SMS marketing for nonprofits: donor appeals, volunteer coordination, and community alerts on one account.

Definition

What nonprofit text messaging is, and what it replaces.

Nonprofit text messaging is SMS (plain text) or MMS (picture) messages sent from a phone number your organization controls, to people who agreed to hear from you at that number. Most of it is practical information rather than promotion. The most useful messages carry a detail the reader needs right away, for example that their shift starts at 8, that the ballfield is closed, that a matching gift expires at midnight, or a link that lets them give in eleven seconds.

Most organizations we talk to think of their contacts as one list, but in practice they have three:

• Donors. People who have given, might give again, and who you are asking for money on a calendar that repeats every year.
• Volunteers and staff. People who give their time rather than money, and who need practical details far more often than appeals.
• Members, participants, and community. This includes the congregation, the families in a program, and the neighborhood that needs to know when the distribution site moves.

The three groups overlap, and that overlap is where most nonprofit texting programs go wrong. When a volunteer who has never given receives a year-end appeal, or a major donor receives a request to cover a shift at the coat drive, the organization appears not to know who it is talking to. The platform keeps the programs separate when you write messages and combines them in reporting, which matches how a nonprofit actually operates.

Texting does not replace your newsletter or the personal call to a major donor. It handles the short messages that support both, such as reminders, confirmations, deadlines, and alerts. Use email to explain things, and use text to deliver a single fact while it is still useful.

Annual schedule

The giving calendar, and where texting belongs on it.

Nonprofit fundraising follows a calendar that changes very little from year to year. This helps, because you can plan the texting program backward from dates you already know. A common mistake is to use texting only in December. People who hear from you for the first time on November 30 do not recognize the number, so they opt out.

1. January to March: fix forms and records. Use the quiet first quarter to fix how you collect contacts. Add clear SMS opt-in language (a statement that the person agrees to receive your texts) to every form the organization owns, and review every list you have to confirm where its consent came from. This work is not exciting, but it is what makes the rest of the year defensible.
2. Spring appeal and event season. This season brings gala RSVPs, ticket reminders, event-day logistics, and auction closing times. Event texting is the easiest place to start, because asking for consent fits naturally into registration, and the messages are clearly useful rather than requests for money.
3. Summer: programs rather than appeals. Send camp reminders, distribution schedules, and volunteer shifts. These messages keep your number familiar. One or two messages a month with no request for money make people more willing to hear your appeals in the fourth quarter.
4. October: build the giving-day list. Focus on growing the list before you plan the campaign. Collect opt-ins at every fall event, and finish your 10DLC registration (a standard local phone number registered with the carriers for business texting), so the carriers do not limit how many messages you can send on the day it matters.
5. Giving Tuesday. On this day you text the whole list, with a message beforehand, a morning launch, a midday progress update, and a message in the closing hours. It is the one day of the year when a broad, well-timed mass texting send is the right approach rather than a shortcut.
6. Year-end, December 26 to 31. This is the busiest giving week of the year, and texting works better than any other channel during it, because the message is about a real deadline. Before the December 31 send, remove anyone who already gave in December. A donor who is thanked and then asked again in the same week may not renew, even if they planned to.

Matching-gift windows fall outside this calendar and can happen whenever a board member or a corporate partner offers to match gifts. They are the most productive time for a nonprofit to text, because they give a text everything it needs: a reason to give, a deadline, and a total that rises while people watch. Write the matching-gift message on the day the match is confirmed, rather than in the week it expires.

If you want examples of individual messages (what a donor appeal, a thank-you, an impact update, and a volunteer recruitment text each look like when written well), our guide to SMS marketing for nonprofits and churches covers donor, congregation, and volunteer messaging with examples you can adapt, so you do not have to start from a blank message.

Two kinds of messages

Donor communication is not the same thing as a fundraising solicitation.

Every text your organization sends falls into one of two categories, and the balance between them determines whether people stay on your list through the year.

• Solicitation. This is any message whose purpose is to raise money, such as an appeal, a matching-gift message, a follow-up, a pledge reminder, or a year-end deadline. These messages are useful and necessary, and they are the only kind most organizations ever send by text.
• Communication and stewardship. These include the receipt confirmation, a thank-you sent on the day of the gift, the photo from the build site, the note that the program you funded reopened Monday, the shift reminder, and the closure alert. These messages carry no request for money, and often there is nothing to click.

A practical test is to review everything the number has sent in the last six months and count how many messages asked for something. When every text is an appeal, people learn that a message from this number means a request for money, and they mute or block it. When an organization sends four useful messages for every appeal, people continue to read the appeals.

This distinction also matters for compliance. The consent someone gave, and the wording they agreed to, determine what you can send them. A person who opted in for "service reminders and closures" did not opt in for a capital campaign appeal. Your counsel can tell you where the legal line is, but the practical rule is simpler and stricter, which is to send people only what they signed up for. This approach also keeps opt-out and complaint rates low enough that the carriers continue to deliver your messages, so it has a business benefit as well as an ethical one.

Few organizations use texting to thank donors, although it works unusually well for that purpose. A gift receipt belongs in email. A thank-you sent forty minutes after the gift, from a person and with no link in it, belongs in a text, and it is the least expensive way a development office can keep donors giving. At $0.06 a message, thanking every donor who gave in December costs less than the postage on a single mailing to the same donors.

Congregations

Church texting: service times, closures, prayer chains, and giving.

A church works to a weekly schedule, which shapes how it uses texting. Most of its messages are not about fundraising. They carry information the congregation needs before Sunday.

• Closures and schedule changes. For many churches, this message alone justifies the account. When an ice storm hits at 5 a.m. and the service is canceled, one message at 6 keeps people from driving in for nothing. This is the one case where an emergency message outside normal hours is appropriate, and it should be rare enough that people trust it when it arrives.
• Service and holiday reminders. Christmas Eve times, a Holy Week schedule, a special service at a different building. Send these on Thursday, not Saturday night.
• Small groups and ministries. Give each group a tagged sub-list, so the men's breakfast reminder does not reach the whole membership roll. Sub-lists help keep people on the church list instead of muting it.
• Prayer chains. Prayer chains are one of the best uses of texting, and they also need the most care.
• Tithing and pledge reminders. These include a giving link on the first of the month, a pledge follow-up in the fall, and an end-of-year note about the giving deadline. The same rule applies as for any nonprofit: people respond better to a request for money when it is not the only kind of message the number sends.

Prayer chains need this care because a prayer request often describes someone's medical situation, family crisis, or job loss. Sending that to a few hundred phones discloses private information, whether or not anyone intended it. Two habits prevent this. Keep the prayer chain as its own opt-in list rather than texting everyone on the roll, and send nothing without the person's permission, using only the detail they chose to share. A line such as "Please pray for the Kim family this week" belongs in a text, but a diagnosis does not, unless the family asked for it to be shared.

Churches with several sites, or with a separate school or food pantry, usually want a separate number for each at $5 a month. The congregation recognizes the church number, the pantry has its own number, and neither list receives the other's messages.

Common mistakes

What nonprofits get wrong with texting.

Almost none of these are software problems, so a better platform will not fix them. They are decisions, and each one can be reversed.

• Texting a list that never opted in. This includes a purchased list, a partner's list, or donor records from 2014. It is the fastest way to turn an inexpensive channel into an expensive problem, and it is the one mistake on this page with legal consequences.
• Over-asking. Six appeals in November from an organization that sent nothing in July will wear out a list. Most people lose patience by about the third message and stop reading before the one that matters.
• One list for everyone. This is how volunteers end up receiving capital campaign appeals and major donors receive shift requests. If you tag contacts when you import them, you avoid the problem.
• Only sending in December. A number that sends nothing for eleven months is unfamiliar when it returns, and people ignore or report unfamiliar numbers.
• Writing long messages. Long texts are split into segments, and each segment bills as a message. The composer counts segments as you type, with 160 characters in the first and 153 in each one after that. A three-segment text is usually trying to say too many things, and cutting it to one segment saves money and is easier to read.
• Using MMS by default. An image message uses 3 message credits, so it costs three times as much as a plain text. It is worth the cost for a photo from the build site, but not for a logo nobody needed to see.
• Nobody watching replies. A message to a donor list produces answers, corrections, and questions within minutes, and if no one reads them, a conversation can become a complaint.
• Two asks in one message. A text that asks people both to give and to volunteer in the same 160 characters usually gets neither response.

All of these mistakes have the same cause. Texting fails when an organization uses it as a cheaper way to broadcast appeals, and it works when it is used to send one useful fact to one person at the moment they can act on it.

Afterward

What to do with the list after the campaign ends.

The most expensive habit in nonprofit data is letting a list built for one campaign go unused and then rebuilding it from scratch the next year. Do four things in the week after a giving day or an appeal closes:

• Send the thank-you, then send the result. The thank-you goes to everyone who gave, in the same week. The result ("we finished at $41,200, here is what it funds") goes to everyone on the list, including the people who did not give. Many of them are next year's donors, and this is the only message all year that asks them for nothing.
• Export everything. Export the message history, consent records, opt-outs, delivery rates, and per-campaign cost as a CSV file. These records supply the board packet and the annual report figures, and they are the record you will want if a complaint ever arrives.
• Keep the opt-out list permanently. The opt-out list (also called a suppression list) is worth more than the contact list. If someone who opted out last December receives a text again this December, expect a complaint. Opt-outs stay flagged on the account and are removed from every future send automatically. This is the behavior you want, and you should never work around it.
• Keep the number active. Roughly once a month, send something that is not a request for money, such as a program update, a volunteer opportunity, or a photo. On pay-as-you-go, a monthly message with no request to 2,000 people costs about $120 per send, or about $1,440 a year, and about $110 per send on the Basic plan. It is still one of the least expensive donor retention line items in the budget.

One caution applies to organizational change. If the organization changes through a merger, a new fiscal sponsor, a chapter joining a national organization, or a program becoming its own 501(c)(3), you need to revisit consent. Consent given to the organization people knew does not automatically transfer to the one that now holds the list. Treat it as a new program and ask for opt-in again, which is slower but considerably less expensive than the alternative.

Recurring stewardship (the thank-you sequence, the monthly message with no request, and the pledge reminder cycle) is worth setting up once so that it runs on its own, rather than rebuilding it every quarter. That is what text message automation handles.