The Better Ireland Program is part of Irish bank, AIB’s Corporate and Social Responsibility strategy. AIB introduced the Better Ireland Programme six years ago in order to tackle the issue of social exclusion at an early stage and focuses its resources into key concerns affecting children in Ireland.
In May of this year, AIB was looking to re-fresh the Better Ireland Programme, and asked Dublin-based mobile marketing agency Púca to handle a text voting campaign. 275 AIB branches were each invited to nominate three children’s charities to receive a donation from the bank.
The three charities nominated by each branch were then put to a public vote to win a prize of €10,000 (£8,000) per branch. To vote, members of the public simply had to text the Branch name e.g. DUBLIN followed by shortlisted charity A, B or C to the shortcode, 53099.
In total, 308,011 text votes were received and 185 deserving charities received a total of €1.85 million (£1.5 million) in funding.
“This was Ireland’s biggest ever text voting campaign and really shows the power of the mobile medium,” says Púca Marketing and Communications Manager, Gráinne Ryan.