Posted by Mary on Jan 25, 2018 Views: 6276

Engage Your Clients With Text Messaging

Community Connect Labs is a project of GreatNonprofits that provides SMS texting-based tools for nonprofits and government to reach hard-to-engage individuals. It’s time-consuming and challenging to engage low-income individuals — but text messaging meets them where they are in a convenient and private format. Read on for success stories, key learnings, and an overview of our solutions for texting and other mobile messaging channels.

Text messaging meets your clients where they are

Community Connect Labs

GreatNonprofits has experience with a wide variety of technology-based tools oriented towards nonprofits — but nothing is as effective as text messaging. Text messaging has incredible reach:

90% of low-income people have mobile phones (only 30% have landlines)
95% of Americans text every day
95%+ of text messages read with average response time <1 hour

Text messaging is also highly accessible: it works across feature and smartphones and is free to receive on most phone plans. Almost everyone is familiar with texting as a mode of communication and it’s simple for busy people to respond to during their day.

Enroll clients, send reminders, and collect data via text messaging

Community Connect Labs

We’ve built a platform for creating custom text-messaging based campaigns to meet a variety of nonprofit needs.

Adaptive enrollment campaigns can be used to collect screening information from clients to determine if they meet program requirements. Clients who do can be directed to apply and given reminders throughout the process — and clients who don’t can be directed to other programs.

Personalized reminders can be sent to clients to remind them of events or check in on the status of applications or other information. Reminders sent via text messaging offer a two-way channel of communication in case the client has questions or needs more information.

Surveys conducted via text message are simple for clients to respond to and so have a high response rate. Text messaging offers a way to regularly measure program impact.

The United Way used our tools to pre-qualify clients for EITC enrollment

Community Connect Labs

The U.S. Federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit for low-to-moderate income working individuals and couples. To qualify, individuals need to meet certain IRS requirements and file a tax return, which is a difficult process to negotiate. There are over $15B available in unclaimed refunds.

The United Way used a text-message based survey to pre-qualify their clients for EITC enrollment. Clients who qualified were provided resources to apply and regular reminders based on custom data.

82% of people who completed the EITC screening and were deemed likely to qualify clicked to sign up for the service and 60% signed up for text message reminders.