South Africa - Bulk SMS: Take your message to the masses

Only a few years ago, very few could foresee that SMS messages would become one of the most effective methods of reaching people in South Africa.

From the richest to the poorest, everyone seems to be sending text of data messages to someone, somewhere in the world. As a result, the term “yuppie earring” has become obsolete.

In many parts of Africa, cellular technology has skipped around the cumbersome growth rates of landlines to reach across the wide, inaccessible expanses to connect villages dotted across the landscape.

From an infrastructural point of view, cellphone towers are a lot easier to erect and maintain than a landline network. You can imagine the amount of cables that won’t have to be maintained in a ten kilometer radius, which is the area an well-placed tower will cover.

Locally, a 2008 estimate has concluded that over 70% of South Africans are moving around with a phone in their pocket and that every single person in the country has access to one. In some instances many people share a mobile phone between family and community members. With figures like these, South Africa is a leader in cellular connectivity and not only marketers have sat up to take note.

With the costs associated with cellular communications plummeting, many industries are embracing the technology to keep in touch with their customers. Log on to your bank account and within milliseconds you’ll hear your phone beeping. By the time you’ve concluded your banking, you’re likely to have a few SMSs on your phone confirming all transactions.

It’s not only large corporations that have embraced this technology. From restaurants sending out messages news on specials to doctors reminding patients of appointments and medication schedules – bulk SMS subscriptions are soaring.

As with all methods of communication, abuse has become rampant. Companies should take care only to sign up to a trusted SMS portal to ensure that data and subscriber details remain confidential. It is also important that your SMS campaigns and communication complies with the WASPA code of conduct that protects the privacy and security of the public.

Source: by admin on February 6, 2012

South Africa - Savvy SA schools SMS

SMS has been widely used in school to make sure parents are alerted of what is happening on their children.

A Cape Town mom is more than a little displeased with her children's primary school. During the recent heat wave in the Western Cape, the school cancelled athletics practice due to the extreme temperatures. The teachers went home and children, under the age of 13, had to wait alone outside the school in the heat until their parents picked them up at the time the sports practice was meant to end. The school had no way to alert the parents of the change of plans when they decided to cancel athletics at the last minute.

This unsafe situation for the children could easily have been avoided had the school implemented an SMS notification system, says Pieter Streicher, BulkSMS.com managing director. This is an excellent example of where SMS comes to the fore: it allows the sender to quickly reach a large number of people wherever they are, quickly and cost-effectively.

In addition, SMSes are typically read as soon as they are received, ensuring the message gets across timeously. Around the world, schools regularly use SMS to alert parents about snow days, preventing them from taking dangerous journeys to drop their children off at school, only to find it is closed. Closer to home, the devastating floods South Africa experiences creates a similar scenario: parents and children can be saved from a potentially dangerous trip past high waters and on flood-damaged roads.

It's not only bulk communications where SMS is useful for schools. Teachers can alert parents very quickly if their child hasn't arrived at school, either because they are absent, or because they have had an accident, fallen ill, or any number of other things that may have happened to them on their way to school.

Another way schools are using SMS is to ensure important messages, such as meeting notifications or concerns over their child's behaviour, are sent directly to the parent and don't risk being intercepted or lost by the child.

Schools are given the ability to send SMSes to a group of people at once via a bulk SMS provider. This makes sending SMSes as easy as sending e-mails – using a computer, non-technical admin staff or teachers can access address books, set up lists to target specific parents, and send either a single SMS to one parent or a group SMS to the entire school community.

Before choosing a bulk SMS provider, schools should estimate the number of SMSes they will send in the year, based on the number of children at the school, activities planned, how they expect to use SMS and also factor in unforeseen events, such as the Cape heat wave. They should look at which current communications can be replaced by SMS, and which can be supported by it: for instance, the school might e-mail out a calendar of events for the term in advance, but any changes to this can be SMSed at the last minute.

Planned correctly, SMS communications will also save schools on printing, copying and telephone costs, as well as the human costs related to contacting parents in such a labour-intensive way.

Of the several hundred schools using BulkSMS.com to send their messages, only a handful of schools spend more than R6 000 per year on sending messages. Schools should bear this in mind as a benchmark when deciding between pay-as-you-go service providers versus paying a fixed cost for an unlimited number of SMSes – which often ends up being up to four times more expensive.

Finally, schools have a duty to teach their learners more than just what is between the pages of text books, and with technology such a pervasive part of our lives, this is an excellent demonstration of efficient and cost-effective communications, using the right tools for the message. In our Cape Town mom's case, this would have meant her primary school children were picked up safely from school at the right time, rather than left to their own devices in the blazing heat.

Source: By itweb on 7th February 2012

South Africa - SMS the crime fighter

The crime-fighting power of technologies such as SMS should not be overlooked!

The latest South African crime statistics for 2010/2011, could probably best be summarised as “improving, but could do better”. While there have been reductions in the murder and attempted murder rate, assault, robbery and attacks on policemen – fighting crime should still be at the top of South Africa’s agenda.

With SMS being so suited to sending alerts quickly and easily to a group of people, its capability and usefulness as a crime fighting tool is not to be under-estimated. Probably the best-known application of SMS in the fight against crime in South Africa is Primedia’s Crime Line, an anonymous crime tip-off line via SMS that has made 1, 106 arrests and R39, 579 928 in seizures since its inception on the 6th June 2007.

The success of using SMS for tip-offs about a crime that has taken place is thanks to the fact that nearly everyone has a phone and is able to use SMS. People can send a tip-off immediately and discreetly when they witness a crime, wherever they are, and remain anonymous.

As well as tip-offs, however, SMS is ideal for quickly sharing important information with a number of people which can be effective in keeping people safe, preventing crime or apprehending criminals. Neighbourhood watches, security estates, schools and any other communities can quickly alert their members to dangerous situations. They can also gather information from members of the community to allow police services to respond faster.

Nico Nel, the past Chairman of the Linbro Park Community Policing Forum in Sandton , Gauteng, has no doubt about the effectiveness of SMS in fighting crime. “We originally subscribed to BulkSMS.com to communicate with the Domestics for the Domestic Watch programme run by Making a Difference with Penny Steyn. Our Domestics receive a crime fighting lesson from her, once a month and Penny is now using the system to alert and remind Domestics to attend her lessons throughout the Johannesburg region – some 3,000 a month! SMS is the most effective method of keeping in touch with the part of a Community that does not have access to email,” he says.

In terms of crime in Linbro Park, “Crime in Linbro Park is down to its lowest level in 20 years,” he continues.

“We used to have between three and seven armed robberies a month and at one stage that many in a week. In the past 30 months we have had virtually none. SMS is integral to our fight against crime. We now pay a reward of a R30 recharge voucher for each crime tip-off, or more, according to the circumstances. This has made Linbro Park a place where criminals have no place to hide. We then react, where applicable, by sending bulk SMS messages to alert the Community, including our domestics”.

Linbro Park Community Policing Forum uses SMS messaging to alert the community to a crime in progress, and says that they have caught criminals red-handed on more than one occasion as a result of these SMS alerts. “Bulk SMS is particularly effective because it is quick to use and the delivery of messages is virtually instantaneous, whereas SMSing to various individuals from your cellphone is quite slow,” says Nel.

Community-based security via SMS can take several forms, from informing all households of a crime; to having mobile members of the community such as estate agents, plumbers and so on share information; to communicating with more formalised neighbourhood watch organisations and the police.

In Linbro Park, on receiving a crime alert, members of the community have pre-determined duties – some will man access points to the suburb to prevent criminals fleeing, others with trauma training go to the scene to render medical and other assistance, others will patrol streets on the lookout for criminals. All keep a watch for any presence of the criminals in the suburb.

In these contexts it is vital to manage the flow of information while ensuring the information is accurate. Two key considerations are that an SMS alert doesn’t cause panic or incite vigilante activity. Using a bulk SMS system, it is possible to ensure that information is shared from a central community safety hub, whose responsibility is to check the accuracy of any information they receive from members of their community.

With a SMS messaging solution, the hub is able to send out messages to predetermined groups of contacts within the community, for example, neighbourhood patrol leaders. The community should be educated about what is expected of them when they receive an SMS alert that is crime related, in order to avoid them being placed in danger.

So while there has been talk of the South African government banning communications technology such as Blackberry messages for security reasons, and both BBM and SMS has been temporarily banned in several countries around the world during times of civil unrest, the crime-fighting power of technologies such as SMS should not be overlooked.

Source: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/cellular/37220-sms-the-crime-fighter.html by Pieter Streicher on October 31, 2011