Bulk SMS for Winter Aid!
Employing bulk SMS on a per town or per region scale could help mitigate the possible effects of disaster this coming winter.
Chile is the most recent country to be affected by a natural disaster – an earthquake with an 8.8 magnitude and with a death toll of 711 at the time of this writing. This follows the Haiti quake which struck not even a month earlier with up to 230,000 people dead.
Bulk SMS 4 South Africa
The above-mentioned quakes don’t really have a significant impact on South Africa, but it does serve to remind us that winter is on its way. In recent years many thousands of people have either lost their lives or personal property as a result of heavy flooding.
Can bulk SMS limit the amount of casualties and lessen the damage to personal and government property?
Bulk SMS has already proven to be a lifesaver in countries that have made groundbreaking use of bulk SMS, as evidenced in an earlier post, ‘Text messaging saves lives in the UK‘. In all instances the key lies with effective communication, from officials to citizens and vice versa.
Even in bushfire-prone Australia bulk SMS is being employed to warn citizens about impending dangers during the hot summer months.
“The focus at this stage is certainly on bushfires but it’s an emergency warning system, so it can be used for floods, cyclones on the North Coast, or tsunami warnings,” said New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
Employing Bulk SMS
Toward the end of 2009 an estimated 34.4-million individuals in South Africa had access to a mobile phone, a number still growing as handsets become more affordable. This means that more people have access to a mobile phone than they do the internet, a television set or even the radio at any given moment.
The mobile phone is also the only technology to be always carried and always on. And, lest we forget, virtually all mobile handsets are capable of receiving an SMS message, which, to the handset owner, is free.
Emergency and governmental services using bulk SMS will therefore be able to get in touch with more individuals during times of crisis, thereby saving lives, and possibly limiting the amount of damage that occurs.
In a country where communication has played a key role over the past 16 years, it can also be used to save lives, improve service delivery and help protect private and government property. For more information, navigate to our bulk SMS page.
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Tags: bulk SMS, bulk SMS alerts, mobile phone penetration, SMS emergency services
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