Scaling American Cancer Society’s events with SMS
By leveraging text message marketing the ACS scaled from 6 events to 95—in just one year.
3 min read | Illustration by Mayara Lista
American Cancer Society and Banter teamed up for a pilot SMS program to text lapsed and current participants for their Making Strides Against Breast Cancer events in 2021. The pilot was very successful, with 6 different events around the country recruiting former participants and engaging current ones, and ACS wanted to scale to dozens of other events around the country in 2022, as they ramped in-person events back up after the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2023, Charity Dynamics placed American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life and Making Strides Against Breast Cancer in the top 10 of the most successful peer-to-peer campaigns in North America, thanks in part to Banter’s help.
We have been able to track an impressive increase in activations with those events that utilized a texting strategy using the messaging and cadence recommended by Lloyd. We feel it has helped us not only communicate more effectively with our constituents and give them a much faster and easier way to activate, but it has also helped us build more 1:1 relationships with our stakeholders. Our constituents are loving it!”
— Lisa Palmentiero, Director of Community Fundraising Projects
The Challenge
Training hundreds of ACS staff in SMS for events
Going from 6 events in a controlled pilot environment to many more can be challenging on multiple fronts – you need to train and devote more staff power, budgets need to be coordinated among many more people, and you need more advanced analytics to account for more types and varieties of events. You need traffic cops making sure event organizers aren’t accidentally messaging other events’ registrants, and other common pitfalls.
The Solution
Creating a reliable and repeatable SMS strategy
Banter worked with ACS to scale the SMS program in several key ways:
First, we took an educational approach and developed weekly training sessions open to all staff, so they could attend as many as needed to ask questions, feel comfortable with strategy and best practices, and get trained on the platform. To maximize access to information, we instituted weekly office hours so that the ACS’s staff could ask their questions, learn from each other and not overwhelm program coordinators with one-off queries.
Then, we developed helpful tools that would allow staff to quickly and efficiently implement the SMS strategy. We created messages and calendar templates, along with a process to request and approve unique, localized messages, again keeping coordinators from having to write or approve every single message that went out.
We clearly identified which responsibilities belong with one coordinator, versus distributed among event staff, like budgeting, tech support, and setup, so that event staff could focus on what they do best – building relationships with supporters.
This was an amazing way to reach our lapsed and current participants and I attribute our success this year to texting and reaching a bigger audience.”
— Marlie, Relay For Life
The Result
A 1500% increase in events in just one year
Working with Banter, American Cancer Society successfully scaled from 6 events to 95—a 1500% increase in just one year. We were able to recruit thousands more participants, trained more than 120 staff members, increased revenue and retention, and deepened relationships with supporters. They collected hundreds of photos from event day, got song requests for shared playlists to build community, provided extra support to team captains, recruited new and more volunteers, helped participants do peer-to-peer fundraising successfully, and kept supporters engaged throughout the year.
This is one of the best tools I have seen in my 12 years with ACS. Not only was it easy to use and successful in connecting with our audience, it is RELEVANT!
— Heather, Making Strides Against Breast Cancer
We achieved these results while making it easy for staff. 86% of staff survey respondents said the implementation of the program and results were “good” or better – only 3% said “fair” or worse. 82% of event staff rated the quality of conversations they had with supporters as “good” or better, only 6% said “fair” or worse. 93% of event staff were interested in continuing to text supporters and expand usage to other events in their portfolios.
Sample message:
Jane have you seen all the new social media assets American Cancer Society has created for you to use this year? What sites are you using to recruit & fundraise? I can send you some neat graphics to post & share with your team!
— John
Sample message:
Hi Jane- John here! I'm putting together a playlist for participants to listen to while you walk. Any requests? Or do you want the link?
As the American Cancer Society, and everyone, continues to emerge from pandemic restrictions, there is a limited window of time to re-engage people who were once involved in their work. They needed to do a project of this cost and scale the right way, the first time.
Working with Banter, they were able to make sure this program was ROI positive, keep a distributed team in compliance with unfamiliar laws & regulations, and let event staff do what they do best – make their events successful.