Non-profit Fundraising
Donor engagement is the key to success when you are trying to raise funds for nonprofit organizations or a cause. People are willing to support the causes nonprofits work for, but for the fundraisers, it is essential to keep the supporters engaged in every possible communication channel. Social media is a good option but dumped with too much information, and it seems to be a bit difficult to cut through all the noise on email inboxes and share the message. However, among many other communication channels, one simple and easy way to reach all your wellwishers at one go is SMS marketing.
There are some research reports also showing that about 90% of the text message is instant read by the receivers within 3 minutes itself. So, in terms of sharing your message for nonprofit fundraising, you can reach the prospective donors instantly through text. This will further help increase donor engagement and also to get more contributions.
Some specific advantages for SMS marketing for the nonprofits
Get more people into your mailing list
As we have seen above, sending texts is the easiest mode of instant communication with a potential donor with prospects to support your cause. Just by including a relevant keyword and some shortcodes in the content to connect, you can make use of these texts to grow your email subscription list of supporters to meet your goals.
Organizing events
Since text messages have a better guarantee to be opened, sending text becomes a good idea in terms of organizing some fundraising events. SMS marketing will reach your members who can be informed about any rallies, meetings, or conferences you arrange for fundraising. Calling individually is time-consuming and also costly, whereas e-mail and social media may be slower and unsure modes of communication to organize things fast. If you need to send voice messages specifically, you can set up an automated calling system.
Sharing the fundraising blasts
It is very difficult to meet the short-term goals in terms of fundraising in the nonprofit world. However, by using SMS marketing, you can easily share a call to action, which is relevant to the purpose in hand to prompt some quick action. Nonprofit organizations can launch some campaigns like text-to-donate to reach more and more donors instantly.
Setting reminders
If there is a need to make the prospects sign a petition or to remind them about their membership renewal, SMS marketing by SimpleTexting can be an ideal solution. It is possible to send individual reminders tailor-made for each person based on their unique situation.
Nonprofit SMS marketing tips
Nonprofit bodies cannot survive without proper networking with passionate and engaged volunteers. So, the administrators also need to maintain these close engagement opportunities to maintain a positive impact in anything like hosting fundraiser programs to recruiting fresh volunteers. Here are some tips for the administrators to effectively use SMS marketing for nonprofits.
Improve the effectiveness of your ads
A typical ad copy will not offer a lot of room to include the mission statement or your organization or any other critical information. Some ads may ask the viewers to check out their social media accounts whereas some others push the users to scan the QR code. However, these strategies may put the patrons without a smartphone at bay, but text messaging is an inviting solution for all.
Pick up better options
A proven method to make use of SMS marketing to boost your advertising efforts is as below. Try to book the same promotional slot on two radio stations. Ask the listeners of the ad to send an SMS to get more info or to enroll in a contest. Announce different codes to each station and compare the output. On finding one outlet reaping better results than others, you can spot the better placement option for targeted ads by identifying where it makes the most impact.
Share valuable knowledge
Once if you get the users to subscribe to SMS marketing alerts, then you have to keep them from unsubscribing ever. The ideal approach is to test them some knowledge nuggets once in a while, describing the causes of your support and organizational goals, etc. Those who are interested in supporting nonprofits are always passionate about supporting any relevant cause, and these texts may be informative and interesting to them to engage more actively. This is a proven model to always stay on the heads of the supporters.
Raise funds without spamming
As we have seen above in the benefits of SMS marketing, text can reach supporters much easily and quickly. So, text campaigns can be effectively used to solicit donations too, but you should be very careful while planning it. If you keep on sending soliciting messages to the supports far too often, then you may be annoying them to lose opportunities. Always strike a balance and limit donation requesting texts to a minimum. Always try to tie-in some incentives like gifts, contests, or points to add and avoid sending duplicate texts repeatedly.
Optimize the marketing efforts
All your marketing campaigns as radio spots, TV ads, bus shelter ads, or whatever, you can optimize it using SMS marketing. Traditional media is often very passive without the scope of interacting with it, but the modern media including text messages can be creatively made interactive. You may conduct polls or run pledge drives through SMS marketing and also display live results. Just try to ad text-in incentives to your static commercials and make them also interactive. If you succeed in creating an interactive experience, then it is possible to turn the passerby viewers too into active participants.
As you can see above, there are plenty of methods to use SMS marketing as an efficient tool for nonprofit promotions and fundraising campaigns. Apart from those discussed here, there are plenty of other innovative ways too which you explore on being a bit creative based on your need in hand. SMS marketing has proven success both as a standalone strategy as well as can go along well with other marketing modalities too to enhance their effectiveness.
More on this topic: Jump Between iMessage And SMS With Switch-Service