April 11, 2014

008: Feeding Hungry Children with Text Messages

We talk with Jason Wilson from No Kid Hungry about their unique text messaging program and how it is connecting families with free lunches for their children over the summer. A fun story that goes beyond text-to-donate campaigns and thinks about programmatic impact.

Additional Resources

According to Pew Internet Research – 90% of Americans have a cell phone, 60% of those have access to the internet. Many nonprofits hear these numbers and glaze over or feel that they are too resource constrained to do much about it. This is evident when you consider that only 16% of nonprofit’s have a mobile optimized donation page (Nonprofit Scorecard 2013). If a donate page, a page that literally drives revenue, isn’t inspiring a shift to mobile then we’re in trouble.

I think we sell mobile short when we stop at mobile web/apps and don’t consider the power of that other handy thing that phones do, which is text messaging! Try out No Kid Hungry’s text messaging system – Text “Food” to the number 877877.

The No Kid Hungry Text program

Pew Internet Research on Mobile usage in 2013

Mobile Commons – text provider of No Kid Hungry

Transcription

Episode 8

This is Using the Whole Whale. The podcast that brings you stories about data and technology in the nonprofit world. My name is George Weiner, your host and the Chief Whaler of wholewhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1: What if I can tell you that there is a way to feed children in the United States who are going hungry simply by using text messaging. I think where our heads immediately jump to is alright, who do I have to my money to now? How much is it going to cost?

Welcome to episode eight of Using the Whole Whale. Today we are going to be talking with Jason Wilson of nokidhungry.org. He is the Associate Director of Digital Communication there and actually, he’s doing this but not in the way you think. Let’s talk to Jason.

Music Plays

Speaker 1: OK. I’m here today with Jason Wilson from nokidhungry.org. Jason, tell me what you’re up to. Who are you? What do you do?

Speaker 2: Yeah, No Kid Hungry is the campaign of Shares Trade. We are, simply put, ending child hunger in America. We know that there’s enough food out there, truly a question of how do you get access to that food? How do you make sure all the kids that need the food and nutrition, how do they get access to it? It’s about educating families about shopping smart on a budget, healthy eating, what does that look like from like cool grains to checking unit pricing and food labels. Then it’s about awareness. Making sure families know and kids know about the programs available out there about the great resources that already exist so they can take better advantage of them. What we like to say here is it’s about getting every kid healthy food every day. That’s the simple piece of it. My role in that is from, obviously from a digital perspective, so I focus all of our social media, electronic communications, website, mobile, texting all of those efforts live with my team. We’re all part of a larger, grand t

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