Response to suggestions of an SMS line

In response to the suggestion of the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (OUTA) introducing a SMS option to their fund raising campaign, we inform our supporters that we used to have a SMS fund raising campaign, but in June we took the decision to discontinue this as it was being counter-productive to the campaign.

Too much of the revenue was lost to agent and admin costs (around 40%) and the required levels of funding through this channel were just too low. For instance, a R20 SMS campaign only generated R11.50 for OUTA and would need hundreds of thousands of contributors to achieve our target. Research also showed that a R50 or higher SMS campaign would not work and again, we would lose too much of the supporters contribution. R11 per person was simply counter productive.

What is required is a higher yield support from the contributors, eg. R250 or R500 (i.e. their first moths e-toll savings). A lower hit rate with higher yields will have a significantly better result, thus we now only offer contributions via direct EFT into the ABSA bank account, or through the “PayFast” option, as listed on the OUTA website. We realise this may unfortunately alienate some supporters who can only contribute by SMS, but this was a hard decision which we had to make.

Your support is much appreciated.