IF SMS TEXT MESSAGING WORKED FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA, IT CAN WORK FOR YOU AS WELL

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2 Whether you are the president or executive in a company, a charity organisation, school board or even a country, bulk SMS mobile messaging can help you to reach out to your stakeholder community and make you and your organisation more accessible. IF SMS TEXT MESSAGING WORKED FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA, IT CAN WORK FOR YOU AS WELL Bulk SMS recently found a new and dynamic application in the political arena, with US President Obama s example of the Mobile Town Hall Without Borders. In an endeavour to increase communication around the world, President Obama scheduled a trip to Africa, visting Egypt and Ghana, with the intention of increasing the opportunities for dialogue between the US and Muslim countries. The US Department of State with Clickatell s assistance delivered US President Barrack Obama s Cairo address via SMS to mobile phones all over the world. This mobile text messaging campaign was also offered in multiple languages English, Persian, Urdu, and Arabic. In order to disseminate the information in this innovative messaging campaign, Clickatell and the US Department of State first created an enrolment form at where people could register if they wanted to receive SMS message highlights from President Obama s speeches in Cairo, Egypt on June 4, 2009 and in Accra, Ghana on July 11, Unique mobile routing profiles, which utilised Clickatell s existing infrastructure of 800 mobile operators in over 220 countries, were set up specifically for this event. The campaign didn t stop there; it went much further than merely translating and distributing President Obama s speeches to all corners of the world. The mobile messaging campaign was tasked with opening up essential two-way communication between a global audience and the US Department of State, which it achieved by enabling the text message recipients to respond via SMS to the US President s speech and fulfil its goal of creating a "Mobile Town Hall without borders" through open two-way mobile communication. Once of the many benefits of an SMS text message campaign is immediacy comments could be sent back by message recipients and received by the US Department of State instantaneously. The SMS-reply messages from enrolled participants, were first quickly moderated and then posted onto a page on the website of the US Department of State, allowing both the US Government and the campaign audience to view the various opinions about President Obama s visit and the speeches. Copyright 2009 Clickatell 2

3 More responses from people all over the world who received speech highlights can be found at: "Thanks for the fantastic quotes from Obama mesmerizing speech " Egypt "Thank you so much Mr. President, this is the greatest speech I have ever heard it is very inspiring, he was reaching out and we should not fail him, the speech make my tears fall, thank you." Saudi Arabia "Good evening! Thanks for an sms of Obama speech. In my opinion its good speech if he will take it into action, especial to solve the problems of the Middle-East." Tanzania "I appreciate Mr. President s support to the dialogue among communities. It is an effective way to solve the problems including Palestine and Kashmir and bring peace in the world." Pakistan Copyright 2009 Clickatell 3

4 THE LESSONS LEARNT FROM PRESIDENT OBAMA S SMS TEXT MESSAGING CAMPAIGN CAN BE APPLIED BY YOU NOW In your community or organisation, SMS could effectively enable you to reach and receive comments from the people who you depend upon for votes, comments, decisions, resources or team work. While President Obama s Mobile Town Hall without borders was a political application of mobile messaging, there are many other important places where a virtual mobile meeting place would be highly advantageous: not least of all for companies, NGOs, schools, associations and local media. By using two-way SMS, you can contact people about an important issue or proposal, and receive immediate responses keeping you in touch and helping to build your community and your leadership profile. Specific lessons learned from the success of the Obama campaign that you can replicate in your organisation: 1. Clear campaign objectives The objectives of the communication must be clearly established. Mobile messaging is particularly effective at transmitting simple communication to almost anywhere in the world in a personal and cost-effective manner. It also enables the ability for the receiver to engage with the sender, by replying to his message, no matter where in the world they are. The Department of State wanted to improve relations with the populations of predominantly Muslim countries by distributing President Obama s speeches in near-real time to ordinary members of the population of those countries, without the interpretation of intermediaries in the press, radio or TV broadcast media. It had to be done costeffectively, be country-agnostic and come across as a personal message from the president of the United States, directly to the recipient. Simarily, the campaign had to enable the message recipients to respond to the messages, in order to more accurately gauge the sentiment to the USA and the message, on the ground in these countries. 2. Incentivise a tactical team for success The creation of a team tasked with doing whatever is necessary to make sure that the messaging campaign is a success, ensures coordination of effort behind a shared objective and flexibility around the implementation approach and necessary tactical responses during the campaign. Dipping a toe in the water and hoping for success will guarantee either complete Copyright 2009 Clickatell 4

5 failure or inadequate data to support a decision on whether or not the campaign was successful. This approach is particularly important when considering that this will be a new initiative for both your organisation and the intended recipients, when everything will be a learning experience and things will not go off without incident. In the case of the Obama SMS campaign, the tactical team consisted of Clickatell and US Department of State representatives, who worked very closely to design and execute the messaging campaign. It s scope and tactical specifics underwent many revisions, but achieved the campaign objectives and appeared to be flawless in execution. 3. Take advantage of the novelty The applications of contacting people with an expected, relevant message on a personal mobile device, are countless. Doing any kind of mobile messaging campaign now, still has the added benefit of novelty, which creates additional public awareness and higher response rates. The Obama team realised that getting the every-day public involved via mobile SMS alerts and 2-way text message communications had never before been tried. Suddenly, there was a new option available for people to particiate in a Town Hall meeting 'without borders' - e.g. - wherever they were at they could be involved in the meetings and this novelty had a significant impact on response and signup rates. 4. Create a distribution list Marketing the mobile event is essential to create awareness of the mobile messaging campaign, including the subject matter, where to sign-up or enroll, when messages will be sent and later, where & how people can make and see their public comments. People can be added to the distribution list by either responding to a shortcode, or using an Online enrolment form. If you don t have a significantly large enough list of message recipients, they are not clear on the purpose of the messages that they ll be receiving, when they should expect to receive them and are aware that they can respond to the messages, then campaign success becomes increasingly unlikely. Most importantly, don t be tempted to extend your reach by sending unsolicited mobile messages. The Obama service was preceded by major press activity announcing the campaign. Links to the Online enrolment web page at were placed on the websites of the US Embassies around the world and there was also use of 'new media' to promote the service (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and as a consequence, a significant distribution list was created. Copyright 2009 Clickatell 5

6 5. Messages should be to the point SMS only allows for 160 character input and so the message copy must be crisp and clear. Message frequency should be appropriate to the campaign, whether it be every 5 or 10 minutes, once a day or once a week. The Obama campaign sent out 10 standard length SMS text messages covering the most important exceprts from the speeches, while the speeches were taking place. It took a lot of effort to agree on the excerpts that made the most important points in the speeches, but this made consumption of the content much easier for recipients. 6. Two-way communication The best of the new social media enable two-way communication with community members. Two-way messaging, or the ability to respond to a message, brings this capability to mobile media as well. Two-way messaging was enabled for the Obama campaigns, so that message recipients could respond to messages with their comments and these were then posted on the same website at html. START PLANNING YOUR SIMPLE MOBILE TOWN HALL MEETING NOW Signup for a Communicator account. Select the two-way messaging option on your Communicator account. Build your distribution list by advertising your Town Hall Meeting and your two-way number to your intended audience. Upload your distribution list in csv (comma-separated value) format. To add a list of multiple contacts, you will need to create a CSV file in MS Excel with the required headers (FName, mobile number, etc) and save it as a CSV file. You can later use the data in the uploaded distribution list to populate the custom fields when composing a reply message. For example, Hi #FName#, thank you for your response becomes Hi Anne, thank you for your response. Break your message into manageable parts. For instance, you could write 5 to 10, 160 character messages around a particular theme, which you will send out to your distribution list. Now determine your message frequency: will it be one every day for 5-10 days, one every hour, or one every 5 minutes? The frequency of your message will be determined by the nature of the content and the intended audience. Copyright 2009 Clickatell 6

7 Respond. An essential contributor to your campaign success is for people to know that you have taken their comments seriously. Firstly, set up an automated response that immediately thanks subscribers for their comments (you can use the custom fields from your address book to personalise this). The second way, which can be used in conjunction with the first, is to publish the audience s comments and, if it makes sense to do so, respond to those comments whether on a website, store poster or in a community newspaper. In this way, you can keep an ongoing conversation with your community or organisation members keeping in touch with their concerns and communicating your responses to them in an efficient and personalised manner. On the other hand, if you are a large organisation that anticipates sending more than 500,000 messages and have more specific requirements, then we ll be able to assist you with a fully managed, custom solution, including: Building & managing a custom branded online enrollment website & maintaining a database of mobile campaign opt-in subscribers. Language translation templates in multiple languages and confirmation delivery to confirmed campaign subscribers and opt-outs Mobile messaging testing across target countries including use of client-supplied mobile phone numbers to be used in country-specific message delivery testing & verification of service delivery 2-way short code and long-number procurement and set-up to receive feedback from campaign subscribers posted in standard reporting that is made available online and directly accessible by the organisation and it s audience pre-, during- and post- the messaging campaign. Campaign professional advisory services for set-up, marketing and post mortem analysis For Enterprise enquiries, please contact Ben Brieger on +1 (800) or ben.brieger@clickatell.com. Clickatell bulk SMS is one of the easiest and cost effective ways to quickly reach the people in your organisation, school or community with the right message. Get started with your mobile town hall meeting now! Copyright 2009 Clickatell 7