UK & GERMANY: Amnesty International UK uses mobile to rally support for Burma

The human rights organisation, Amnesty International, has integrated mobile prominently in its latest appeal to generate awareness of the current crisis in Burma. The 'No More Bloodshed' press advertising campaign features an SMS call to action, enabling supporters to instantly engage with the organisation from anywhere, at anytime by texting 'Burma' to 64118 to initiate a callback and discuss how people can support Amnesty's work.

"SMS is continually proving to be a really effective channel for capturing people's interest at the point they engage with our advertising," said Alistair Baggs, Amnesty International's senior direct marketing coordinator. "Earlier in the year we featured text response alongside phone and web as part of our Darfur appeal, and found that over 90% of response came from mobile. As a result we decided to integrate SMS as our main channel for people to pledge their support for the Burma crisis and its again generating record response levels." Over 40% of response to the campaign to date has been received outside of normal office hours and of those, more than half were over the weekend; proving the value of the channel in capturing interest 24/7. Different keywords are also used on each insertion to evaluate their ROI. Alistair explains, "Tagging each ad provides us with invaluable information about which media is working for us.

"Understanding how much response we receive to each title is crucial for future planning to ensure our strategy is continually refined. One of the biggest revelations we've had by tracking text response is that some of the media we expected to yield the biggest response were actually out-performed by a less likely publication."