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Northampton Borough Council cuts communication costs with SMS

Northampton Borough Council?s Housing Department has seen an increased response from consumers since it switched to SMS, cutting 33 percent of its communication costs.

The company had partnered with Mobisoft Corp. to use its SMS service because traditional communications such as leaflets, posters and letters were not only costly and time consuming, but were not gaining significant responses or awareness. The partnership was to create a mobile texting strategy to engage and serve local customer base more effectively.

?Northampton Council needed to find a way to reduce the cost of interacting with the public, but at the same time improve the response rates they were seeing,? said Dan Metcalfe, CEO at Mobisoft Corp., Surrey, Britain.

?Mobisoft was convinced that the strategy that would provide the results required was by utilizing SMS,? he said. ?After the very first campaign Northampton realized that the results were significantly better, while providing a 33 percent reduction in normal marketing costs via post.?

Northampton?s Housing Department manages more than 12,200 council homes.

SMS service
Mobisoft recommended its text service based on an Ofcom survey that found that 97.5 percent of text messages are opened within five seconds.

Additionally, the study found that mobile devices were used by 86 percent of the population.

Mobisoft?s Campaign Manager and Mobile Site Builder services are enabling significant cost savings, the company claims. With the service, there is nothing to install and everything is access via a Web console.

The Campaign Manager lets Northampton engage with consumers immediately at the touch of a button.

?A recent study by Ofcom cemented that a mobile strategy was the way to go,? Mr. Metcalfe said. ?The council can now reach more people, more of the time, at less cost and achieve higher response rates.

?The survey found that 97.5 percent of text messages are opened within five seconds and that mobile devices were used by 86 percent of the population,? he said. ?This makes mobile an ideal platform to interact with your target audience on.?

Mobile results
Northampton claims that it saw results and improvements immediately when it began using SMS.

The company previously had a Young Voices Project campaign that was promoted via a publication aimed to get volunteers.

According to the company, the publication was issued to 13,000 people, resulting in just one volunteer.

When Northampton used SMS, a message was sent to 1,640 people. The company received responses from 26 people interested in becoming a volunteer.
 
?It has been simply overwhelming the responses that the council has seen from the public ? the users and members of the public have embraced the technology from the start,? Mr. Metcalfe said. ?They prefer using mobile to any other medium and now feel that communication from the council is more personal, interactive and useable.

?It is also a big step-change for Northampton who is now more up-to-date with the technologies people know and use on a daily basis ? mobile,? he said.