One of the great things about providing a versatile service for communication is that we get to work with a diverse range of organisations. This includes those doing great things for our community, like Guide Dogs Victoria. They breed, raise and train dogs to provide mobility services for vision impaired clients, and they do it completely free of charge.
We recently had the pleasure of meeting with Guide Dogs Victoria Fundraising Manager, Alex Cross. So we asked him a few questions about how they’ve been using our service over the past few months to help with their important work.
1. Who do you contact via SMS, and how were you contacting them before us?
We use the service only for contacting donors at the moment. We were previously contacting them only through email and phone calling.
2. How many people would you say you reach via our SMS services?
It depends on the campaign. We have 16,000 active mobile numbers and we would have definitely contacted this many. We recently (last week) sent a campaign to all regular donors–about 1,800 people. But if we’re promoting products, then messages would go to a different amount of people.
3. What were you hoping to get out of it?
As an innovative and modern organisation, we wanted our communication technology to reflect this. We wanted to communicate more quickly. We also wanted to add that extra element to our already complex communication strategy. We were already emailing and phone calling donors, it was just SMS missing!
4. What did you actually get out of it?
Communication is a lot quicker. Using Esendex and text messaging added a new dimension in how we communicate with our donors and supporters. The great thing about using the SMS tool is that it’s very quick to implement, and you see it working straight away–it’s helped so much. The SMS donation has really allowed us to communicate more often, more quickly and at a lower cost.
5. What are your plans for the future with SMS?
We want to move forward with contacting clients and volunteers as well as donors. We want to contact them all at the same time with SMS. We will keep looking for new ways to use the service because we love it so much!
If you would like to learn more about great uses for SMS, or our work with charity organisations, give us a call on 1300 764 946 and talk to one of our experts!
Prachi Bametha
Marketing Coordinator, Esendex Australia