Riverdale City Improves Community Engagement with Pidj

Business SMS is an incredibly impactful marketing tool for companies big and small across the country. From retail stores and restaurants to healthcare industries and property management companies, business texting facilitates valuable two-way SMS communication between businesses and their customer bases. While the use of bulk SMS in business-to-consumer communications is growing rapidly, the benefits of using a robust business texting platform extend beyond for-profit businesses and corporations.

The same text messaging software features and tools that help businesses communicate efficiently also help municipalities, local government services and community centers build community engagement by reaching members where they are with the information they need.

But don’t just take our word for it – keep reading to see how Pidj’s business texting platform has been successfully used as a platform for community engagement.

Riverdale City & Pidj Join Forces

Like many public agencies around the country, Riverdale City, Utah, provides a host of community services aimed at enriching the lives of its community members. One of the biggest and most common hurdles community providers face, however, is getting the word out about all of their amazing services and programs. Rich Taylor, Riverdale City’s community services director, kept running into a version of this particular communication hurdle in regard to the open court schedule at the Riverdale Community Center.

The Open Court Solution

Basketball and pickleball are very popular sports at the community center and open court times are coveted. Over the years, Rich has tried everything – making weekly and even monthly schedules to give community members advanced notice, posting schedules to the community center’s website, emailing schedules to all members – all to no avail. His open court schedule communications were falling through the cracks and the community center received numerous calls every day inquiring about open court availability.

It was obvious to Rich that everything he had tried was not working. While his efforts helped in-house staff answer open court schedule questions over the phone, the information just wasn’t reaching the community members who really needed it. So, he decided to ask around and see how other community service directors were communicating with their members. The overwhelming response? Pidj’s text messaging service.

Now, instead of posting to the community center’s website or sending out emails that invariably get lost in overloaded inboxes, Rich uses Pidj’s business texting software to reach court users directly.

First, he creates the open court schedule for the week and easily slides it into a Pidj template, which he then schedules with Timetext to go out via Textcast bulk SMS to a targeted list of people who have signed up to receive the open court schedule and updates via text. Using the Pidj platform for community engagement has made communicating with the center’s members simple, efficient and effective. What’s more, community members can respond to these texts with any questions or concerns and start a two-way SMS conversation with Rich and his team.

It’s a win-win for everyone involved (both on and off the court)!

Serving Seniors a Sense of Community

The basketball and pickleball players at Riverdale City’s Community Center aren’t alone in reaping the benefits of Pidj’s community engagement platform. The patrons of Riverdale’s Senior Center have become hip to mass texting and now rely on Pidj’s two-way SMS feature to save their seats at the lunch table.

Before Pidj, Senior Center Director Miranda Rizzi used to print out a menu for the seniors to take home with them. While this mostly worked, it was easy for seniors to misplace the printed menu and made last-minute changes and updates to the menu come as an unpleasant surprise to the seniors. As Miranda explains it, their older patrons like structure and schedules – they want to know what to expect and like to plan accordingly.

Enter, Pidj.

Now, instead of a printed menu, the senior center texts out the following day’s lunch menu at 2 p.m., and the senior center members have until 8 a.m. the next day to RSVP. Not only does this give the seniors a structure they can depend on, but it also gives the staff a more precise headcount for lunch every day. With their old system, the kitchen staff never knew how much food to prepare because they didn’t know how many diners would show up on any given day. Now the kitchen can plan ahead and prep only what’s needed to feed the hungry seniors.

Miranda has found that Pidj’s community engagement platform comes with an unexpected bonus: it’s created a true connection between the seniors and the center’s staff that wasn’t there before. Thanks to Pidj’s two-way SMS functionality, the seniors don’t just RSVP – they respond with inside jokes and stories, ask questions, make special meal requests and so much more! What was once a simple daily lunch has turned into a community of engaged seniors.