What is your preferred way to donate to a charity?  Well it seems that charities think that their future lies with text message donations…at least in the UK.  According to the UK regulator of premium rate telephone services that oversees charity text donation, PhonepayPlus, there has been a sharp increase  in charity text donations last year and the trend looks set to continue into 2012.

More than 200 charities are now registered with PhonepayPlus, which means that they can ask people to donate by sending a text message to the charity’s short code number.  Perhaps this isn’t too surprising given the end-of-year findings by nfpSynergy’s Charity Awareness Monitor  which found that the monthly average for people giving to charity by text donations rouse by 40% in 2011. 
As of 2011, around 1 in 4 people in the UK will donate to a charity by text.  Forecasts predict that by 2014 around £96 million will come from SMS donations, which is a lot of money by anyone’s standards.  And charities have been quick to realise that text donations chimes well with younger givers.

The latest International Communications Market Report from Ofcom has been making a bit of a stir within the telecom industry.  Its survey of some 5,600 consumers in six major countries (including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA) has found for the first time that some of us are more likely to use our mobile phones for non-voice purposes (i.e., text messaging) rather than making voice calls.  Ofcom’s survey found that SMS usage levels ranged from a low of 64% (in the US) to a high of 86% (in Australia).  Conversely, voice calls ranged from a low of 68% (in Italy) to a high of 80% (in Germany).  The report found that on a per capita basis these countries had an average SMS usage level of 71.52%, while the usage figures  for voice calls was slightly lower at 71.48%.  So, it seems that while we may call it a mobile “phone” some of us are just as likely (if not more so) to use it for text messaging ignoring its voice capabilities.

Plus, if you consider that SMS usage is rampant in the developing world (thanks in part to its low cost) there probably is a strong case to say that text messaging is more popular amongst mobile phone users worldwide, rather than voice calls.

As the economy contracts yet prices continue to climb many small businesses are finding it tough going at the moment.  One surprisingly low cost way to make the most of your existing customer base and attract new ones is with a mobile marketing campaign.   Many small businesses can also make use of text to streamline their business functions and save themselves a bit of money in the process.  With today’s harder trading conditions in mind, here are five ways that small business can benefit from text messaging.

Important points to remember are that SMS marketing is very powerful and it will enable you to instantly target your audience, and as more than 95% of all text messages are opened and read you can also most guarantee that the receiver will view your message. If done properly, SMS and mobile marketing is a highly effective way to reach your customers.  Best of all the process is very simple and affordable –it is just as easy as sending an email, but much, much more effective.

1. Start by building an opt-in list for your mobile marketing and SMS messages, with the promise of giving your consumers real value and special discounts. You will need to explain to your customers the benefits for receiving your text messages. Make sure that you communicate the benefits of opting-in to your mobile campaign in all your communications, including emails, in ads, in person and on your website. The key to collecting contact details is to make it worth your customers’ while to opt-in to your mobile campaign by offering special discounts, reminders, alerts …even VIP events.

2011 has certainly been a busy year for us at RoutoMessaging, seeing expansion for us on both sides of our customer base. Within the wholesaler market we’ve seen mobile operators and social networking companies, as well as software developers and marketing companies continue to turn to RoutoMessaging to deliver a message termination service second to none. At the same time we have seen growth with our enterprises customers (across a wide range of sectors ranging from retail to travel and everything in between) who depend upon our expertise, quality products and services to provide the SMS and multi-messaging services they need to help optimise their business objectives. We also have an increasing number of businesses turn to us to provide bespoke consulting and development for their SMS and MMS messaging needs.

Probably our biggest success in 2011 was the addition of excel2sms to our range of products. This Excel add-in is brilliant for individuals and companies that want to send bulk text messages to phone numbers stored on Excel worksheets. Best of all, as it is an add-in the user doesn’t need to exist Excel to send a text message (they just need to click on it within the Excel menu) so it is simple to use. Of course our other text messaging products, including Web SMS (offering web-based bulk SMS messaging) and Easy Messenger (for those who prefer to use a desktop application for their SMS messages) have both proved to be popular with different parts of our customer base.

Yet none of these products would be as successful or popular without TextGate, RoutoMessaging’s resilient, reliable and amazingly fast SMS gateway, providing access to more than 800 operators worldwide. Add to this the fact that RoutoMessaging owns and manages its own worldwide mobile messaging network. This provides our customers with direct access to destination operators the world over and helps us secure unbeatable destination termination reliability.

In many countries Christmas Eve is usually  the first or second biggest day in the calendar for sending a text message, though in some regions this honor falls to New Year.  However, this traditionally busiest time of year has for the first time seen a decline in the number of text messages being sent in some countries.  According to Tero Kuittinen, a senior analyst at M.G.I. Research, the recent holiday period saw a decline in the numbers of texts being send in several counties.  In particular, there seems to have been a steep drop in the number of texts sent on Christmas Eve.

According to Kuittinen, in  Finland one of the country’s largest network operators saw SMS messages fall to 8.5 million on Christmas Eve 2011, down from 10.9 million on Christmas Eve of 2010.  Likewise both Australia (down 9%) and Hong Kong (down 14%) saw a decline in the number of SMS messages sent over the Christmas and New Year period.  In Sweden, The Local (the Swedish English -speaking press) wrote that sending a text message to express Christmas or New Year’s greeting is passé here.  Those in the know instead use a social network to pass on their holiday greetings.

In his blog, Kuittinen attributes the fading allure of text messaging to the increased popularity of social networks and BBM/iM, which allow smartphone users to send messages for "free".