Mongoose Research

In June 2009, Nielsen reported on the myths and realities of teen media trends in a study titled "How Teens Use Media".  The graph above shows how texting is the medium of choice for teens aged 13-17.  "Text Messages" is the orange line and "Mobile Phone Calls" is blue.  They would much prefer to send a text rather than a voice call.

The average U.S. mobile teen now sends or receives an average of 2,899 text-messages per month compared to 191 calls. The average number of texts has gone up 566% in just two years.  And this data is almost a year old! 

The Mongoose Mobile^(tm) Platform allows your institution to leverage this existing behavior with targeted text messages.

Our first partner institution - St. Mary's University - is experiencing record enrollment and excellent results related to delivering mobile updates to prospective students.

St. Mary's has realized a 53% increase in applications for Fall 2010 (compared to Fall 2009).

Additionally, 'highly interested' students are opting in for mobile updates at rates as high as 67%.

Interesting.. some national  nonprofit brands are winning from texting interested people. An interesting service by the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition:

text4baby :: Subscribe

This text campaign provides free weekly updates for pregnant women. It has its own website and heavily focuses on “Text BABY to 511411″ or “Envia BEBE al 511411 para Español”. The web page with subscribe functionality is secondary. That’s a great best practice. Nonprofits should be consistently and regularly promoting their KEYWORD and SHORT CODE combination on the web, social networking sites, and print materials!

For the complete list: http://nonprofitorgs.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/10-nonprofit-text-alert-campaigns/