Here’s how MN350 used text messaging to build an engaged list of 2919 young climate activists, and organized them to take further action towards climate justice. 

The organizers at MN350 saw positive response rates over 22% while texting targeted segments of their contact list.

When Greta Thunberg arrived in New York by sea in late August of last year, she was greeted by hundreds of fellow climate activists and supporters.

With the reality of climate change setting in, It was clear that young people were ready to fight for the issues that mattered to them.

Cut to a few weeks later, climate advocacy groups were organizing rallies around the world, in over 4,500 locations, across 150 countries. They were mobilizing over 7.6 million supporters and ordinary citizens, and making their voices heard. 

One such rally took place in Minnesota, organized by 350.org.

Part of a larger coalition of organizations worldwide, including the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, their main demands in the USA were enacting the Green New Deal, and transitioning to more sustainable forms of energy.

In short, activists were looking for real, lasting change.

But first, the organizers in charge of these rallies had to overcome their primary challenge. Getting people to show up. Young supporters of the climate movement were accustomed to taking action online, but volunteering or showing up for offline events was different. 

How do you activate a dedicated online base of young supporters and bring them out to not just one event but multiple, over a period of time?

It meant keeping them engaged and energized. 

They needed to be able to have relevant, two way conversations with supporters. For example, to:

• Reach out to targeted age groups for volunteer recruitment.
• Reaching supporters in different cities for specific events.

We talked to Priya Dalal-Whelan, an organizer for MN350, about the movement, and how they mobilized supporters:

“I am a senior in high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When the UN released the IPCC report in 2018, I realized climate change was a threat to me, my classmates, and all future generations and decided to get involved with the Youth Climate Strikes. When 6000 people attended our strike in September, I knew the rest of our generation felt the same way. “

“I got the idea from the Women’s March, where they had text messages, and I asked Ulla from MN350 how we could do that. She said CallHub was the best way (to do it).”

The 2017 Women’s March, which gathered over 5.2 million participants, had effectively used text messaging to mobilize supporters and turn them out for marches worldwide.

For the organizers of the youth climate strikes, text messaging was the ideal way to reach out to their young followers.

In a study, almost 75 percent of American Gen Z’ers and Millennials said they would rather talk over text messages.

Taking cues from the women's march, the organizers at MN350.org used text messaging with CallHub for:

• Getting supporters opted in to their communications.
• Gathering data to send out targeted messages.
• Running efficient outreach campaigns.
• Recruiting organizers for their movement.
• Getting their supporters to come to rallies and other events.
• Asking supporters to sign petitions.

Getting people into their contact lists

For Priya, and other organizers at MN350.org, the path to their goal was simple. They needed to engage supporters of the movement and bring them out to future rallies and events. That meant getting a list of contacts to keep engaged.

Of the roughly 6000 people that came to the first strike on September 20th, 2919 attendees opted in by SMS to their text message communications. 

According to Priya, this was done by making the call to action very prominent. 

“When we had speakers, we told people to do it (opt-in), and we had signs around the march too”

Speakers at the front were asked to announce the keyword (MNSTRIKE) and the number (33339) to the rally attendees, who texted into the number.

That meant everyone at the rally heard or saw the call at least once. Testament to the ease of using text messages, half the attendees signed up using their mobile phones on the spot.

Gathering data for future communication during an opt-in

The organizers at MN350 wanted to make sure that the communication going out from their campaigns was highly relevant to their audiences. When they wanted to recruit volunteers, or organize local artbuilds, they needed to know who to send texts to.

That meant getting data that could be used to target specific groups with specific messages. Through CallHub’s SMS Opt-in campaigns, organizers were able to get people’s data, by sending automated follow up questions right when they signed up.

“We had it as an automatic process, so it collected what school they went too, their grade, their name. We had that all in a spreadsheet, for when we used peer-to-peer texting”

Using the data for better message targeting

How did they use the data they had on these new subscribers? By collecting identifiers like a contacts age or school, they were able to target different groups of people with different messages.

That’s where list segmentation came in.

“We have all of their names and grades labelled, and we’ve got it seperated into a list of just highschoolers, a list of highschoolers in the city, and highschoolers in the suburbs, so it’s all sorted out”

The segmented lists were used to send targeted messages to contacts.

Priya with fellow organizer at the Climate Strike

Efficiency was key

As passionate as they were, volunteers needed time and energy to reach all their contacts. That means not all of them were going to be available to send out peer-to-peer texts when you need them to be.

According to Priya, the ability to reassign contacts to active volunteers came in handy:

“I assign all the contacts, and a bunch of organizers are the agents. It’s nice because I can, if they’re not doing it, just (re)assign the contacts to someone else, or I can do them myself”

That meant under a watchful campaign manager, there was no time wasted in getting the message out to supporters.