How to Use SMS to Increase Alumni Event Attendance

It’s a powerful thing when alumni give back to your school, whether they donate to fundraisers, volunteer to mentor students, or speak at a career fair. Alumni are a vital part of your school community, but their busy lives can prevent them from staying involved.

 To engage former students and motivate them to attend your events, you need to meet them where they are—on their phones.

According to Double the Donation’s alumni giving statistics, 75% of alumni said they would engage more with their school if their options were mobile-friendly. Think virtual or hybrid events, accessible websites, and mobile-first messaging.

In this post, we’ll focus on engaging alumni via SMS, or text messaging. Follow these steps to tap into the power of SMS and boost attendance for your next alumni event.

1. Ask alumni to opt in.

Before you start texting alumni, make sure you review and understand SMS laws and regulations. Any mobile messages sent from an application (known as Application to Person, or A2P messaging) must comply with laws like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which requires recipients to opt in before you text them.

 This means that if you use a school texting app, you need to collect opt-ins. Ideally, you’ll build an opt-in list well before your fundraising event, but it’s never too late to start.

To get your alumni’s consent to text them, add a simple checkbox to important forms on your school or alumni website, such as donation and event registration forms. Then, email alumni about this new opportunity to engage with your school. Explain why they should sign up for your texts—to get quicker updates, hear about important news first, and easily stay connected.

2. Send personalized invitations and reminders.

Once you have a growing opt-in list, start drafting a variety of different messages to send. Each message should be 160 characters or fewer to align with text marketing best practices, and they should include clear calls to action.

To boost event attendance, plan out text messages like:

• Announcements and invitations: Texts are a great way to announce your event and personally invite alumni to attend. While you can’t include every detail in a short text message, you can include links to website pages with more information.
• Reminders to register: Segment your alumni based on their registration status. Then, send targeted reminders to those who haven’t registered yet. Link directly to your online registration form so they can sign up easily.
• Texts to build excitement: Send short, fun messages to keep alumni invested in your event and inspire more registrations. For example, you might tease a few high-value auction items ahead of your alumni gala.

Personalize these messages for maximum success. This way, you’ll grab potential guests’ attention and remind them that you value them as individuals. Use SMS automation tools to send the right messages at the right time, auto-populate texts with first names and engagement details, and easily send tailored messages to different alumni segments.

3. Incorporate multimedia.

Text messages aren’t limited to SMS. With MMS (multimedia messaging service), you can send several types of media, such as images, videos, GIFs, audio, and even PDF files in addition to plain text.

Any of these additions can make your event text messages more engaging and helpful for alumni. For instance, you might use MMS to:

• Include an event flyer in announcements to boost ticket sales.
• Share behind-the-scenes photos of your event setup or venue.
• Create a countdown GIF to generate excitement a few days before the event.
• Send a short thank-you video from your staff to thank registered guests.
• Draw attention to important event details with a graphic.
• Share a class photo to bring back memories ahead of an alumni reunion.

Whenever you include multimedia in a text message, pay attention to the size of the files you want to send. According to Mogli’s MMS marketing guide, large file sizes can cause slower load times and deliverability issues. Fortunately, you can avoid this by compressing files and limiting video length; Mogli recommends keeping them under 300KB and within 15-30 seconds.

4. Share important information via text.

Text messages are much more reliable than email or social media for getting recipients to read messages immediately. In fact, 90% of text messages are read within just three minutes, making SMS the perfect channel for communicating key details that you don’t want alumni to miss.

As you get closer to the event date, take advantage of text messages’ speed and high open rates to share important or time-sensitive information, such as:

• Logistics, like specific time and location details
• Any last-minute changes
• Links to download your event mobile app
• Time-sensitive details about donating during the event
• Event check-in and check-out information
• Updates during the event itself

Quickly sharing this information over text will help you keep registered guests informed and increase the likelihood that they attend. You’ll also provide guests with a more positive event experience overall, which can encourage them to attend similar events in the future.

5. Learn from your engagement metrics.

Finally, track engagement with your messages throughout the event promotion period and the event itself.

Texting software makes it easy to monitor metrics like open, click-through, response, and conversion rates. This data, along with event attendance rates and fundraising totals, indicates how successful your texts were at getting donors’ attention and communicating the value of your event.

After your event, analyze this data to determine which content drove the most action, whether sign-ups, donations, responses, or other interactions. Then, combine this information with alumni giving results to evaluate SMS’s role in your event’s success and identify ways to improve your strategy next time.

SMS is an impactful, accessible marketing channel that any school can leverage to improve its events. But just like any other marketing effort, your success largely depends on how well you can appeal to your unique audience. Center alumni in all your event text messages as you try out these strategies, and you’ll build a strong foundation for engagement.