With the explosion in mobile, it’s more important than ever for nonprofits to use text messaging. But sometimes you need the immediacy of a voice call. In addition to texting and ringless voicemail, you can also make phone calls from within the Rally platform.
That kind of personal connection makes for a better customer experience and a successful marketing campaign.
How Do Rally Platform Phone Calls Work?
Let’s be clear that Rally is not a phone call platform. We focus on short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) text messaging. But our calling functionality makes it simple to follow up on a text campaign with voice call.
- When you look at a campaign, you can see back-and-forth text replies (because we encourage conversation).
- At any point you can turn that text message thread into a phone call.
- Rally will connect to any phone (cell phone or landline) and then place the call to your supporter, so they’ll see a call coming from your organization’s phone number (even more effective if you use a contact card).
Why Would You Make a Phone Call?
There are a number of reasons you might follow up with a voice call:
- Coordinating volunteers: Texting is great for sharing details, sending notifications, and answering quick questions, but sometimes you have to talk a volunteer through a more complicated task, and that’s where a phone call is perfect.
- Segmentation: A text message campaign is a great way to share a message and get a response. You can then segment those responses and follow up with those who respond most positively. They might be future volunteers or donors, and what better way to connect than a personal phone call.
- First contact: These days people don’t like to answer their phone, so you could lead with a text message and then follow up with a phone call when it’s more convenient. You could also use a ringless voicemail for the same effect.
- Receive calls: You can also receive calls with the Rally platform. This is also human-centered—you’re texting people and they should be able to text you back and even call you and get somewhere (not just the fast busy signal you’ll get with many text messaging services). Rally can direct those in-bound calls to whatever phone you prefer, whether it’s your front desk or the cell phone of your marketing person. That can be incredibly helpful during an event when you’re not in the office and volunteers are likely to call with questions while they’re driving.
Benefits of Calling
SMS text messaging is a great way to connect, but sometimes you need to go a step further.
- Personal: Perhaps the biggest benefit of calling is making a personal connection. That kind of human interaction leaves a mark. In these days of social media and inhuman messenger apps, personal connection is at a premium. At Rally, we believe in human-centered communication, and that’s why we built phone call functionality into our SMS platform.
- Simplicity: There’s no need to switch tools. You’re already having a conversation with this person, and you’re only a click away from a call. They’re already in your contact list and customer relationship management (CRM) software, so just make the call from here.
- Tracking: Rally logs text messages back and forth with a contact, and phone calls are tracked as well so you have a single record of the various interactions with this contact. You can always look back and see who talked to this contact last time and what they covered.
- Record: You can even record the phone call if you want and save those details and track sentiment for future analysis and sorting.
- Consistent: You’re texting contacts from one phone number, so you should be able to call them from the same number. You can do that with Rally. It also makes it simpler for everybody when you have staff turnover.
- Protect staff: With some tools you’re forced to use staff phone numbers or even personal cell phones. That can be a nightmare for your team. Keep it all in a tool you’re already using.
Get Started
Making and receiving phone calls is another way you can use Rally to connect via text message marketing and beyond. Get started today to see how Rally can work for your nonprofit.
- We offer FAQs, pre-written templates, and we’re willing to do a real-time voice call to talk pricing, workflows, and more to make SMS marketing work for you.
- Our text messaging service allows multimedia, including emojis, GIFs, and video.
- More than a messaging app for mass texting, we also do ringless voicemail, two-way text replies, fundraising thermometers, and more.
