Well, as much as I have spent time discussing the Moderator election for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, today’s brief note on new approaches brings us back to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
A couple of days ago I got an interesting Tweet from one of the candidates standing for Moderator of the General Assembly of the PC(USA). It reads:
@nealpresa: Receive alerts of mod candidacy by texting word, “PRESA” to 56512. For email alerts text “PRESA (your email)” to 56512 #fb #pcusa #ga220
So now we can get mod candidacy alerts by text message. I believe this is a first.
This is actually a very smart move if you are aiming for a particular demographic. Consider a meeting of a youth group (youth ages 14-20) that I was at last Sunday afternoon. They were discussing an upcoming activity and the youth chair needed a piece of information from the adviser. The adviser asked “Can I email you that.”
“No” replied the youth, “text it to me.”
I can’t speak for this as a national trend, although I suspect it is, but for most of the youth and young adults that I work with on various things (and this includes my own kids) by far the number one means of communicating is by text message on their phones. If you haven’t noticed, phones are not to talk on any more but devices to send and receive text messages. (And I sometimes suspect that one appeal of contacting your parents by text is that your friends don’t know its your parents you are texting to as opposed to having them overhear you on the phone.)
Email? Too complicated for the easy stuff. Twitter? Interesting, but not the way to hold a conversation. Text messaging is the simple method of communicating one-on-one for youth and young adults.
This does of course beg the question of whether there are enough commissioners who would want to get updates by text message to make this approach worth while. It will be interesting to find out. And yes, I have texted in to be added to the distribution list but no alerts yet.
So how do you go about doing this? Well, the “text to” address of 56512 belongs to a direct marketing firm called Guide by Cell that offers various audio, mobi and text packages. It must be pretty affordable because the budget for a Moderator campaign is capped at $1500.
As I said, it will be interesting to see how this new media works out for Rev. Presa. Stay tuned…
(And yes, there is other Moderator news this week, but I’m going to let that run a bit further before I do more with it.)
When it comes to communicating with teenagers, text is king. Although, not all of them have access to it, making it necessary to combine Facebook and snail mail to get important stuff to everyone. It’s crazy, really.
FWIW … considering the demographics of most voting commissioners at the GA, I seriously doubt that many will be influenced by text message campaigning.
Agreed.
I have to wonder if this is one approach to try to incorporate the media of choice for the younger demographic so as to position himself as having a new approach that incorporates those members of the church.