As digital channels evolve and grow, it is important for nonprofits to stay ahead of the curve and find new ways to engage with their donors and prospects.

Why Texting?

A comprehensive SMS/MMS fundraising strategy can help your organization overcome challenges common to many nonprofits:

  • Reaching donors is more difficult and expensive than ever.
  • Engagement fades without consistent communications.
  • Only about 40% of donors are retained annually.
  • More engagement needed to balance fundraising requests.

Audience behaviors are changing but engagement and retention are persistent challenges. Texting provides an efficient engagement path. 78% of people indicate that text messaging is the best way to reach them.

So why add texting to your fundraising program?

  • Superior ROI to social, digital, and even email
    • According to M&R, adding text messaging to an existing fundraising program can increase the amount of revenue raised per person by 25-50%. 
  • Ensure your donors see your messages
    • Text messaging achieves a 99% open rate (90%+ within 3 minutes of receipt).
    • 4.5x higher click-thru-rate and 4x higher conversion rate than email. 

What Is SMS/MMS?

There are two types of text messages: short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS). 

  • SMS is what we would consider standard texting. It is a text-only message of up to 160 characters.
  • MMS has a wider range of features than MMS. It allows you to utilize a subject line, 5000 characters of text, and media content such as an image, GIF, video, etc.

MMS is slightly more expensive to send than an SMS message, but most brands and organizations prefer to use MMS in order to catch the attention of your donors. Best practice is using a combination of both of these types of text messages in your texting program.

Let NextGen Help

Ready to incorporate texting into your nonprofit’s fundraising plan? Connect with NextGen today.