Text Messaging (SMS) Best Practices

It’s important to recognize the different ways to reach multiple audiences across Indian Country. For some organizations and Tribal Nations, sending text messages is the most efficient quickest way to share important updates and requests to their community.

Benefits and Considerations

Leveraging a SMS (Short Message Service) platform to send text message updates can enable you to…

• Reach folks who are less active on social media and/or email.
• Establish a more direct line of communication, with no algorithms to limit reach and effectiveness.

Considerations:

• Text messaging (SMS) typically makes the most sense for organizations that are sending timely reminders or prompts for action.
• If you aren’t providing timely emergency/support updates, or urging people to do things like sign petitions or come to events on a regular basis, sending text messages might not make sense for your organization.

Text Messaging (SMS) Strategy 101

Key questions to ask yourself when developing your SMS / text messaging strategy:

• What are the most timely, important updates for my audiences? Examples include:
  • Event reminders
  • Emergency updates
  • Volunteer opportunities
  • Advocacy alerts
• Are there opportunities to integrate text message (SMS) blasts into our existing list management platforms, so that we can manage them all in one place? For example, if you use Mailchimp to send emails, you could sign up for an Email + SMS plan and manage your contact lists and communications for both in a single place.
• How can we make it easy for people to find out about and sign up for my organization’s text message (SMS) updates? That could include things like making sure the email sign-up form on your website includes a field for sharing their phone number to receive SMS updates, too.
• Do our different audiences need to hear different information? If so, you could have different audience segments that receive different types of text (SMS) updates. For example, donors might receive texts with updates about fundraising, whereas community members might get event-specific updates.

Text Messaging Tips and Best Practices

• Provide a section in your organization’s newsletter and website sign-up form for community members to sign up for the text message service.
• Don’t send multiple text messages in one day. You don’t want to drive people to unsubscribe.
• Avoid sending graphics with small text.
• Include Zoom meeting links so people can easily attend meetings from their phones.
• Add the important information at the beginning of the text.