The On the Inside exhibition by Craft Contemporary displays artwork of forgotten creatives - mostly LGBTQ - incarcerated in prisons, giving hundreds of expressive prisoners a platform to voice their message and be understood through words and art. By using FrontlineSMS, exhibition visitors have an opportunity to engage directly with the imprisoned artists through an innovative automated integration between SMS messages and printed mail.
FrontlineSMS teamed up with Black and Pink, a grassroots advocacy organisation fighting for LGBTQ prisoner needs, to build an interactive messaging platform that enables exhibition attendees to comment on the artwork via SMS. Those messages are collected, grouped, and sent as letters in the mail to the artists directly in their prisons. This interaction helps Black and Pink acquire supporters, invite gallery goers to share their email addresses, join a pen pal program, or sign up for notifications on future events.
When gallery visitors see a piece of work that they wish to share feedback on, they send their message from their phone as an SMS containing the artist’s code which is appended on the artwork. Once an artist receives enough messages to fill a letter, their tailor-made FrontlineSMS platform collates different visitors’ messages SMS texts into one letter. This is packaged up and sent from Black and Pink with theirletter template design and return address. An integration with Lob via API then automatically creates a letter and posts it. A few days later the artist receives the letter with the messages!
Through the FrontlineSMS system, the communication gap between the artists and the exhibition attendees has been bridged. Using SMS as the messaging channel means the system is inclusive to all visitors and does not require any form of download, installation or data connectivity. Visitors can even continue to send messages after they have left the exhibition as the artist’s impact stays with them.
“As a result of the system developed by FrontlineSMS, visitors of the museum were able to engage with the artists and send them private messages about the art. The automated SMS workflows allowed us to add a bridge between our incarcerated artists and attendees, and capture additional information from our attendees, all without adding to our daily workload, which was also critical.”
A first time visitor interacting with the artist receives an automated reply thanking them for the message. After 24 hours of sending their first message, they will receive a follow up SMS thanking them for their attendance and asking for an email address to keep in touch. If they reply, the email address is attached to the visitor’s contact record. The tailor-made automations that make all of this possible are reusable each year.
Two of the actions managed by the FrontlineSMS Activities; on the left you see the system catch a message that did not match an artist and the system informs the user. The right hand flow shows an inbound artist message received from a visitor; it shows a confirmation message that the feedback was received and will be shared with the artist, and also the programmatic follow ups that occur afterwards.