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Ever wondered how to harness the often annoyingly familiar chirp of someone else?s mobile phone for the benefit of your organisation, asks Adam Wallace?
Well, the first step is to register people to receive your messages and to capture their details.
At the Belfast Festival at Queens we did this for a text campaign for our 2002 festival.

Having a link on your website to take the user through to a text message registration page is essential. Consider carefully the information you want to capture, as this can help to target an audience for a particular show. Another advantage is that you can capture the tastes of your audience, as well as their names and addresses.

Another popular method of registration is to encourage people to send a text message from a mobile to your campaign number. This is an immediate and hassle-free approach; but just like your normal box office number, it is important to get the campaign number tagged on every piece of print your organisations produces ? brochures, pamphlets, tickets and billboards in order to track where the campaign information has been seen. We were able to compare the response to a brochure with the response to an advert by asking for different words to be included as part of the text message to us. One disadvantage of this approach is that you only capture a phone number, though we got around this by holding a competition in which respondents answered a simple question and gave their name and address.

Finally, if you have any volunteers, get teams of them out onto the street to stop passers by and register them there and then! A friendly face explaining what your audience are letting themselves in for, including the fact that they can stop at any time, is invaluable. This method became, for us, the most successful way to build up registrations. You can target college campuses, shopping centres and busy streets - wherever your target audience gathers! Face-to-face campaigning will help build a visual presence for your organisation, as well as capture names and addresses. Using keywords, you can even run a competition amongst your volunteer team and reward the one who gets the most registrations!

Adam Wallace is Audience Development Manager at Belfast Festival at Queens
e: a.j.wallace@qub.ac.uk