With 99% open rates, real-time updates, and direct communication with your supporters, it’s no wonder why many nonprofit organizations choose to send updates to their supporters via SMS messages or MMS messages. SMS marketing has many benefits that are particularly appealing to nonprofit organizations when communicating an urgent need or request to supporters. In this blog post, we take a look at how two popular non-profits—PETA and The Humane Society—use SMS marketing to get their message out and fundraise for their organizations.
Benefits of SMS Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations
SMS marketing offers the following perks:
SMS marketing is a spam-free channel. Unlike email, SMS marketing messages can’t get caught in a spam filter or spam folder. All SMS messages that are received, even those that are A2P, land in the same inbox.
SMS marketing messages have a 99% open rate. This nearly perfect open rate is one very important reason why nonprofit organizations opt for the SMS marketing channel. Email marketing has about a 20% open rate and social algorithms typically show your updates to less than 5% of your followers.
90% of SMS marketing messages are opened within 3 minutes. As most nonprofit organizations have an urgent call-to-action, this quick open time makes SMS marketing the ideal communication channel.
Now, let’s see how PETA and the Humane Society are using SMS marketing to communicate with their supporters. PETA utilizes SMS messaging, while the Humane Society utilizes MMS messaging. Let’s examine the details below.
PETA SMS Marketing Examples
PETA exposes animals suffering in laboratories, the food industry, the clothing trade, and the entertainment industry. This nonprofit organization opts for SMS messages within their text message marketing campaigns.
SMS messages allow up to 160 characters of text, an emoji, a phone number, and a hyperlink. The PETA examples in the image above are smaller in size, due to the character limit, and include hyperlinks that lead subscribers to learn more about PETA’s mission. This nonprofit organization keeps its messages short and simple, ensuring that supporters can quickly digest the message.
The Humane Society MMS Marketing Examples
The Humane Society of America focuses on animal welfare and opposes animal cruelties of national scope. This nonprofit organization utilizes MMS messaging within its text message marketing campaigns.
MMS messaging allows for a subject line, 5,000 characters of text, and media content (video, image, GIF, vCard, or a sound file). The examples above include eye-catching photos, subject lines, and lengthy messages, all part of the MMS messaging capabilities. The Humane Society has many small community branches that often host rescue events, so a longer message and image is helpful when communicating with supporters.
The Humane Society vs. Peta SMS Marketing Examples
Now let’s look at these two brands stacked next to each other.
As you can see in the example above, something that both of these nonprofit organizations have in common in their text messages is that they send messages from their logo and brand name instead of their SMS short code number. This helps their subscribers instantly recognize the messages as coming from one of their favorite organizations.
One way that The Humane Society and PETA differ in their approach is that The Humane Society often includes a link where subscribers can take action, whereas PETA invites subscribers to reply back. Neither one is necessarily better than the other, as both are trackable through SMS marketing analytics. It really takes knowing your audience and measuring how they engage in order to generate the most donations, responses, or signatures.
As you can see in the example above, The Humane Society uses images to drive home their messages. They often take full advantage of the extra space in the MMS image by writing a headline, which further catches attention and summarizes their message, should subscribers not read the whole text.
As you can see in the example above, PETA prefers a plain-text message to communicate, versus an image like The Humane Society. PETA invites subscribers to reply “Y” to take action, which makes it easy for their supporters to get involved at the click of a button.
SMS Messaging vs. MMS Messaging
The great thing about text message marketing is there is something for every organization. Brands that prefer to keep their message short, sweet, and to-the-point tend to opt for SMS messages. Brands that need a bit more space to elaborate on their message—or prefer to add some sort of media content—utilize MMS messaging.
One is not better than the other; SMS messages and MMS messages tend to meet the needs of different brands. The beauty of text message marketing is that there’s a specific type of message for every organization.
Raise Donations for Your Nonprofit with SMS Marketing
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