Festive Safety with Email to SMS

Email-to-SMS can gift public services with additional assistance throughout the festive season. Based on the SMTP API, email-to-SMS allows for quick message delivery to a large number of people.

Last week’s post touched on bulk SMS and how it can be used to increase the efficacy of health services throughout South Africa, and, as if in response to this, even more evidence appeared regarding the application of SMS and how it can be used to save lives:

“SMS for Life” is a malaria medicine stocking system designed to monitor drug stock in remote areas affected by malaria. During a test run of the program, staff in 135 villages throughout Tanzania received automated SMS messages that required them to check anti-malarial drug stock. The result of this effort, even during the first weeks, proved that this system is not only effective, but that it will save many of the 1,000,000 lives currently lost to the disease. How can we achieve the same with email to SMS?

Email to SMS in South Africa

We’re in the middle of the festive season and, aside from the jollity, we all know that it is also a time where the chances of tragedy are on the increase. Are there any initiatives that can be put in place that will allow local municipalities or even private firms and individuals to look after constituents, clients and friends? Let’s have a look:

Road Safety

The benefit of email to SMS is that it takes a single email to reach a large number of people. Think in terms of road safety, where thousands upon thousands of people will be travelling both locally and nationally to their holiday destinations and back home. SMS can be used to:

• Provide traffic updates: “Severe congestion on the N1 south bound between Paarl and Cape Town.”
• Supply information about accidents: “Upturned tanker on the N2 to Cape Town outside Somerset West.”
• Provide advanced severe weather warnings: “Heavy rains and strong winds expected in Knysna region.”
• Distribute ‘Best route’ information: “Severe congestion between Stellenbosch and Cape Town on N1. Take alternative route: N2.”
• Provide road safety information: “Exhausted and still driving? Pull over and take a break. Road safety comes first.”

And lest we forget, there’s the obvious benefit to your business, where you can either use your company’s name as a personalised sender ID, or simply include your business name in the message body.

Note: Even if you are intending to save lives with email-to-SMS, keep in mind that there are regulations regarding the distribution of unsolicited SMS messages that need to be adhered to. Visit Managing Bulk SMS Opt-in post for more information about this topic.

Public Safety

Another area of safety where email-to-SMS can be employed to save even more lives is within communities. Each year, sometimes throughout the festive season, reports of fires and floods damaging entire residential areas seem to come at the worst possible moments. Evidence of this is rife, and you can only wonder how it could have turned out, had there been an advanced warning system in place. SMS messages can be used to:

• Provide advanced warnings of potential fires and floods: “Possible floods as a result of heavy rains. Contact your local police station for risk assessment.”
• Help coordinate action between local rescue services and the public: “Food needed for disaster victims in the area.”
• Supply residents with vital life-saving, information: “In the event of a flood, move to higher ground.”

Email to SMS: How it Works

From the above examples, it is obvious that there’s a definite potential for email-to-SMS to help save lives, not only during the festive season, but throughout the year. It is a reliable technology based on the SMTP API (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Application Programming Interface) that simply requires a formatted plain text email to be sent to a specific email address, from where it is then distributed to the intended recipients.

As with the other API’s, SMTP also has the functionality to provide advanced reporting that will allow you to see which messages have been delivered, which are awaiting delivery and which messages have failed. This not only makes it effective, but accurate and can be incorporated with an existing software infrastructure for optimal usage.

Whether you want to save lives or promote your business, SMS is a versatile technology of which the application is only limited by your own innovation. Click to read more about email-to-SMS.

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Tags: automated SMS, Clickatell ZA, email to SMS, Mobile Health Bulk SMS, sender ID, SMS legislation, SMS messages, SMS saves lifes, SMTP, SMTP API