Platforms for Community Engagement: Build Connection with a Community Text App
The world of SMS messaging services has revolved around business texting since its inception, for good reason. Automated mast texts are a great way to reach a large audience and targeted, well-crafted SMS campaigns enjoy a high rate of engagement. In fact, 86% of small businesses using SMS say it offers a higher rate of customer engagement compared to email and other marketing initiatives and successful business SMS campaigns achieve a 70% conversion rate on average.
Thanks to the great success of SMS marketing, business texting isn’t just for businesses anymore. These text messaging services are now being harnessed and reimagined to create better platforms for community engagement.
The Best Community Platforms for Connection
“Community” is an incredibly broad term – one person’s definition of community may vary significantly from another’s. The beauty of communities is that they come in all shapes, sizes, forms, and functions, built around the unique wants and needs of their community members. From municipal neighborhoods, HOAs, and community associations, to nonprofit groups, congregations, and sports teams, every type of community needs an efficient platform on which to communicate.
Today, the best place to reach your community members is on their smartphones. Likewise, the best community building apps are SMS messaging services that have taken business texting to the next level to better connect communities of all kinds.
A Community Text App in Action
There are virtually an unlimited number of instances and circumstances in which community texting can be a powerful tool to inform, connect and encourage community engagement. Unique business texting features offered by community texting apps, such as tags, SMS surveys, groups, two-way SMS, and Teamtext, provide robust community management and communication capabilities to reach people where they are – on their phones.
The following are just a handful of common situations in which a community texting app or platform makes communication easy, immediate, and seamlessly interactive when community feedback is important.
Community Texting for Municipalities
Bulk SMS: It’s construction season again and the main artery in front of the community center will be down to one lane on and off throughout the summer, causing unavoidable traffic delays and/or impeding the center’s main entrance. Meanwhile, the community center has a full slate of summer programs and kids’ camps all summer long.
Using bulk SMS, the municipality can keep local residents and active community center members up-to-date and fully informed on all street closures, construction updates, alternate routes, and anything else related to the summer-long road construction.
SMS Surveys: A generous donor has given the city a two-acre plot of undeveloped land and the municipality wants community input on what to do with the land. To encourage community engagement and feedback, it sends out an SMS survey asking for local residents’ votes and/or ideas for what to do with the plot.
Compared to the most recent city council meeting with 50 resident participants, the 5,000 responses to the SMS survey give the municipality a more representative picture of what the city’s residents truly envision for the space.
Two-Way SMS for HOAs & Community Associations
Two-Way SMS: You’re preparing for next month’s HOA meeting and need your members’ agenda requests. Instead of sending out a general email that rarely gets a response or taking the time to call each member individually, you send out a personalized two-way SMS to all HOA members with the meeting date and time and include a brief request for any important agenda items they’d like to discuss. You receive a handful of responses and build the upcoming meeting’s agenda around your members’ concerns.
Tags & Teamtext for Parks & Recreation
SMS Contact Tags: Parks and Recreation is hosting a soccer tournament and a softball tournament on the same weekend across three different city parks. The fields are allocated and the schedule is full… And a freak thunderstorm with significant lightning strikes blows in with no warning.
With bulk SMS you send out a mass text to all 40 teams announcing a two-hour weather delay, which completely upends the carefully-devised field schedule. Your team starts problem-solving to get the schedule fixed and the teams notified. Thanks to tags, you’re able to send separate two-way SMS to the soccer teams and the softball teams, the referees and the umpires, field maintenance workers and individual coaches quickly and easily, and respond to coaches’ concerns all in real time.
Community Texting Made Simple
The functionality, flexibility and immediacy of community texting make SMS the best platform for community engagement and the simplest way to keep community-wide communication flowing. While the above are just some examples of how these text messaging service features (and others not mentioned), it’s easy to see how business texting can be used in countless ways for all types of community communication.