BEDFORD, Mass., May 3, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SoundBite Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq:SDBT), a provider of customer experience management solutions, announces its involvement in the recently launched nutrition education texting program, "Dinner Made Easy." Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) and Share Our Strength are leveraging SoundBite's text messaging platform and mobile marketing expertise for this campaign.
The "Dinner Made Easy" program supports low-income Americans, offering parents and families the valuable tools and information they need to make healthier choices. The program sends text messages to subscribers' mobile devices with cost-saving ideas and tips to make healthy food choices, links to easy recipes, and other information to help guide their food shopping experiences. Subscribers will receive incentives to join the program such as coupons for healthy vegetable products and a sweepstakes for prizes.
"The opportunity to interact with and assist American families in making healthy choices is important to us," said Partnership for a Healthier America Chief Marketing Officer Drew Nannis. "We are passionate about making the healthy choice the easy choice and leveraging text messaging - and SoundBite's expertise - to reach target audiences is helping us do just that. Ending the childhood obesity epidemic will not happen with a single solution, but with multiple strategies working in concert - including mobile strategies."
The program leverages SoundBite's mobile marketing platform to manage subscriber opt-ins and deliver text messages for helpful reminders, recipes and tips, as well as facilitate SMS-based polls and survey questions. According to data from the Pew Research Center, text messages are a promising avenue for connecting with low-income families as households making less than $30,000 send and receive an average of about 60 texts a day. That amount is double the number of texts sent and received per day for households earning more than $75,000. This important insight into one of the preferred channels for low-income families makes text messaging a natural communications vehicle for this program and enables more engaging communications with families seeking healthier choices.
"SoundBite Communications is delighted to have a role in this important educational program working with Partnership for a Healthier America," said Mark Friedman, Executive Vice President and General Manager Mobile Services of SoundBite Communications. "Text messaging is the channel of choice for so many marketing and customer care communications. 'Dinner Made Easy' is a unique and innovative program that leverages our mobile capabilities to assure messages reach the broadest audiences – offering an optimal channel to connect with low-income families."
The initial pilot program, which kicked off April 22, 2013, will run through the fall of 2013.
About the Partnership for a Healthier America
The Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) is devoted to working with the private sector to ensure the health of our nation's youth by solving the childhood obesity crisis. In 2010, PHA was created in conjunction with – but independent from – First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! effort. PHA is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that is led by some of the nation's most respected health and childhood obesity experts. PHA brings together public, private and nonprofit leaders to broker meaningful commitments and develop strategies to end childhood obesity. Most important, PHA ensures that commitments made are commitments kept by working with unbiased third parties to monitor and publicly report on the progress our partners are making. For more information about PHA, please visit www.aHealthierAmerica.org and follow PHA on Twitter @PHAnews.
About Share Our Strength's Cooking Matters
As part of the national No Kid Hungry campaign working to end childhood hunger in America, Cooking Matters empowers low-income families to stretch their food budgets so their children get healthy meals at home. In hands-on cooking courses and interactive grocery store tours, participants learn to shop smarter, use nutrition information to make healthier choices, and cook delicious, affordable meals. Cooking Matters equips families with the skills they need to stretch their food dollars and maximize the benefits they receive through public nutrition programs like SNAP (food stamps) and WIC (Women, Infants and Children). The ConAgra Foods® Foundation and Walmart are national sponsors of Cooking Matters. For more, visit CookingMatters.org
About SoundBite Communications
SoundBite Communications is a customer experience management company with deep expertise in delivering cloud-based mobile marketing, proactive customer care, and collections/payments solutions. More than 450 global end-clients, including nearly 50 Fortune 500 companies, leverage SoundBite's proactive multi-channel communications and preference management platforms to power 2.5 billion personalized and compliant customer interactions annually across the full consumer lifecycle. Visit SoundBite.com and follow us on Twitter @SoundBiteComm for more information.