This month for the mobile marketing spotlight I’d like to talk about ways the religious and non-profit community can use SMS/text marketing.
There are many different ways that SMS/text marketing may be useful to those organizations. The possibilities are 
endless!
- Event notification
- Appointment reminders
- Daily/Weekly tips or words of encouragement
- Donations/fundraising
- Alerts for disaster relief/mobilization
The last one – alerts for disaster relief/mobilization – is especially poignant considering the times. It seems that every time you look on the news some sort of natural disaster has struck somewhere in the world. With one text message you can alert your base to an unplanned blood drive, food collection, volunteer medical or construction team meeting and more.
Even the everyday needs – neighborhood clean-up, mission trip fundraising/raffle, etc. – can use text marketing to reach their base in real-time for reminders or real-time response.
The key to the usage is to not wait until an emergency or event arises where text marketing could be of use, but to start enrolling your audience NOW. Currently sending a newsletter or email to your member base? Put a note in there encouraging your members to subscribe. Let them know what to expect. You can even sweeten the subscription by including a drawing for a prize. Add a line in the membership application where new members can opt in. Post it on your social networks and encourage people to share it. The more people subscribed to your text channel the better response you will get when a real-time response is needed.