Save The Children’s most recent petition, to stop the violence in Gaza, had a big difference from usual. It was completely text-based.
Rather than having clip-board wielding volunteers hastling passers-by for signiatures, Save The Children placed ads in newspapers, including The Guardian, Daily Mail and Sunday Times. The ad called on readers to text CEASEFIRE to a number provided. Over three days, metrics showed that 115,000 responses were sent.
Planned by Carat and run by mobile marketing agency Incentivated, the response was good enough that Save The Children sent a follow-up text to respondants: “Save The Children is taking 115k CEASEFIRE requests 2 Downing St @ 3pm today. We need more. Pls ask your friends to txt CEASEFIRE 80 81819”.
From the release:
Adrian Lovett, Save the Children’s Director of Campaigns, said: “This is an unprecedented response and the message from our text campaign is loud and clear – the British public want an end to the bombing in Gaza. A huge number of the British public care what is happening in Gaza and have taken action. Politicians are well aware of those messages and we will continue to ensure their voices are heard. Right now the fighting is still going on and one child dies in Gaza every three hours. Public support can and must make a change.”
What we think?
SMS continues to show it’s strength as the backbone of mobile communications. We are really seeing texts move from one-to-one to being a true mass communication tool, as famously shown in Obama’s text campaign last year. This was a limited test run by Save The Children, but I wonder if we’ll begin to see more and more social camapaigns run by mobile now?
