Spotlight: Goodwill Southern California Uses Text Marketing For Immediate Reach
Goodwill Southern California (GSC) is a nonprofit organization that serves people with vocational challenges and places them into sustainable employment through programs offered throughout Los 
Angeles (south of Rosecrans), San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Proceeds generated from 81 stores and 46 attended donation centers help support Goodwill Southern California’s mission.
Text Marketing Helps Reach Customers Immediately
Before using text marketing, GSC’s Marketing team promoted the latest news, sales and updates through its social media channels, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. They also collected email addresses at their stores, donation drives and events and included email blasts in all their campaigns. “We are a relatively new department,” said Erica Wedmore, Coordinator of Marketing & Community Relations, “so we are always looking to try something new. We wanted to find a more immediate way to get in touch with our customers.”
Using Text To Drive Store Sales and Donations
GSC decided to try increasing public awareness of upcoming GoodWill SoCal sales and events using text message marketing from TextMarks. In order to reach customers by text, they promoted the call-to-action “Text GOODWILLSOCAL to 37373” on printed posters in all their retail locations, on Point-of-Sale signage, and on the home page of their website. Sending about 4 texts per month, the Goodwill SoCal team has scheduled its text marketing messages to encourage donations, drive traffic to stores, announce sales and new store openings.
“We’ve been growing steadily since we started the program and we found that people are responding to our text messages,” said Wedmore. In just 6 months, Goodwill Southern California has added over 2,000 subscribers to its text messaging program.
Interested in learning more about text marketing or other ways nonprofits are using SMS? Contact us at 800-696-1393 or email tmsales@textmarks.com.
