The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) recently came to Interactive Mediums seeking a way to efficiently communicate the opening of its Family Housing Wait List. This is a pretty big deal for the CHA, which hasn’t done this in more than a decade. The list itself is used to fill rental units as they become available in CHA-owned properties across the city of Chicago. 40,000 families will be selected via lottery for a chance to be offered housing following a registration period.
My colleague, Amanda Gilmore, worked closely with the CHA to ensure all their needs were met – no easy task when working with a government agency unaccustomed to sourcing technology enabled marketing services.
CHA administrators cleverly employ our platform to register anyone via 
text message interaction to receive updates via text as they become available. Simply texting INFO to 75309 is all that it takes. This call to action is being advertised across the city and is a completely hands free method of creating a list of families to later communicate with quickly and easily using our platform’s Alerting engagement action. Hundreds of thousands of messages are expected to flow through our system during the registration period.
Speaking of registration, CHA was able to meet another objective virtually hands free using our platform – driving actual website registrations for the wait list. Embedded in each text message is a short URL that links off to the CHA registration website. These links are tracked with our platform so CHA will be able to observe a funnel effect – of the universe of text message recipients, some portion will link off to the registration site on their mobile phones, and some portion of that group will register right then and there. Closing the gap between observing a call to action and following through to the desired end result is a unique value offered by text messages that provide a gateway to next steps.
That’s why I call this a “rich” alerting application. There’s a lot you can do in a text message beyond sending a brief communication. Embedding trackable short URLs, text advertisement footers, personalized messages and more are just some of the ways our clients are creating high performance interactions with our platform.
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