Texting in a Pandemic: How Clients Are Reaching Out Around Covid-19
When a text message is a lifeline
How GroundSource texting is keeping communities safer.
Text messages are getting critical info to communities across the country now.
As the world adjusts to the reality of life in a pandemic, your audiences and communities need you now more than ever to provide quality, timely information, and—just as crucially—to listen.
Allowing them to text your news organization like they do their family and friends offers a direct channel to someone they trust—and a way to stay in touch that’s simple, intimate, and personal.
We’re working across the country with major newspapers, TV stations, public media, and digital news organizations from Los Angeles to New York; Oklahoma to Idaho to rapidly develop simple and effective ways to reach their communities on their phones and open up a two-way conversation regarding COVID-19.
News organizations are using GroundSource SMS and voice to:
Gather questions and build COVID-19 FAQ’s
Send out daily updates about COVID-19
Connect communities with social services
Understand the needs of the community
Source stories at a time of social distancing
Here are some examples:
Non-profit education news outlet Chalkbeat is using GroundSource to help parents in Memphis find where they can get free meals — and in the process is building a community of parents they can continue to stay in touch with.
Mississippi Today has created a COVID-19 texting newsletter, inviting people to sign up using a GroundSource-powered form on their site. More than 2,500 people have signed up to receive and reply to texts—a sizeable audience to alert with the latest news, and a powerful source network to inform reporting.
Los Angeles public radio station KPCC has built an FAQ, the No Panic Guide to COVID-19, by gathering and answering questions via text message. KPCC also offers kids the chance to call into a voice mail line and hear Oscar the Grouch and Grover offer tips for staying healthy and happy whil staying at home and maintaining social distancing. The phone line has received more than 6,000 calls, and led to a blog post on a well-read parenting blog and this Lifehacker piece.
Detroit TV station WDIV-TV built a COVID-19 texting exchange, offering frequent news updates as well as the opportunity to text back and share a question or a story. They produced a poignant piece on the small and big things people were missing during the pandemic with responses from 129 texters.
Those are just a few of the many examples of news organizations engaging audiences using GroundSource texting and voice to engage their audiences. We are also working on projects to convert texters into donors, to reach out to isolated and rural communities, to create audio diaries, and more.
If you want to discuss ideas you have for using texting and voice, you can sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with Andrew Haeg using this link.
No matter your budget, your reach, or your staff size, we are here to help your organization be there where and when your audiences and communities need you most. If you are resource-strapped, that’s OK, just reach out and let us know what your needs are and we’ll make something work. Book time with us here.
Through our platform, training and ongoing support—informed by decades of journalism and engagement experience—we will help you:
Set up a dedicated phone number for your audiences and communities to text you
Create automated two-way conversations to provide news updates that feel like 1:1 conversations
Develop strategies for reaching out to your community online, on the air, in person and in print.
Cultivate a feed of community questions and on-the-ground perspectives to guide your coverage (including images, GIF’s, videos, and voice memos)
Build ongoing texting exchanges with 95+ percent open rates, 10-20 percent response rates, and 90+ percent retention rates
Segment and build lists of texters based on their questions, geography, etc.
Integrate texting with enterprise platforms (MailChimp, SalesForce, Stripe, etc)
We have been working for years to lower the barriers to engagement and help organizations become more responsive to, and reflective of, the needs of their communities. That work is even more important and urgent right now. Please reach out. We’re here to help.