Texting from TouchPoint - Overview¶

Integrations¶: Texting via TouchPoint uses an integration with one of two third-party texting services - Ministry By Text (MBT) or Twilio. This integration allows you to send texts directly from your TouchPoint database. You can then follow up the text with an email, so that anyone in your targeted group who has not opted-in for texting or does not have a cell phone on his record will still receive your message.

Important

Your MBT or Twilio account is totally separate from your TouchPoint account. You pay MBT/Twilio directly. TouchPoint has no financial interest in either company and the relationship between your church and MBT/Twilio is managed by your church.

Note

Setting up your TouchPoint database to use MBT or Twilio for texting must be done by your Admin user. There are several steps involved, so please follow the steps closely.

Benefits¶

It is so easy to text to any group in your TouchPoint database. Wherever you see the blue toolbar, you can send a text.
Texts to groups of people go as individual texts, not as group texts.
You ensure full coverage by being able to easily click a button and follow up a text with an email, so no one will miss out on your message.
TouchPoint tracks all your texts. You will have a list of your texts and a report of those who were sent the text. If they were not sent the text, you will see the reason - either they have no cell phone on their record or they are unsubscribed from that group.

How Quickly Are Messages Sent?¶

As a basic rule of thumb, Twilio messages are sent at a rate of three messages segment per second for each Toll-Free Twilio phone number. A message segment is approximately 153 characters. (Remember that texts sent to a group of people are sent as individual texts, so one message sent to 50 people counts as 50 messages in this discussion.) So if you send a message to 900 recipients, assuming it is short (only one segment) it will take about five minutes (300 seconds) for all the messages to be sent to the various carrier networks for delivery. Be aware that this is a general guideline and not an SLA that Twilio is bound to.

If you will be sending SMS messages to hundreds (or thousands) or recipients, or if your messages are time-sensitive and must be received soon after they are sent, you can contact Twilio’s Sales team about increasing your throughput.

Ministry By Text recommends using short codes instead of local or toll-free numbers. You may provision your own short code or use a shared short code with other churches. Short codes have a throughput of 150 messages per second whereas local and toll-free numbers have a throughput of 1 message per second. Additionally, Ministry By Text finds that local and toll-free numbers have lower successful deliverability rate (50%) compared to deliverability of messages using short codes.

Sending to More Than 100 Recipients

If you are sending to more than 100 recipients, when you click Send, the dialog box will let you know that your SMS message has been queued and will be sent, and the Send button will disappear (so you will not accidentally click it again and send the sms messages again). This is the same message you see if you use scheduled emails.

For this many recipients, it is more efficient for us to use our batch processor. This runs every 5 minutes on the hour. So, if you queue your SMS message at 11:03 AM, it will start sending at 11:05 AM.

Getting Started¶

Step 1 - Establish an account with one of the SMS providers.

The first step is to create a MBT/Twilio account and find your account numbers. Start with one of the following help article for instructions. To help figure out which SMS provider is right for your church, check out Texting with Powered By Text (PBT) and/or Twilio.