It’s been a rough few years for food banks, with supply chain disruptions, increased demand, and unpredictable donations. We get it. We love nonprofits and it's hard to watch them struggle. But a marketing shift to mobile might be the way to reach people where they’re at, connect, and boost your fundraising efforts.

Short message service (SMS) text messaging is an incredibly effective way to reach people. It’s the preferred form of mobile communication today, from friends and family to doctors’ offices and brands you love. 

Why not nonprofits? Texting can fight hunger too. 

We’ll explore five ways your food bank can use SMS campaigns to boost donations and connect with your supporters. We’ll also look at why you should use text message marketing in the first place.

Why Text Message Marketing?

With increased demand and dropping donations, your nonprofit organization needs a boost. It’s critical for your food bank to find a communication channel that gets a response.

That’s text messaging. Here’s why:

• Reach people where they’re at: 97% of American professionals are within 3 feet of their mobile device 24 hours a day. They look at their cell phone 344 times a day. There’s no better way to reach a captive audience.

• Real responses: Text messaging stats are amazing—a 98% open rate (versus 25% for email) and a 48% response rate (versus 2-4% for email). Your ‘fight hunger’ campaign will be seen and get a response.

• Bigger donations: Texting also brings in larger average donations—$135 for texting (versus $45 for email). And that’s just the industry average—we saw average donation amounts topping $600 on our platform last year.

Building a text message channel can help you reverse that donation drop and build relationships with new donors.

Example: The Denver Rescue Mission uses text-to-donate for their turkey drive and it helps with acquisition—“New people, new supporters, new people who want to learn about the Mission,” said Senior Director of Marketing and Communications Alexxa Gagner.

5 Ways Food Banks Can Use Text Messaging

Food banks do vital work to provide basic needs and keep families fed. So let’s look at just five ways text messaging can help food banks mobilize people and accomplish their mission:

1. Boost Fundraising With Text to Give

The best way to boost donations? Simple, quick, and easy fundraising. It doesn’t get any simpler than your CEO urging people to ‘text FOOD to 24365’ during a media interview. Easy to remember and no clunky URL.

You want the giving process to be smooth and slick with no roadblocks or hangups. That’s what text-to-give fundraising offers:

• Starts with a simple keyword and shortcode that gets around clunky URLs and works great in interviews, videos, bumper stickers or anywhere you can’t have a clickable link.
• Works with your existing donation platform, so you can use your current donation page and don’t have to redo anything.
• Allows for follow ups when they don’t donate and ongoing communication when they do.

Example: For Darryl Carnley with My360Project, text-to-give offers the quickest path from ‘what do you do’ to a $100 donation.

When people are hungry you can’t rely on fickle donation strategies. Make it quick and easy! 

2. Better Response Than Social Media

Social media is great for communicating with a broad audience. It’s a good way to introduce your food bank to the community. Social proof works in your favor as your supporters like and share your content, increasingly the likelihood potential new supporters will engage. 

Tip: That’s why we offer pre-made social media graphics for food banks.

But social media is just the beginning of engagement. It’s a broad approach that often misses the mark because your supporters don’t always see your content. You can thank the algorithms social media companies use, which often mean your followers don’t see your posts (unless you’re willing to pay for advertising). The rules can also change unexpectedly, where something that worked before is suddenly floundering.

Text messaging can be a solution to this problem. Starting a text list gives you a direct line to your most dedicated supporters. Thanks to better open and response rates, you’ll get results.

Insight: Your text list will likely be smaller in number than your following on social media platforms, but it will have more impact.

It’s vital for nonprofit food banks to build relationships with their supporters. That requires communication that always gets through. Social media posts are often blocked by the algorithm. Emails are rarely opened. Direct mail can get, well, lost in the mail. 

But with text messaging’s 98% open rate—yes, 98%!—your supporters will see your messages.

3. Recruiting and Coordinating Volunteers

We love to help nonprofits rally people, and text messaging can be ideal for that. Because you get a better response, it’s the ideal mobilization tool.

When you have an unexpected shipment or a volunteer doesn’t show and you need extra help, text messaging can help you bring in more volunteers immediately.

• Send detailed updates with parking tips, maps, and more. Bonus, that info will be on your volunteers’ mobile devices, ready to access when they need it.
• Last-minute updates, changes, and emergency alerts can go out via text—even in the middle of an event—and you can have the peace of mind of knowing you’re reaching your volunteers.
• Share specific and immediate needs—from specific food items you need donated to supplies you’re running out of.

Example: See how the Special Olympics uses texting to mobilize their Polar Plunge volunteers.

4. Emergency Response

In the middle of an emergency, there’s no time to waste. Text alerts can get the word out instantly—no messing with spam folders or social media algorithms.

Tip: The best emergency planning is preparation before an emergency. Have a mobilization plan in place and ready to go.

You never know when disaster can strike—a burst pipe at your distribution center, a fire at your warehouse, or a medical emergency among staff or volunteers. Of course you rely on 911 and dedicated first responders, but when the smoke clears you still have hungry people to feed.

Text messaging can help you mobilize a response, whether it’s volunteers to help move and restock canned goods or a last-minute donation plea to help your nonprofit organization respond to the crisis.

Use it: Our People Mobilizer offers a template and strategy to help you quickly mobilize people in a crisis.

5. Connect With People You Serve

Text messaging can be an ideal way to connect with your clients. Unlike social media, it can be private and direct. Families struggling with hunger are looking for immediate and direct help, not a social media marketing blitz. You can offer immediate answers via text right on their cell phone.

That’s a powerful way to offer hope in the midst of hunger.

And it’s important, because a food bank isn’t a regular business. You’re not interested in a sale. 

“Unlike a for-profit business, you don’t want repeat customers at a food bank," said LaDonna Thornton, an assistant professor at Auburn University, talking about supply chain management.

Instead of sales, you want to feed people. You want to help them through a crisis. You want to offer support and education. That requires building a relationship that goes beyond a simple transaction. 

A medium where you can reach someone via the mobile phone in their pocket is a powerful and effective way to connect.

Tip: Segmented lists can help you keep donors, volunteers, and clients separate. 

How to Get Started

For text messaging to be an effective marketing strategy for your food bank, you need to fully embrace it.

• Create a strategy: What do you want to accomplish? Make sure your goals and tactics align. In other words, if you’re trying to get more donations, your messages should ask for money. If you want more engagement, you need to ask questions that prompt a response. Don’t just tack on another tool, think through your text messaging strategy.
• Get set up: We have all sorts of resources to help you get started. We can help you pick a text-to-give keyword, optimize your donation form, convert email subscribers to text messages, and much more.
• Hit send: The hardest part of getting started is hitting send on your first message. We get it. Launching a new marketing campaign can be scary—but don’t let fear stop you. Trust yourself. It’s a good strategy, and it will pay off in the long run. 
• Keep going: Text messaging isn’t a shiny new tool you can roll out and use once or twice. To be effective, you need to be committed. Yes, engage with a text-to-give campaign, but then keep texting with your new contacts. You want to build relationships and turn one-time supporters into long-time donors.

‍Fighting hunger is a vital mission and Rally can help. Sign up for our playbook now and see how text messaging can boost fundraising for your food bank.

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