long TailA curve falling steeply from a short red head of mega-platforms and high-investment one-offs, through an orange middle of mid-complexity systems and custom solutions, to a long flat green tail of simple, low-cost, highly replicable implementations. The vertical axis shows complexity and cost, from low to high. The horizontal axis shows the chance of replicability, from low to high. A right-hand axis shows the number of NGOs present, from many at the bottom to few at the top.HIGHLOWFEWMANYHIGHComplexity and costChance of replicabilitypresent# of NGOsSOCIAL MOBILE’SLONG TAILwww.kiwanja.net“Mega”-platformsand high investmentone-off’sMid-complexity systemsand custom solutionsSimple, low-cost, highlyreplicable implementations

Social Mobile’s Long Tail (version 2.0). Complexity and cost run up the left, chance of replicability along the bottom, and the number of NGOs up the right.

The idea borrows from the Long Tail concept Chris Anderson described in Wired in 2004, where it was used to explain consumer demographics in business. Applied to mobile technology for non-profits, it gives a quick visual answer to a question that is otherwise slow to explain – what does the landscape of mobile tools for good actually look like, and who is it serving?

Three parts of the tail

Mobile tools, platforms and projects for social good fall broadly into three groups. The higher up the curve, the more complex and costly they are, and the harder they are to copy.

The head – mega-platforms and high-investment one-offs

Large, high-cost systems that run across national or even international borders, often built for bodies as big as government departments.

They play a real role, but they are complex to build and close to impossible for a typical grassroots NGO to replicate. They also attract the most publicity.

The middle – mid-complexity systems and custom solutions

Solutions developed by an individual NGO for a specific need, campaign or project. They are less complex than the platforms above, so their chances of being replicated are a little better.

Even so, they are still hard going for non-profits with few technical resources or little hardware. They tend to get a medium to high level of publicity.

The long tail – simple, low-cost, highly replicable tools

Appropriate technology that is easy to get hold of, needs as little technical expertise as possible, and is easy to copy and pass on.

This is where the greatest number of NGOs sit and where the total value is largest, yet it generally gets the least attention.

Plotting the NGOs

Version 2.0 of the diagram added the axis on the right, showing the number of NGOs in each part of the tail, an idea suggested by colleague Jim Witkin. Few organisations can use the tools at the head of the curve. Far more sit in the green, and add up the value there and it easily outweighs everything higher up.

Long tail NGOs are typically small, dedicated and staffed by people from the community who have first-hand experience of the problems they are trying to solve. They run low-cost, high-impact interventions on local issues. What they lack in funds, tools and profile they make up for with a deep understanding of local language, culture and daily life. A single local NGO with a piece of software will not solve a national healthcare problem. But a hundred of them, or a thousand, might begin to.

What it means in practice

A handful of beliefs follow from the picture, and they sit behind most of the work on this site.

  • No tool is better than another, only more or less appropriate. A million-dollar server-based system and a low-cost, SMS-only tool that runs on a laptop are both valid. Solutions are needed all along the tail.
  • Replicate, don’t scale. Making one enormous version of a tool that works can change its DNA until everything good about it is lost. Getting the same tool into a thousand clinics is often the better answer.
  • Local beats remote. For people with patchy or no internet, centralised means far away and distributed means close at hand. Not everything belongs in the cloud.
  • Give people the tools, not access to the tools. People want a system of their own that works with them to solve their own problem. Local ownership is why simple tools in the right hands can do remarkable things.
  • Focus the effort where the need is. Social mobile is less about a lack of ideas than a lack of tools, so time, money and attention need to flow to the long tail.

Where the concept came from

The thinking grew out of many years working with small NGOs across Africa, and out of a gap that became obvious when work began on FrontlineSMS in 2005 – there were almost no appropriate technology mobile tools that grassroots groups could pick up and run with. Most solutions were commercial offerings that ended up in the hands of larger NGOs with the money and expertise to use them.

Ken Banks first blogged about the long tail in January 2008, refined it later that year and has used it ever since in talks and presentations, including at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech and Nokia Research. It also became a handy test. If a tool claims to put users first, is it something a grassroots NGO could actually use, or does it need a medium to high degree of technical literacy? The rhetoric and the reality don’t always match.

Further reading