How Online Text Messaging Can Benefit Youth and Community Groups
Most youth and community groups are volunteer-led, and either charitably funded or run on donations, so communications need not only to be effective, but they also have to be easy, and quick for volunteers to use, and low cost.
In our ever more digitally connected world of email, social media, and smartphones, it can be tempting to think of SMS messaging as an almost outdated technology. However, if you are looking for an efficient, effective, and inexpensive communications tool for your youth or community organisation, SMS messaging does have many benefits.
Cutting Through The Noise
81% of the UK population own a smartphone (Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey, 2016), constantly bombarding us with tweets, emails, Facebook status updates and other marketing messages. Through all of the noise and clutter, SMS messages still have the power and urgency to demand our immediate attention. Research still shows that users check and reply to a text message sooner than an email or other notification, especially if it is from a trusted source.
For your youth or community group, this can be a valuable way to communicate important or urgent messages to members – or their parents – or volunteers. For example, when you need to make a last-minute change of venue or send parents a reminder about the reply slip for next week’s outing to the local zoo.
When You Need The Message to Get Through, No Matter What
If you work with children and young people, especially, or perhaps vulnerable adults, there will be moments when you need to guarantee that your message will get through. Maybe you are on your way back from a residential weekend, the bus has been delayed in motorway traffic, and you need to let the parents know everyone is safe, but you are going to be delayed. With an online text messaging provider, you have a safe and reliable solution to your problem:
- You only need to type your message once. The online SMS system will do the rest, sending a copy of your text to every parent on your messaging list.
- Because SMS messaging works even over a weak 2G mobile signal, you can be confident that your message will get through.
- The online SMS system will collect delivery reports so that you can be certain that all of the parents received your message, for that extra peace of mind.
Most important of all, using a robust, simple, text messaging provider set up to manage unexpected situations like this leaves you free to handle the situation in front of you, without having to worry about sending texts and making unnecessary phone calls.
Pre-Planned Messaging - Taking the Load off
Using an online SMS provider can allow hard-working volunteers and other team members to share the workload and pre-plan messages to group members and other contacts. When you know that you are going to be working hard running a busy event, or are simply too busy with other vital tasks to send that message at the right time, this tool can help keep things running smoothly.
You can even use it to send messages that appear to be from you or your team when you would not otherwise be able to send a text message at all. For example, when you know you are going to be driving, or on a flight. Perhaps a reminder of an airport pickup time, or an arrival back at base from a day trip away.
Making it Personal
A key advantage of using an online text messaging provider is the advanced features they provide over simply sending group messages from your own phone. One of those is personalisation, for example, the ability to include a contact’s name in the text that you send them. So that a contact “Joe Jones” could receive a text starting “Hi Joe…,” for example.
Making your messages personal in this way matters more than you might imagine, with contacts much more likely to both read and respond to your texts if they include their name than if they do not. For community groups involving volunteers, this is a fantastic tool for saying ‘thanks’ following large events. It is no substitute, of course, for a genuine face-to-face thank you, but a personalised text message offering your organisation’s appreciation for a volunteer’s time and efforts can go a long way.
Advertising and Recruiting New Members
A common complaint from community group leaders is having to give out their own home or mobile numbers in advertising or recruitment materials. With the SMS marketing features included by your online text messaging provider, this need no longer be the case.
Options for receiving messages can include a virtual mobile number (VMN), or even a custom shortcode. Either option allows you to receive messages online, or have them forwarded to you by email, or to your mobile through an app or by SMS text.
In addition to the advantages for volunteers personal privacy, using a VMN or shortcode means that when there are changes in the team managing or running your community group, or when someone is on holiday, messages can easily be managed by another member. This can be achieved either by accessing the messages directly through the online SMS system or by modifying the forwarding rules to send the received text messages to an alternative recipient.
As Easy as Sending a Regular Text, or Even an Email
Youth and community group volunteers do not, in most cases, sign up to be in charge of marketing and communications, but nevertheless, it is a job that needs doing. Thankfully, using an online text messaging system is no harder than sending a normal text or even an email.
Authorised volunteers can choose to send messages directly through a user-friendly online portal, by sending an email to a dedicated ’email-to-SMS’ address, or by using an integrated add-on for Microsoft Outlook. All of these send the same text, to the same contacts, through the same system, in the most user-friendly way possible. This makes the task of keeping your organisation’s communications running as quick and easy as possible so your volunteers have more time to spend doing what they do best.
For more information on using SMS messaging for your youth or community group, contact fastsms today.
Related Articles
Event Promotion : Use SMS Marketing to Fill Empty Seats
If you run paying events - music, drama, sport or even fine dining, training courses or workshops, you'll know the hardest seats to fill are the last few and they are also the most profitable if you can sell them. SMS is an immediate and compelling means of event promotion that can shift those last few places.
8 Ways Veterinary Practices Can Use SMS Within Their Business
Although SMS services are usually associated with retail marketing campaigns, you can also use these communication tools across many other industries. SMS text messaging can be used to provide a perfect veterinary patient/clinic communication tool, and because of this it is becoming increasingly popular within the specialist animal care sector.
How SMS Improves Patient Satisfaction in the Healthcare Sector
The challenges facing the healthcare sector today, whether you work for an NHS Trust or a private health company, are increasing. In an ever-evolving environment, maintaining high levels of patient satisfaction is an unenviable challenge many healthcare providers face on a day-to-day basis. How can SMS help?
SMS Marketing for Dental Practices
5 Reasons You Want to Use SMS Messaging in Your Business
Are you looking to grow your business? Get more customers? Have larger profits? Of course you are. Isn't every business looking to improve, grow and generate more sales? More and more businesses are realising how SMS messaging can help them do all those things. But it's nice to have some facts to back up what most people seem to assume is true.
6 Ways Gyms Are Using SMS Marketing
Marketing for gyms and leisure centres is unlike marketing within many other industries. It's not enough to simply gain a customer and expect to keep them indefinitely. It's important to make every attempt to keep that customer dedicated and interested in achieving their fitness goals to avoid lapsed memberships and cancellations. It's in every gym's best interest to have a loyal customer base that feels supported and encouraged to attend the gym regularly. Failure to do so can result in members who feel it is a waste of money to pay for a membership that they don't use often enough. That's where SMS marketing can make a big difference.
SMS Messaging Helps New Mothers Stay Healthy
New mothers face many challenges in the days and weeks following the birth of their child. Any parent will know most of them well with lack of sleep being a primary one. But many women are also at risk for other conditions that could be prevented by regular monitoring - enter SMS.
How to Have Your SMS Messaging Pay for Itself
SMS messaging supports all sorts of use cases. Most of the time, businesses consider it an expense. But for some businesses, there's a method that could turn that expense into income. See some examples of how it works, and if it might be for you in this blog.
SMS messaging helps both job seekers and recruiters
How does SMS messaging helps recruitment agencies? Just as importantly how does it help job seekers? This post explains several benefits for both recruiters and candidates. Perhaps the key issues are the speed of communication with SMS and also the innate privacy of SMS messaging.
How SMS Messaging is Revolutionising the Healthcare Industry
With 64% of people stating they prefer text messaging for customer support, over voice calling – it is no wonder the hectic, often overstretched health care sector is utilising SMS messaging frequently. Below we’ve listed out a range of benefits of using text messaging within the healthcare sector.