Group Messenger Mobilizes NonProfits with Twilio

June 28, 2012
Written by
Twilio
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If you have ever worked with a nonprofit, campaign, or any other kind of volunteer network, you most likely have run into the fairly common problem of trying to communicate with and assemble your team and subsequently running into a wall of complications, confusion, and general lack of communicative organization.

How to reach all the members of the team network at once? How to get one clear response from all of them (instead of the scrambling confusion that I’ve come to expect from people receiving group messages for the very first time)? Group Messenger is how.

“Some non-profits have looked into integrated group messaging apps, but they are reticent to do it because they are so unstructured and are limited to size. GroupMessenger addresses those issues which are common as group size increases.” said Edward Haber, Founder of Collective Action Inc. 

Thanks to the awesome team of Doers over at Collective Action Inc., Group Messenger launched a little over a month ago and we got the chance to have a quick chat with them about it.

 

What inspired you to build Group Messenger?

Collective Action noticed a need in the industry where companies were missing that one amazing piece of software allowing them to mobilize volunteer networks, SMS tools weren’t cutting it yet, so they decided to do something about it.

“The benefits to an organization are that it provides purposeful, structured messaging. Unlike a lot of other mobile services, there are templated apps that are pre-written and cover all the communication within a group.”

Why Volunteer Networks?

Grassroots non-profits and political campaigns have in common the need to extend the latest in mobile messaging tools to their constituents in order to mobilize and expand their networks of volunteers. It is our opinion this need is not being adequately met by available services. Current offerings miss in two ways: either they are too complex, such as the enterprise-grade top-down mass-blast options by mobile marketers that require scripting. Or else they are too simple and thus completely unstructured.

“We think that it saves an organization a lot of scripting time for a plug-and-play solution for a lot of common advocacy use cases.”

What are some specific features that make Group Messenger unique?

  • Smart Multi-platform – Messages aren’t just limited to text. Each group message can be delivered to email, voice, text, and soon instant message and social networking recipients. Group Messenger doesn’t just send on these various mediums, it also listens and parses responses on any of them automatically.
  • Structured – Group Messenger leads users through purposeful messaging which reduces the risk of idle, inefficient chatter. Responses are validated. Outcomes are automatically aggregated and may be pushed to the group. And the group gets aggregate summary of what happened.
  • Ease of use – There is no huge platform to learn, no page to setup, and message recipients needn’t register to participate.

For a more thorough description, check out this video:

About Collective Action and Group Messenger

Interested in trying it out? Right now each new account comes with 50 Group Messenger message credits, so you can try out the SMS and voice capabilities free. Collective Action, Inc is the company behind Group Messenger, for more information head over to their site and/or follow them on Twitter: @groupmessenger