SMS for municipalities — reaching residents without an app
A municipal app reaches the residents who installed it. A social media post reaches whoever happens to see it. A text message reaches everyone whose number you have — without installation, without an account and without an internet connection.
That is exactly why SMS is the channel of choice for the part of your communication that really has to arrive: flooding, a road closure, an interruption of the drinking water supply, a call-up of your own services.
Where does it go wrong today?
Reach that depends on an app
Whoever does not have the app misses the alert. During an incident, that is precisely the wrong moment.
Slow distribution
A message on the website or social media only reaches people when they go and look.
Calling up your own services
Technical department, response team or on-call service must be reachable, including outside office hours.
This is what it looks like in practice
The examples below are illustrations. The parts between percentage signs are tags: you fill them in from an Excel list or through the API, so that every recipient gets their own version.
Flooding in %street%. Avoid the zone between numbers 1 and 40. More info: %link%
From Monday, %street% is closed to through traffic. Diversion via %detour%.
Due to a burst main there is no drinking water in your neighbourhood until this evening. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Due to the public holiday, collection moves from %olddate% to %newdate%.
Technical department: call-up for flooding %street%. Report to the depot.
How does a municipality use SMS messages?
Build your groups
Divide the numbers by neighbourhood, street or department, so an alert only goes to those it concerns.
Define the scenarios
Save a standard text per situation, so no time is lost on wording during an incident.
Test your alerting
Run a test alert at least once a year and check the delivery reports as well as how current your number list is.
What you use for this
Crisis communication
Alerting that works when app, email and network let you down.
Groups per neighbourhood
Keeping residents and services separate, with Excel import and export.
Delivery reports
After an alert, see who received the message and who did not.
Connection to your systems
Have alerts go out automatically from your own applications.
Good to know
All processing takes place on Belgian servers, within the GDPR — a requirement that is rarely negotiable for a local government. Feel free to ask us for the data processing agreement.
At SMSBOX you pay per message sent, from €0.06 per SMS to Belgium (excl. VAT). No subscription, no setup costs: a month without any sending costs you nothing. All processing takes place on Belgian servers, within the GDPR.
