SocialTxt Partners and Pilots
1. National HIV/AIDS Call Centers
In a six week pilot project in 2007 where Vodacom donated advertising space on PCM messages to Praekelt Foundation, we partnered with South Africa's National AIDS Helpline and HIV911 (two national HIV/AIDS- call centres) in order to promote access to HIV counseling and services across the country. The National AIDS helpline is a crisis helpline offering counseling, information and referral services. Funded by the National Department of Health and managed by Lifeline, the helpline is active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. HIV911 manages a national database and offers referral to HIV services across the country. Click here to learn more about the work of the National Aids Helpline and HIV911.
SocialTxt used "please call me" advertising space to advertise the AIDS helpline number. This campaign ran for 20 days, approximately 20 Million PCMs with the AIDS helpline number were sent and received during this time. At the start of the pilot, Lifeline was receiving approximately 45,000 calls per month. During the campaign, call volumes increased by a massive 350% and the call centre had to work hard to take an additional 1500 calls (over and above what they normally receive) per day.
Based at the University of KZN, HIV911 is a nationally recognized database of HIV information and services. At the start of the pilot, HIV911 was receiving less than 10 calls per day. During the pilot more than 23,000 calls were made due to SoxialTxt "please call me"-advertising. SocialTxt referred 98% of all callers and referrals continued even when SocialTxt was inactive. Further, if the HIV911 sample holds true, we can conservatively estimate that SocialTxt supported more than 9,000 individuals to access HIV services during this campaign.
2. POWA - People Opposing Women Abuse
In 2007, SocialTxt partnered with NGO People Opposing Women's Abuse (POWA) in order to promote the 'I Commit'-Campaign to end violence against women in South Africa. Through continuous engagement and information sharing, the campaign aims to equip men and women across South Africa to identify and take appropriate action against women's abuse. SocialTxt's objective in this pilot was to recruit change agents. Click here to read more about POWA.
During the 5-day campaign PCMs advertised the call to action for people to send an SMS with "I commit" to a dedicated short code. 1,061 Change Agents were recruited over 5 days. These Change Agents will continue to be provided with information about how to identify and respond to abuse in their communities. Over the next year, POWA will call on these agents to follow a series of lessons and calls to action that will allow them to appropriately address violence against women.
3. Netcare / Vodacom Cleft Lip Campaign
In 2007 Netcare and Vodacom launched an initiative to provide 50 free cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries to children otherwise unable to afford it. The objective of the campaign was to identify eligible children by encouraging individuals to phone the Netcare call centre.
At the start of the pilot, Netcare had identified less than a handful of children. SocialTxt ran a 5-day campaign including a toll-free hotline and an SMS information channel. This campaign generated over 500 inquiries and identified 42 children eligible for surgery.
4. Khomanani Zithande Campaign
Initiated on World AIDS Day, Khomanani, the government HIV communications organization, launched its "Zithande campaign" to spread the message that "the only thing that spreads faster than HIV is a positive attitude". At the launch of the campaign, Khomanani was only using radio and TV campaigns with no indication of how many South African's it was reaching...
This campaign ran for 1 month at the end of 2007, the message was sent on over 30 million PCMs. There were nearly 50,000 additional calls to the AIDS helpline per day. This was an 80% increase in call volumes of people accessing HIV-information and services.