In today’s digital era, higher education advancement teams face numerous challenges in engaging alumni and driving effective fundraising campaigns. With the constant competition for attention and the risk of losing engagement through traditional channels, it’s crucial to explore innovative communication methods. One such powerful tool is SMS communications (text messaging), which offers a direct and personalized way to connect with constituents. In this blog, we’ll delve into how SMS communications can be leveraged by advancement teams for impactful alumni engagement and effective fundraiser marketing appeals, and how Mogli, an app built on Salesforce that makes it easy for organizations to deliver SMS communications, can support these use cases.
Communication Challenges in Advancement
Advancement teams are tasked with maintaining strong relationships with alumni and donors, but they often struggle with communication challenges that can put them at risk of losing engagement among their constituents. Currently, advancement teams face common engagement challenges like:
- Lack of Personalization: Nowadays, people expect more personalized content and experiences. This is especially the case with the most ardent supporters of an institution. They want to know that an organization appreciates their support, and they want to receive content and messaging that is tailored to their interests. Imagine if an advancement team were to send an alumnus of an institution’s writing program an invitation to a fundraising event that supports only the school’s engineering program. Certainly that alumnus might be confused, but almost certainly they won’t be attending that fundraiser. Situations like these, and others, highlight the importance of why personalized communications and content for an end-receiver of a message are crucial to drive engagement and event attendance.
- Competing for Attention: On a similar note, in today’s digital age, a person receives around 121 emails each day. That’s a lot of emails! With that many emails going into people’s inboxes daily, it can make it understandably difficult for advancement appeals to stand out, get opened, and read by constituents.
- Unsubscribes: How many of us have unsubscribed from a mailing list and selected “I receive too many emails” as the reason for unsubscribing? Not only does an inundation of emails or a lack of personalized content make it harder for messages to stand out and lead to email fatigue, but it could cause recipients to unsubscribe from a mailing list. Unsubscribes can also be caused by using a poorly maintained or segmented mailing list.
- Demonstrating Impact and Value: It’s important for advancement teams to communicate with alumni, constituents, and supporters about the impact of their support, their involvement, or where their gifts are going towards. That might mean having the technology or a system that can measure impact, such as Salesforce, in order to provide those metrics, but it can foster a sense of transparency between a constituent and an organization. Advancement teams that do not weave their constituents’ impact in their communications may be less likely to retain those constituents’ support or engagement in the future.
- Lack of Automation: Communicating with constituents is an important part of constituent management and relationship building. However, advancement teams often face manual follow-ups and tasks as part of constituent management operations that are time-consuming and inefficient. Timeliness is crucial when it comes to building and maintaining relationships, and if advancement staff don’t communicate with their constituents or supporters in a timely manner or at the right time their constituents expect, they risk decreased engagement.
To overcome these hurdles, it’s essential to meet constituents where they are with relevant messaging and content.
This is where SMS communications can be a differentiator.
Impact of SMS Communications on Fundraising and Alumni Engagement
In SMS communications, almost every text message gets read—even if it is just for a brief moment. Because of how easy, accessible, and convenient SMS messages are to interact with, read, and send, the open rate of SMS messages is essentially around 99%. Notwithstanding those individuals who identify as “not tech-savvy” and those who identify as “bad texters” (we all know somebody who never texts back), SMS is a reliable channel for distributing information to people quickly, and organizations across industries, including higher ed advancement, are starting to integrate SMS messages as part of their marketing and communication strategies to drive engagement rates.
Younger donors are a vital demographic for advancement teams; these donors are tech-savvy and prefer quick, personalized communication. Given this, SMS is an ideal channel to engage this group, as it offers immediacy and convenience. By leveraging SMS, advancement teams can drive alumni activity, increase event attendance, and boost fundraising efforts, and here are some relevant use cases where SMS can be an impactful channel for engagement:
Alumni Engagement
- Event Invitations/RSVPs: Sending personalized event invitations and reminders to alumni via texts, encouraging them to RSVP and attend.
- Alumni Updates/Successes: Sharing SMS message updates on alumni achievements and successes, fostering a sense of community and pride.
- Networking Opportunities: Informing alumni by text messaging about networking events and opportunities to connect with peers.
Fundraising Appeals
- Text-to-Give: Advancement teams can simplify the donation process by allowing alumni to donate via SMS message and provide them a secure link to do so.
- Scheduled Donation Reminders: Send text message reminders for giving days and pledge commitments, increasing the likelihood of donations.
- Pledge Reminders: Follow up via automated SMS communication journeys on pledge commitments and encourage completion.
- Thank You Messages: Show appreciation to donors by sending them personalized thank you messages via SMS. These messages don’t even have to be in response to a gift, you can even send a text message to a donor or constituent greeting them on their birthday.
- 1:1 SMS for High Impact Donors: Engage high-impact donors with personalized text messaging and utilize templates with the right messaging to send over SMS.
Implementation Considerations
If your advancement team is considering introducing SMS as a communications channel, this requires careful planning and assessment. Here are some key considerations as your advancement team plans to implement SMS:
- Measuring Success and KPIs: To gauge the effectiveness of SMS communications and campaigns, it is important to track specific metrics and KPIs. Start with a small test audience, like engaged donors or younger donors, and monitor campaign performance. Track specific SMS campaigns you might have, such as Giving Day text reminders. Key metrics your advancement team should track include open rates, click-through rates, and donor conversions.
- Integration Requirements: Ensure seamless integration with existing systems like pairing Salesforce with Mogli to enable SMS or WhatsApp as a channel for messaging.
- Complementing Existing Channels: Determine how SMS will complement other communication channels.
- Compliance Considerations: Adhere to compliance requirements and best practices.
- Contact and Send Volumes: Plan for the volume of contacts and messages to be sent.
- Overall Communication Strategy: Develop a comprehensive communication strategy with strategic guidance from partners like Cloud for Good.
Cloud for Good and Mogli’s Partnership
For advancement teams looking to elevate their engagement efforts and drive support for fundraising appeals through Salesforce-integrated SMS communications, we have partnered with Mogli to implement its SMS application. Mogli is a robust, user-friendly solution that gives users the ability to compose, send, and receive SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp messages directly from Salesforce. The app comes with an unlimited user license, an elegant and intuitive user interface, a 100% US-based onboarding and support team, and has a 5-star rating on AppExchange, making it the best text messaging communication solution available that is built on Salesforce. In addition to being a vetted, trusted sender, some of Mogli’s other key features and benefits include:
- Support for 1:1, bulk, scheduled, audio (text-to-voice), file-to-voice, and automated messaging: One aspect we enjoy about text messaging with Mogli is that conversation view interfaces are customizable, and there are multiple messaging interface templates available to choose from and customize in Salesforce. In addition, Mogli’s support for WhatsApp messages can make it possible for advancement teams to outreach and engage with supporters who live abroad, thus extending their reach and creating more potential opportunities for support abroad.
- Survey functionality: Mogli has functionality to conduct surveys and collect survey responses over text messages. Users can leverage intelligent branching forms in the app to guide text conversations based on participant responses, use replies to quantify leads, update records, and more.
- Collecting data insights quickly from text responses: Mogli’s survey functionality enables users to receive feedback quickly in the form of a Net Promoter Score (NPS), CSAT, and even custom-created survey feedback. All feedback forms and data responses can be built, implemented, collected, and analyzed within Salesforce.
- Customize and Track URLs: Users can effortlessly create and insert custom or short URLs into SMS messages, which is helpful to ensure brand recognition and SMS carrier compatibility. In addition, Mogli’s URL tracking makes it possible to track active engagement actions by message recipients.
- Applicable to most use cases: Mogli is a versatile app that can be used for nearly any existing communications strategy, even those outside of advancement. The University of Alabama-Birmingham’s Recruitment & Admissions team, for example, uses Mogli to send high-impact, on-brand mass and 1:1 text message communications to students. These communications include messages that have short surveys, checklists, and registration reminders.
Leveraging SMS communications can revolutionize the way higher education advancement teams engage with alumni and drive fundraising efforts. With Mogli’s robust SMS capabilities and Cloud for Good’s strategic guidance, advancement teams can overcome communication challenges when they outreach with alumni and donors and achieve impactful results with advancement outreach efforts and fundraisers. If your institution would like to learn how to use Mogli to transform its advancement marketing and engagement strategies, Cloud for Good would love to help. Having worked with hundreds of higher education institutions, Cloud for Good knows what kind of constituents you are targeting, is fluent in the advancement space, and understands what are the most pressing, common challenges that advancement teams face.
Reach out to us to learn more about how we can support your goals.
