Starting from this week, citizens of Marchamalo will be able to subscribe the new SMS free service that the Town Hall wants to offer to all the inhabitants of the town. In this way the citizens a part from keep informed throughout the normal means of communication and Internet, will have the opportunity to receive directly on their mobile phones all the information about the municipal activities, such as cultural and sport events, alerts on breakdowns and all sorts of useful administrative information.
During this week the Town Hall is advertising all citizens about this new initiative by putting leaflets inside their mailboxes. The flyer informs about the characteristics of this service. Citizens have to fulfill the leaflet with their personal data and give it back to the Town Hall (during its opening times) and they will be inserted in the list of receptors of the messages.
At the beginning, the municipality invested 4.500 euro which will allow it to send 40.000 messages. The first statistics stand out a monthly traffic of about 5.000 messages. This first “pack” of SMSs will give to both parts a more realistic idea of the annual traffic and, as a consequence, it will estimate the cost of maintenance of this new service, which is totally free of charge for the citizens.
During the next months the service will be implemented and improved, both parts are already working on some useful ideas. The municipality will create a list of users for people attending the Sport School, in order to inform them in a self tailored way about the local sport agenda, including information on timetables, courtyards, etc… In the same way, SITSMS is talking with ADAC to find out solutions to use this informative channel to transmit information about employment.
All the SMS will be delivered to the citizens’ mobile phones with the originator “Marchamalo”, which will stand out all SMS sent by the Town Hall. The service can be used by all the mobile phones operators, just one thing is needed: the beneficiary must be register in the Town Hall of Marchamalo. Citizens will have to renew their will to receive the SMSs by writing, every January, to the Town Hall.