Guide to using SMS for charities

Last week we explored how a couple of charity organisations are using our service to solve their problems. I thought I’d follow this up with a quick guide on how other charities can do the same.Our service has provided a simple and effective solution to help charities to:

• boost donations
• recruit volunteers
• notify of appointments
• inform the community about events
• organise shifts for volunteer and staff workers

The process of achieving these important objectives through SMS is extremely easy and you don’t need much to get started.The main ingredients:

1. A strong mobile database: if you don’t have all the correct details of who you’d use SMS to contact (ie potential donors, or volunteers) then you won’t have a successful campaign. Make sure all the details of your database are up-to-date. If you haven’t got much of a database, have a look at our building a mobile database guide to help get you started.

1. An Esendex account: it’s incredibly easy and affordable to set up, and we’d love to help you. Try our free trial to see just how intuitive our Echo platform is to use, and one of our experts will be in touch with you shortly after to set up your account to its full capability.

1. Message templates: Message templates allow you to send messages even quicker, without the need to write out your message each time. A great message template for boosting donations might look something like:

“Hi [[donor_name]],  thanks for your help on Saturday! We’d love your help getting started on our next event. To donate go to (shortlink) today!)”You could use this template in our bulk upload feature, to send to a particular database gathered with the details of attendees at a recent fundraising event. This way, you can contact the whole group of thousands of attendees, all at the click of a button! Our beginner’s guide to SMS with Esendex can walk you through building templates, and our account managers are always happy to lend a hand as well.This is just one of the simple strategies we have for helping charities achieve their objectives. There are lots of way to implement SMS using our system, and we’re happy to share them all with charities, so that every organisation has a solution specifically tailored to them.If you are involved with a charity that is looking for a simple solution to boosting donations, recruiting volunteers, or any of the other challenges that face charities, give us a call on 1300 764 946 today so we can guide you through it!