Count the Ways: More Examples of P2P Texting Working!

Our clients are discovering new ways to utilize P2P texting every day! Here are some of their spectacular results.

Peer-to-peer texting is one of the most exciting breakout communication tools right now. With over 200 million P2P texts sent in that last half of 2018 alone (more than twice the amount of the previous year), it is no surprise that the technology has been receiving so much attention.

Even though most P2P text messages have been sent by political campaigns and organizations, don’t be fooled: P2P is an effective tool that can be used by private businesses and organizations as well. In fact, it already is!

Here are a few ways our clients are using P2P texting:

1. Polling/Surveys

2. Phone Banking/Boosting Call Center Efficiency

3. Patch-Through Calls

4. Fundraising

5. Event Attendance

6. Volunteer Recruitment

1. Polling/Surveys

Use Case: A RumbleUp client sent a series of texts over the course of three days, asking people to complete a survey. Each message was personalized with the recipient’s name and included a unique survey link specific to the person it was being sent to. The tone of the message was urgent and informative, letting the recipient know that the survey was confidential and strictly for research purposes.

Result: After the final round of texts were sent (22,285) the client had a total of 558 surveys completed. Across all messages sent over the course of this campaign, the client had 25 survey completions for every 1,000 texts sent (2.5%). Texting proved to be both faster and cheaper for this particular client compared to live calling.

Key Takeaways: Urgency and transparency, combined with repetition and personalization, works. In the few hours it took to send all of these texts out over the course of three days, the client had enough survey completions for a relevant sample size. They ran this same model in three other states and saw similarly high completion rates.

2. Boosting Call Center Efficiency/Phone Banking

Use Case: One of our clients ran a test to see if they would have more success phone banking if they sent a head’s up text before attempting to call. They tested this by splitting a targeted list in half, sending one group a heads-up text before calling, and not giving the other group any sort of heads-up before calling.

Result:

All in all, they saw a 62% lift when a heads-up text message was sent before a live call attempt. (Wow!)

Key Takeaways: Not only did they find that texting people before calling resulted in a significant increase in successful calls, it also took considerably less time for phone bankers to complete these calls compared to the calls they made to people who did not receive a heads-up text.

3. Patch-Through Calls

Use Case: A RumbleUp client texted a total of 9,339 people in three states asking them to call their Senators to demand action.

Result: They generated 203 calls to the Senate in these three states (2.2% response rate) and received 837 positive responses to their initial text (9%).

Key Takeaway: The people who received these texts had no previous affiliation with the campaign, and our client was still able to drive them to take considerable action just by sending a text. We expect to see even higher levels of engagement when texting a targeted list of people who have previously been contacted in some form.

4. Fundraising

Use Case: For an end-of-year fundraising campaign, our client sent a series of texts to a list of previous donors in the weeks leading up to an ‘End-of-Year Grant Match’ text.

They sent the following texts to ~10,000 previous donors:

Result: They raised $4,000 from 37 donors (that’s an average gift of over $100 per person!)

Key Takeaways: Adding value to an ask is key. Even though these people were previous donors, reminding them why they support the organization by sending them a video is an effective way to spark action. In addition to this value add, they offered an additional incentive by letting their donors know that their gift would be doubled by the end of year matching grant. This three-part progression ending with an ask is an excellent model to follow.

5. Event Attendance

Use Case: Over the course of several months, a RumbleUp client sent invites and reminder texts to targeted audiences in more than 60 different counties for events happening across the state every week. First they would send an initial invite text with details about where/when the event would take place and ask if the recipient would be able to come. Then on the day of the event itself they would send a reminder text to those who replied, letting the recipient know they looked forward to seeing them there.

Result: Our client told us that when they initially started having these rally events, they struggled to fill tables. After they started texting invites and reminders to people in the area, they reported having standing room only because so many people were showing up. This is exactly the kind of attendance they were hoping for!

Key Takeaways: Casual conversational invites work best. By using texting to invite people in the area to their events, they were able to quickly and easily answer people’s questions about location, transportation, what kind of food would be served, etc.

They also had many people respond saying that they wouldn’t be able to make that particular event, but asked if there would be another event in the future. Our client could then tag that person as ‘Future Attendee’ so they could added to the campaign’s list for next time, and were able to text that person back right away, letting them know when they could expect to hear back from the campaign about the next event. This not only helped our client boost event attendance, but also allowed them to connect with their supporters in a memorable way.

6. Volunteer Recruitment

Use Case: A client of ourstexted several thousand people who were identified as being nothing more than somewhat likely to support the candidate’s political party, with a message reminding them of the date of the primary. The text was meant to be a simple touch point for name awareness and to open a channel to answer any questions people may have had about voting locations.

Results: Even though the campaign wasn’t aiming to recruit volunteers with their message, they found that people were texting them back asking how to get involved and help text for the campaign. They were able to immediately text these people back and ended up almost doubling their team of volunteers! After gaining volunteers in the first round of texting, they then sent a second round of messages the following week and had people respond back asking where they should send donation checks and inviting the candidate to appear at events around the district. The campaign was able to text all of these people back and ended up scheduling the congressman to attend some of the events people had texted them about!

Key Takeaways: Texting is the perfect tool to open the channel of engagement. These were people who supported the campaign and were interested in getting involved, but just needed someone to extend a convenient hand to make it happen.

Bottom Line:

Texting is a dynamic and flexible tool that can be used to enhance any type of outreach effort. People like it because it is personal, immediate and convenient. Our clients like it because it works. These use cases barely scratch the surface of the wide variety of successful programs we have helped facilitate through our RumbleUp platform, and the list continues to grow.

For any message you are trying to get across, texting is the best way to do it.

Our team is ready to help you create the perfect P2P plan to complement your already existing outreach programs. Send us an email at sales@rumbleup.com and let’s talk about how to amplify your reach!

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