Future:Media:Change

The ubiquitous calls to help Haiti by texting “Haiti” to 90999 last month, and the $41 million raised by the effort, may have opened your organization’s eyes to the possibilities of mobile messaging, but what are reasonable expectations for more run-of-the-mill mobile campaigns? To answer this question, M+R and MobileActive.org have released 2010 Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmarks.

Building Your List

Percentages of subscribers who make a call (to a congressman, for example) or sign a petition via their mobile phones when asked to do so via text message

The report found that nonprofit text messaging lists grew at an annual rate of 49.5%, with the overwhelming majority of subscribers (80%) joining the lists by entering their mobile numbers on a Web page.

Most organizations leveraged their existing e-mail lists to grow their text messaging lists, which explains why most text subscribers are also e-mail subscribers (73% – 87%). “Hence,” says the report, “for the organizations in this study, text message is primarily being used to communicate with email supporters through an additional channel, not as a way to communicate with a different set of supporters.” This may be an important consideration when deciding whether to invest in building your text messaging lists — especially since the churn rate for text lists was much higher than that for e-mail lists: 30.7% vs. 19%, according to the report.

Messaging Your List

Fundraising may come first to mind for a text campaign these days, but the report found nonprofits and advocacy organizations are conducting five distinct types of messaging:

• Fundraising – The $10 per donation limit is far less than the e-mail average, notes the report, but text fundraising messages increase the success rate of e-mail solicitations when subscribers receive both.
• Advocacy – 4.7% of subscribers make a call (to their congressman, for example) when asked to do so via text message; 14.6% of subscribers sign a petition in reply to text messages asking them to do so.
• Informational – News alerts or reminders to vote, for example.
• Go-to-Web – Sending subscribers to a Web page to take a survey, take an action, or just check it out.
• Text Reply – Asking subscribers for their thoughts/ideas, for example.

The free report has more specifics, of course, as well as links to case studies of many of the campaign types. I definitely recommend downloading it.

More Benchmarking Studies

See our previous posts on benchmarks for e-mail advocacy and fundraising and social networking.