Communication is a major part of managing a non-profit organization.;
Whether your focus is on healthcare, environmental conversation, or education, engaging with your supporters is a priority.
Many nonprofits are using SMS marketing to spread their message in this digital era. Luckily, it’s proved to be very effective.
If you are running a non-profit and you haven't given text message marketing a shot, read on to see what you are missing out on!
Why Choose Text Message Marketing?
You can easily send personalized messages to a large group of people. This will obviously be very expensive and time-consuming if you’ll still hanging on to the traditional messaging system. Text messaging applications are evolving, with more features being added every day.;
Nonprofits are taking advantage of this to maximize gains with minimal efforts using browser-based texting analytics.
Another advantage of using text message is regardless of how you phrase your content; the recipient is likely to read your text.
How Can You Use SMS Marketing in Your Organization?
There are three main ways that you can use SMS marketing in your non-profit organization:
- Broadcast messaging: Reaching a group of people with ONE click.
- Text message sign-ups: Encouraging people to opt-in a campaign by texting a fixed code ( such as type YES or 123)
- Peer to peer texting: This is one-to-one texting to build relations.
Text messages are very effective for recruiting volunteers and mobilizing campaign supporters for non-profit organizations.
Let’s discuss how, as a non-profit organization, you can achieve all this using text messaging marketing.
Communicating with Volunteers during Events
It’s crucial that you keep the volunteers in the loop when holding any event. Texting plays a big role in this.Here are a few examples
Distributing Event Information using Broadcast Texts
Campaign managers can use broadcast messaging to inform volunteers on the following:
- The time when the event will be held
- The location
- Their duties
When you are logged in an app, this is done in one click of a button.
You can also text other potential volunteers and track the results. This is by sending a message with responses such as type YES or NO.
The CRM will automatically categorize the answers.
Read more: How Bulk SMS Marketing can Drive Your Political Campaign to Success?;
Answering Questions through Collective (Peer to peer) Texting
After sending your broadcast messages, some volunteers may have queries regarding the event. Now that they have a phone number, they can text you, and you can reply to them and so on.
The CRM collects and stores contact information for all attendees for future purposes.
Through mass texting, you can ensure maximum participation of an event by sending alerts, follow-ups, and reminders to the volunteers.
You can even collect additional information for attendees through automated texting. For example, if your first text was:
We are having fundraising on 3rd Feb 2020 to help street children, text Interested if you want to attend.
People who are not interested are immediately eliminated from the thread.
Now you can send the following text to the attendees:
Hurrah! Please send us your name so that we can add you to the attendance list.
The CRM updates their name with an automatic merge tag such as {first name _ last name}
At this point, you can start sending personalized messages and ask for more details, such as their email address.
Creates Awareness
Say you want to attract many volunteers to help in planting trees. SMS marketing is the most effective way because many people are likely to read your text.
As discussed earlier, you can use a series of messages to personalize the final campaign messages to encourage attendance.
Use SMS opt-ins to Collect Volunteers
If you are holding a campaign, you can post it on social media handles and website. But instead of asking individuals to enter their email address, you request them opt-in with a text.
People find this more comfortable and are likely to go through with it. You can then ask for more personal details as you get acquainted with each other.
Mobilizing People during an Emergency
During an emergency, every second counts. Emailing people may not work as some may not be connected to their WI-FI.
Calling, on the other hand, may take so much time when they're thousands of people involved.
Thanks to text messaging, it’s easy to spread a message in a minute through broadcast messaging.
Here are a few ways messaging can help during emergencies:
Alerting People When They're In Danger
If there is a fire or tornado, you can text the affected residents to take action quickly. You can also gather information on the affected individuals.
For example, you can add: If you are affected reply with YES
With the information, you can send help to the affected parties as soon as possible.
Sending Automated Responses
Another way you can help people during a crisis is by sending an automated response telling them the action they should take to stay safe.
For example, during a natural disaster like heavy rains, you can caution people to stay indoors.
You can also ask people to help with your social media handles. Here you can use an opt-in-keyword for those who are willing to help. After they accept to opt-in, you can send an automated text informing them of the steps they can take to help.
Since all this data is stored in your CRM, the next time there is a calamity in the same area, you’ll have your list of volunteers ready.
Recruiting
You can recruit volunteers using emails or social media handles, but it’s so much easier when you use text messages.
Text messages take prospects step by step. This way, they don’t feel overwhelmed.
Instead of providing a form that volunteers can fill in,all their information, begin with a simple text and then ask more info bit by bit.
Using broadcast messaging helps you reach many people, which increases your chances of getting the right people for your team.
Fundraising
Money is a sensitive topic, and you have to be strategic on how to ask for it if you want success.
There are two ways you can use text messaging to ask for donations.
One is the peer-to-peer texting, and the other one is using opt-in codes.
Peer-To-Peer Texting for Fundraising
Instead of using emails or generic messages, you can use collective texting to ask for donations.
Inserting the first time of an individual can have a huge impact and a higher persuasion power compared to a generic text.
When you are using a messaging app, this doesn’t take hours to implement.
The best part is that you can prepare and schedule your campaigns in advance.
Use Tags to Segment Your Supporters
You can categorize your messages based on the replies you get from your supporters. For example, you can group those who opt out and try to win them over using other options.
You can then have two more segments of those who pledged high amounts, and those who pledged a small amount. This ensures your follow up emails make sense to all groups.
To create a long term relationship with your users, make a habit of thanking them for taking action.
You don’t want your thread to be full of money requests only.
Surveys
Every non-profit requires constant feedback to know whether or not they are on the right path. If you are running a survey, you can send a simple message such as:
Hello Olivia, we are carrying out a survey to improve our services. Would you love to help? Reply YES if you want in and NO if you want out.
If a person chooses YES, they are provided with the questionnaire or asked to fill in a form.
How to Choose the Best SMS Service for Non-profits
If you Google, text messaging service, you’ll get thousands of results. Below are five tips that will give you an idea of what you should be looking for:
1. Easy to Use.
Time is of the essence in a non-profit organization. You don’t have days to learn or teach your juniors how to use a text service software. Be sure to find something that requires minimal time to learn how to operate.
2. Great Customer Service
A great texting service for a non-profit organization should have a responsive and friendly customer service.
This is very critical because you don’t want a company that won’t be there when you are facing issues sending texts during a crisis.
3. Experience with Non-profit Organizations
Non-profit organizations have different needs from other companies. It’s crucial that you work with a testing message that has a history with other non-profit organizations. They are likely to have a way to solve the challenges you may face during texting.
4. Price
It’s very crucial that non-profit organizations save every cent they get. This is very reasonable given the cause they are serving.
With that said, choosing the cheapest messaging service may not be the best idea. It may not serve the intended purpose.
If you focus too much on the price you might forget other factors such as reliability of the app.
5. Features
Text messaging apps come with many features to make the texting experience of the user easy. A messaging service that understands a non-profit organization may have templates that fit your needs. If you don’t get one with experience with nonprofits, get one that’s ready to go the extra of helping with the customization process.
Get A Messaging App for Your Organization
Even though they are other outreach ways such as email marketing and social media marketing, they may not be the best outreach means for a non-profit organization.
Nonprofits need a mode of communication that can reach out to thousands of people in the shortest time possible.
If you haven’t considered switching to SMS marketing, this may be your opportunity to get started and take your organization to the next level of efficiency & effectiveness.
If you still don’t understand how this works, contact us for a Start Free Messaging Demo that will take you through the whole process.