Surfs Up: Brooks Lambert Gives Back To The Surf, Helps Nonprofits Communicate Via Twilio SMS

Surfs Up: Brooks Lambert Gives Back To The Surf, Helps Nonprofits Communicate Via Twilio SMS

Qwikon helps nonprofits communicate. Learn more about the Twilio.org program, committed to supporting nonprofit and social good organizations using communications technologies at Twilio.org.

Surfing was the catalyst that inspired Brooks Lambert  to found Qwikon back in 2012 [read our story about it here]. Now, Brooks is using his business to help give back to the surfing community, and show others how surfing can change their lives in the same way it changed his.

On the heels of a long surf trip in the summer of 2012, Brooks was driving home tired, hungry and looking for a good place to eat. He wondered why he had to hunt down a good restaurant, and thought that businesses should be coming directly to him. A few months later he launched Qwikon, a service that lets businesses send out notifications and last minute deals to customers via Twilio SMS.

Nonprofits Catch Qwikon’s Wave

Now two years after Qwikon’s launch, it’s not just restaurants and retailers using Qwikon. A different clientele is using the platform to streamline group notifications and scheduling — nonprofits.

Brooks says his hope when founding Qwikon was to make communicating through the platform “so easy you’d have no excuse not to use it.” The ease of use attracted nonprofits without the engineering resources, or time to build their own SMS notification platform. UCSC’s Volunteer Organization, Ride A Wave, and Global Brigaders use Qwikon to reach specific groups of volunteers, donors or event organizers via text without having to write a line of code.

Brooks knows first hand how powerful a simple text can be when trying rally volunteers. He launched his own nonprofit, Best Day Foundation, to help children with special needs experience the joy of surfing, kayaking and body boarding. If there’s a storm or surf conditions are too dangerous to go out, Brooks lets volunteers, kids and parents know by sending a text via Qwikon to a pre-selected list of contacts for that day’s event.

While Qwikon started as a just business communication platform, its quickly evolved into something much more. By lowering the barrier to SMS communication for nonprofits, Brooks hopes to help nonprofits change the lives of their community for the better– both on and off the surfboard.