Volar Mobile Boosts Donor, Customer Engagement with SMS Communications

With Avaya OneCloud™ CPaaS, Company Reaches Customers Right in their Pockets

In the competition for customer engagement, reaching customers where they are—literally—puts organizations ahead of the game.

“Anytime you reach people in their pockets, with text, you’re winning,” says Jay Nevel, Co-Founder and CEO of Volar Mobile. “Email has a 46 percent open rate and text has 97 percent.”

After years of helping nonprofits with fundraising, Nevel and his longtime friend Matt Fosenburg started Volar Mobile to bring the power of text to nonprofits and businesses. “We thought, ‘What a great way to help businesses and nonprofits increase engagement, sales and donations,” Nevel adds.

The two envisioned an application that would allow organizations to reach their customers easily via text. But as they built their solution, they needed a backend platform to power SMS communications.

A Flexible, Budget-Friendly CPaaS

Volar’s founders looked at several leading cloud platform as a service (CPaaS) providers, including Avaya OneCloud™ CPaaS and Twilio. Only Avaya offered the combination of a reliable development platform, APIs to communication-enable its solutions and a pricing model that would help keep costs down as the company grows.

“OneCloud CPaaS really spoke to us, especially being a new company,” Nevel says. “We’re flexible and we need partners who are as well.”

While other CPaaS solutions levied carrier fees on top of text messaging fees, OneCloud CPaaS does not—saving Volar and its customers on every text. “One of our prospective clients expects to send millions of text messages. Can you imagine getting dinged on every one?” says Nevel.

OneCloud CPaaS additionally reduces costs for Volar with shared short codes, which are numbers that can send and receive SMS (and MMS) to and from mobile phones, enabling communication between Volar clients and their customers. Through Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, Volar can lease these existing, pre-approved short codes and avoid having to buy dedicated short codes—saving Volar thousands of dollars.

Those shared short codes enable true bulk messaging with virtually no upper limit, so businesses using Volar solutions can schedule and send multiple messages per second to reach hundreds or thousands of customers at once.

Cutting Steps—and Costs—for Nonprofit Fundraising

On the IT side, OneCloud provides simple API access, only requiring Volar to drop code into its application to receive a response. Then as Volar signs on each new customer, the company can have them up and running with text communications in a day or two.

For nonprofits, receiving donations takes just two steps with Volar Donate. They publish custom keywords on their marketing materials. Then using those keywords, donors text into the Volar platform to start the process. They receive a unique link to donate on a customizable page with the organization’s information.

The text-to-give application reaches donors wherever they are and enables them to donate rapidly. Beyond the ease of collecting donations, nonprofits also save considerably on mailing costs.

No More Slow Days: Driving Foot Traffic

For business clients, V Rewards supports their loyalty programs with on-the-fly offers that drive sales. They can send targeted, automated offers to increase foot traffic and keep customers coming back.

“On a slow day, a pizza restaurant can text an offer for half off,” says Fosenburg, Co-Founder and COO - President. “Or if a customer hasn’t been in in a month, Volar can text them automatically with an offer for free garlic bread. The free offer brings them in, but they end up spending much more.”

The response, so far, has been overwhelmingly positive. “Volar Mobile has impacted my business in the best ways possible,” says Steve Harrer, Owner, Antioch Indoor Sports Center and a Volar Loyalty customer. “Not only has it increased my foot traffic but it has given me a platform to eliminate slow days altogether. But what I like most are the real-time reports, which give me the data I need to capitalize and adjust marketing strategies.”

On the back end, Volar tracks real-time and historical analytics to give clients data for decisions and strategic planning. And for every transaction through Volar Mobile applications, organizations collect contact information, allowing them to stay in touch with donors or customers.

As Volar Mobile grows, Avaya OneCloud will serve as a flexible backend that keeps costs down for the company and its customers.

“Avaya OneCloud™ CPaaS definitely contributes to competitive advantage and better margins,” Nevel says. “It’s an essential part of our solutions.”