Colleges and Text Messaging: Get Now Your Students’ Attention

How do you get your students’ attention when they’re running between classes, studying, enjoying life and generally busy as bees? Colleges and text messages go hand in hand. Unlike email, text messaging for Higher Ed can and will get your students’ attention so you can share information, events, and more with them.

Let’s face it. Your students are all digital natives. They spend more time on their smartphones than they do anywhere else. When you communicate with them the way they naturally like to converse, everybody wins.

That’s why text messaging for Higher Ed is such a powerful communications channel for universities and other educational organizations. Your students will read your messages. They will respond. In fact, text messages get 6X the responses vs. email and 10X vs. phone calls. How’s that for connection power?

Colleges and Text Messaging

You can use conversational text messaging for virtually any communication you want to share with your student population. And they will love you for it.

Following are just a few examples:

1. Campus announcements.

Whether you want to send out information about classes, campus schedules, and updates or simply let your students know about something that just came up, text messaging is the fastest and most effective way to reach them.

You can send out a simple outbound informational message to your entire student population.

You can send a message to a select group of students, from everyone in a specific class to those in a school to those with a certain GPA.

2. Events and special opportunities.

Some campus events require registration or some kind of response from students. You can easily use text messaging for Higher Ed to manage those events, as well.

For example, let’s say you want to promote and sell tickets to your Fine Arts production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. You can promote the event, guide your students to their discounted ticket sales and remind them of the upcoming event, all with a single multi-touch messaging campaign. Here’s how.

First, you send a message telling them about Hamlet.

Next, you can send a message a week later offering them a student discount.

When your student buys the tickets, you can automatically trigger a confirmation message. You can also offer a keyword response for them to ask questions or get help.

Then, you can send reminder messages ahead of the actual play date, as often as you’d like.

3. Emergency announcements.

Text messaging is a fast way to get emergency information to students. For example, weather advisories, road closings, building closings, class cancellations, and more.

The Bottom Line

Your students are digital-first. They communicate through digital means, like messaging. Colleges and text messaging are meant to go together.

If you want to get their attention, you need to communicate the way they want. That’s just what text messaging for Higher Ed lets you do.

More importantly, conversational text messaging gives you the flexibility to communicate virtually any type of information, quickly and effectively, to any segment of your student population.

So what are you waiting for?