St Richards Hospice of Worcester are using the Textlocal SMS service to engage supporters with instant messages about forthcoming fundraising events.
The hospice introduced the text messaging service to help promote the annual midnight fundraising walk and drive people to the hospice website to register.
Results for the first campaign were excellent with a 22% response rate of additional people signing up for the walk. There was also a dramatic increase in visitor numbers to the website directly after the text campaign which helped raise awareness of other initiatives the charity were planning.
Tricia Cavell fundraising manager of the Hospice is delighted with the results from the text campaigns. “We’ve had excellent results. Our first text campaign exceeded our expectations and we had lots of hits to the website, with people downloading application forms for the midnight walk.”
The hospice collect their contacts mobile numbers from application forms, leaflets and from a data collection exercise via the hospice newsletter and these numbers are stored within the Textlocal account.
The Hospice plan to continue using SMS texting to engage their supporters. Carvell claims “We intend to utilise and grow the service as the main method of contact for our donors.” She continues “Text is a very quick and easy way of contacting people and reminding them about our fundraising events.”
SMS marketing is growing in popularity with more and more charities looking for innovative ways to engage their donors. Text also makes an excellent tool for accepting donations. Examples of this include the 2009 Comic Relief campaign where over 1.5million pounds was raised through people donating £1.00 to the Kilimanjaro climb initiative by Texting CLIMB to 88808.
The power of text lies with the fact that people carry their phones with them wherever they go which makes spontaneous donations easy and convenient. People can effectively make a charitable donation anywhere at anytime by simply sending a quick text.
Textlocal specialise in bulk sms and short code sms services, with a number of charities currently using the service to send low cost messages.
