Using SMS to reach out to your membership

One good way to reach out to many of your members and partners in one go is through the use of SMS. One of the value add for CJA partners is the SMS Bulktool that enables one handle the sending of messages to many people quite easy.

Today I was tasked with making a presentation to fellow participants at the CJA ToT workshop in Dar as to how WOUGNET is making use of the SMS Bulktool. We already have a one-year contract through Hivos that provides us access to this tool. The tool is accessible online through http://star.hivos.nl. For a long time, we have needed to use SMS to quickly pass on messages to our members. During this year's Annual Members Meeting (AMM), even those members with ready internet access indicated their preferences to receive quick updates through SMS.

SMS Bulktool provides one the opportunity to load a set of numbers into an online database. For each phone number, one can provide the name of the person, organisation, region, gender, age and any two other types of information they would like to include about the people in their organisation. Once the database is established, one can select to whom they wish a particular message to be sent. For example, messages can be sent to all in the database, sent to only the Females in the database, or sent to a particular age group. It is a quite simple and flexible tool to use.

WOUGNET has used the tool in three primary ways:

(1) we have conducted SMS campaigns on topical issues, where subscribers to the campaign have received daily messages related to the them. For example, we have run a campaign around the 16-days of Activism against Gender Based Violence and we have also supported one of our members, EASSI, to conduct a campaign around Women's Day and the Girl-Child in Kenya. Both campaigns have also been posted to the WOUGNET blog.

(2) we have sent messages to update our members on various issues, e.g., training available at the Secretariat, workshops, etc.

(3) we have used the tool to provide updates to participants for an international event, Idlelo3, including quick tips on travel for the workshop, visa requirements, etc.

The benefits of the tool in all case is to enable us reach out widely at only the cost for accessing the internet. There is a cost for members to correspond to us through the tool - and this is at the price of an internationally-bound SMS since the Bulktool is hosted in the Netherlands. Even then, we have provided our members with a local number in Uganda to which they can send their contributions or inquiries.

We have been testing the tool for about six months now, and in general, I would say the technology is not really the main issue now that we have got the understanding of how it works. The challenge is how best to take advantage of this tool in our information sharing and in our advocacy activities. So we certainly look forward to the opportunity to learn and share from the experiences from others making use of this tool - or other similar tools.