Local Council - Mobile Marketing Case Study

Local Councils are continually looking for better ways to engage with residents. Given the high penetration of mobile phones amongst the UK population, it was a natural choice for Crewe and Nantwich Borough Council (CNBC) to want to allow residents to interact with them via SMS.

"At the moment anybody who wants to contact the Council can either phone us, write to us, send us a fax, e-mail us or call in person to any of the Council offices." said Alan Warburton, Assistant Chief Executive (Democratic Services and Communications). "We believe that offering a text messaging service will open up opportunities for people to have a more instant form of contact with us."

CNBC is also continually striving to engage with the youth population of the Borough and again mobile was the obvious choice.

Councillor Howard Curran, Portfolio Holder for Local Activities said "Young people feature high up in our priorities, and we are fully expecting the new text messaging service to be a successful way of involving them in our future plans for introducing activities that they really want and need".

Once the decision had been formally agreed, CNBC wanted to be able to rollout services as quickly as possible and with maximum flexibility to add new services and tailor existing ones as necessary.

Sign-Up.to was chosen because it gave CNBC total control over their mobile services, was highly cost effective and enabled the services to be enabled the same day.

Using Sign-Up.to, a text in service which enables local resident to send in comments and complaints by SMS has been established. Residents text in to a special shortcode and their message is emailed to the council help desk. The council can then reply by SMS or phone call.

In addition, a youth promotion was established to promote this year's Local Democracy Week theme of "Tomorrow's Voters Today". The youth population of the Borough was invited to vote by text message on whether the right to vote in elections should be extended to those over 16.

The competition was promoted on local radio, in the local paper and through flyers distributed to schools. A prize of a £150 mobile phone voucher was offered to a randomly selected participant. This enabled CNBC to encourage youth participation and at the same time build a database for future interaction.

The voting promotion was run for 1 week, during which the council could see updated vote statistics in real-time using their Sign-Up.to interface. At the end of the promotion they output a list of all entrants so that they could select a winner. Sign-Up.to automatically prevented multiple votes from the same number. The council can now use the system to establish new SMS voting campaigns whenever they wish.

Using Sign-Up.to's integrated campaign technology youths without a mobile phone could vote using a Sign-Up.to form on the council website.

Crewe and Nantwich Borough Council:
http://www.crewe-nantwich.gov.uk
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