There's a moment in every fundraiser's calendar year where the pressure peaks: tax time, end-of-financial-year appeals, Christmas campaigns. And the instinct is the same: reach as many donors as possible, as fast as possible, across every channel available.
SMS is often where that instinct does the most damage.
The channel is powerful precisely because it is personal. Every person reading this has a phone within a metre of them right now. SMS reaches people on the device they never put down, and 90% of messages are opened within 90 seconds. That kind of cut-through is extraordinary. It is also exactly why getting the strategy wrong is so costly.
In a recent episode of the Ortto podcast, we spoke with Karl Deitz, who leads customer strategy at Tall Bob and has spent nearly a decade working with nonprofit clients on mobile messaging. Karl introduced a framework he uses with every client. He calls it LEE: Loyalty, Engagement, Emotion.
It's a useful lens for any team thinking about how SMS and MMS fit into a broader donor communications strategy, particularly heading into tax appeal season.
The framework: LEE
Loyalty. Engagement. Emotion.
The core idea, as Karl outlines in his original article at Tall Bob, is that every communication you send to a supporter should be building at least one of these three things. If it isn't doing any of the three, you probably shouldn't be sending it.
It sounds simple. In practice, most batch-and-blast SMS campaigns fail all three.
Loyalty is built between campaigns, not during them
The most common SMS mistake in the nonprofit sector is also the most predictable: reach out twice a year when there's an appeal, stay silent in between. It's understandable given the pressure on small teams, but it trains donors to see you as an organisation that only makes contact when it needs something.
As Karl put it on the podcast: "The results that you're about to get all come down to the work that you've put into each of the channels in the last 10 months."
Loyalty is the accumulation of consistent, respectful contact throughout the year. An impact update in February. A thank-you with no ask in May. A progress report on a project a donor helped fund. None of these require elaborate production. They require discipline and a system that makes them easy to execute.
This is where Ortto's journey builder earns its place in a mobile strategy. Behaviour-triggered journeys mean these touchpoints don't have to be manually scheduled. A donor who reaches a giving milestone gets acknowledged automatically. A lapsed regular giver enters a re-engagement sequence without anyone building a list. The loyalty work happens in the background, consistently, across the full supporter base.
Engagement means earning the attention you're given
SMS guarantees attention in a way almost no other channel can. That's not a reason to fill the message with more copy. It's a reason to be more precise about what the message is actually for.
Karl is direct on this point: even with MMS, where unlimited text is technically possible, the goal is what he calls the one-thumb flick. A message short enough to read without scrolling. Clear enough to act on immediately. Relevant enough to feel worth the interruption.
Relevance is the operative word. The difference between an SMS that feels like a relationship and one that feels like a broadcast is almost always personalisation. Not just a first name, but a reference to something real. How long someone has been giving. Which campaign they supported last year. What their donation helped achieve.
Ortto's unified supporter profiles make this achievable at scale. When donation history, event participation, email engagement, and giving behaviour all sit in a single profile, the data needed to personalise a message is already there. The question for most teams is not whether they have the data. It's whether they're using it.
Emotion is the piece most appeals forget
The default tax appeal message is built around urgency. The deadline is approaching. The matching gift expires. The campaign target hasn't been reached. These are legitimate reasons to give, but they are not emotional ones. They don't build the kind of donor relationship that survives cost-of-living pressure or survives being the seventh charity to land in someone's inbox that week.
Emotion comes from specificity. A photo of a project site. A story from a beneficiary. A thank-you that doesn't immediately pivot to another ask. Karl described MMS as a billboard in the pocket, and the most effective billboards aren't lists of reasons to act. They're images that make you feel something in under three seconds.
An MMS sent to a segment of long-term donors showing where a project was 12 months ago and where it is now is not a campaign mechanic. It's a relationship moment. The cost-per-send is higher than SMS, but the audience is smaller and the return, both financial and relational, reflects that investment.
The practical threshold Karl suggested: think about your top 100 donors. Would a well-crafted visual MMS, timed well and personalised meaningfully, change how they feel about your organisation heading into tax appeal? For most, the answer is yes.
Putting LEE into practice before June
For fundraising teams with tax appeals approaching, here is how the framework translates into immediate action.
On loyalty: If consistent year-round contact hasn't happened, the window to course-correct is short but real. A warm, no-ask SMS sent in the next two weeks, something that updates donors on a project or simply acknowledges their support, will land better than anything sent cold in June. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It has to be genuine.
On engagement: Go beyond the first name. Pull in giving history, years of support, or a specific campaign reference if the data allows. A message that opens with a reference to someone's giving history earns more trust in one line than a paragraph of campaign copy. Ortto's people data makes this straightforward to build into templates.
On emotion: Consider MMS for high-value or lapsed major donor segments. Targeted is better than broad. A small, well-crafted MMS to the right audience can reactivate a relationship that a generic blast would never reach.
And across all three, the principle Karl returns to consistently: send less, but send better.
One compliance item that cannot wait
ACMA's sender ID registration requirement comes into effect in July 2026. Every organisation sending SMS in Australia needs to register its sender ID, the name or number that appears at the top of a message, through its SMS provider. This is not optional, and with tax appeal season creating high send volumes across the sector, it is not something to leave until the last minute.
If this hasn't been confirmed with your provider yet, that conversation needs to happen now.
The bigger picture
The most important insight from Karl's framework is also the most uncomfortable for teams in planning mode right now. The results from this year's tax appeal are largely determined by the quality of communication over the preceding 10 months.
That's not a reason for pessimism. It's a reason to start building the infrastructure now so that next year looks different. Automated journeys. Behaviour-triggered touchpoints. Unified data that makes personalisation possible without manual effort. These are not aspirational capabilities. For teams using Ortto with Tall Bob as their SMS provider, they are available today.
The organisations that will perform best this tax season are the ones that have spent the year treating donor communication as a relationship, not a broadcast schedule. LEE is a useful way to test every message against that standard before it goes out.
Karl Deitz leads customer strategy at Tall Bob, an SMS and MMS provider and Ortto partner. Listen to the full conversation on the Ortto podcast and read Karl's original breakdown of the LEE framework at tallbob.com/blog/loyalty-engagement-emotion.
Tall Bob is available as a native SMS and MMS provider within Ortto, allowing nonprofit teams to build behaviour-triggered mobile journeys alongside their full multi-channel communications strategy.
