5 tips for creating a successful RCS campaign

By James Briggs, Account Executive at Cymba.

As someone who’s spent a considerable amount of their career charity side, I’ve had the freedom to try new fundraising approaches and get a sense for what works, and what doesn’t.

Now, having recently joined Cymba, I’m in the privileged position of being able to consolidate what I’ve learnt along the way in order to help multiple charities leverage their fundraising campaigns when it comes to that all important thing – boosting fundraising revenue.

Whilst RCS as a tool for fundraising is still in its infancy, my charity was an early adopter and I worked with Cymba to test RCS across several campaigns.

Here are the five things that I learned.

1. The devil is in the detail

It’s often the subtle things that make the big difference – particularly when it comes to building credibility. RCS is no different. For instance, the verified badge, as well as your charity’s logo, at the top of a piece of RCS communication speaks volumes. During our standard PSMS campaigns, we’d often get calls from potential donors asking if the text we sent was legitimate and not a scam, or concerned that the short code link was potentially harmful. With RCS and a fully setup profile, which is visual and verified, this concern simply falls away. So, make sure that your RCS profile is correctly setup, and that the logo is clear and concise.

2. Stick to the story

The biggest restriction to PSMS is the 160-character limit. After all, trying to convey a message or tell a story that resonates at an emotional level and make an ask within these parameters is incredibly difficult (and that’s before you’ve factored in copy around compliance). The way to get around this to some degree is to abbreviate everything, which can kill the mood and the message. With RCS, characters aren’t limited, which means that you can be much more detailed when it comes to storytelling. RCS’s ability to support storytelling allows your charity to be much more emotive – and when it comes to fundraising, emotional connection is critical.

3. A picture is worth a thousand words

Use imagery wherever and whenever possible. Any visual cues that support the story you’re telling makes the message so much more powerful. Just like text characters are unlimited with RCS, so too are images. And they’re free to add, too. More to the point, images enrich the content and make the user – or recipient – experience that much more compelling. So, why wouldn’t you use them.

4. Button it

Another beauty of RCS is the ability to embed buttons into a piece of communication. Not only does this enhance the user experience (who doesn’t prefer buttons to links) but it makes it more appealing – and arguably more likely – for people to take positive action and donate. Furthermore, buttons yield metrics that can be tracked, which means that messages received and open rates can be evaluated. This also provides invaluable feedback and insights that can be used to improve future campaigns.

5. Novelty factor

This is less of a technical point, but it’s true nonetheless. RCS in all its visual glory is new and interesting. As a result, we saw fewer unsubscribes from those who received the RCS campaign compared with the PSMS variant. PSMS has been around for years, so people are seemingly more inclined to default so unsubscribe. With RCS – the new kid on the block – people are seemingly more inclined to engage. My view is that whilst it’s so new, charities should adopt it now before the novelty factor wears off (although that’s likely to be many years from now).

As with all campaigns, charities should give RCS time and split test. However, there’s no doubt that RCS is the future. It just depends on when individual charities decide to adopt it. In my view, the sooner they do the better.

Interested in finding out how we can make RCS work for your fundraising campaigns? If so, call us on +44 (0)845 0829622 or email enquiries@cymba.co.uk.