Sending texts on Spoke involves a minimum of two people: the contact and the texter who is messaging them. In order for texts in a campaign to go out, they have to be assigned to texters. But texters are human beings, and they can’t always send messages to the contacts assigned to them. Reassignment and unassignment help ensure that contacts receive timely, appropriate responses. Basically, these features make it easy to move conversations to the texters able and available to handle them.
Imagine a texter who has to dash for an emergency and can’t finish sending all of their initial messages. Or a texter who can only devote a few hours to a critical GOTV campaign and won’t be able to monitor any replies afterward. Or a texter who isn’t equipped to respond to a message they received, say because it’s in another language. In these situations, many admins would choose to move the conversations to another texter’s account: this is called reassignment. Another option would be to simply take the conversations off the texter’s account, which is called unassignment.
Spoke offers several ways to customize the reassignment and unassignment process:
Message Review - where admins have control over every conversation in the account and can reassign or unassign individually or in bulk
Dynamic Assignment - toggled on in the Assignment Management section of a campaign, this set of features allows you to automate aspects of assignment, reassignment, and unassignment
Done for the Day? button - toggled on in the Settings page, this feature allows texters to unassign themselves from every campaign they’re currently in
This article goes into more detail about using Message Review. You can read more about how to use Dynamic Assignment here.
Using Message Review to Reassign or Unassign Texts
To reassign and unassign conversations in Message Review, open the Reassign / Unassign box in the middle of the page. Hover your cursor over Reassign / Unassign (it will change color), then click to open the box.
Image showing how to access the Reassign / Unassign box.
The Reassign / Unassign box is where you tell Spoke whether to reassign or unassign messages. You will also specify how many messages should be moved and, if you are reassigning, who should receive the messages.
Image showing the Reassign / Unassign box with options to reassign or unassign specific amounts of texts. If you are reassigning messages, you must specify who will receive the texts.
Scroll past the box, and you’ll see the list of the conversations brought up by your filtering (for more on using the Message Filter, read our Message Review overview). These are the conversations you will be reassigning or unassigning.
The conversation list in Message Review shows the conversations brought up by your search in the Message Filter, and allows you to take action on specific conversations.
You can select a specific conversation (or several) for reassignment or unassignment by clicking the checkbox in its row.
Here’s how to reassign and unassign:
Reassign: In the Reassign / Unassign box, click the Reassign button, then type in the name of the texter who is receiving the conversation(s). Next, specify the amount of texts to be reassigned:
If you’ve marked conversations with a checkbox and only want those reassigned, click “Selected”.
If you want to reassign a specific amount of conversations, type in the amount in the “Custom” field.
To reassign all conversations brought up by your search , click “All # Matching”.
Once you have added a recipient and specified an amount, the button to “Reassign # Conversations to …” will turn green. Click the button to complete the reassignment.
Example of reassignment - the “Reassign” button has been selected, a texter has been added as the recipient, and an amount has been selected (here: the custom amount of 3 conversations).
Unassign: Click the Unassign button, then specify which conversations should be unassigned..
If you’ve checked the boxes next to certain conversations and only want those unassigned,, click “Selected”
To unassign a custom amount, type in the number of conversations that should be unassigned next to “Custom”
To unassign all conversations brought up by your search, click “All # Matching”
Once you’ve specified the amount of conversations to unassign, the “Unassign # Conversations” button will turn green. Click the button to complete the unassignment.
Example of unassignment - the “Unassign” button has been selected and an amount has been entered (here: selected conversations, meaning only conversations that have been checked).
Using Reassignment for Sweeping
If you are using Message Review to review conversations, it can be helpful to ensure that the conversations have been assigned to a texter beforehand. This is to make it easy to change survey question responses and add tags to a conversation if needed.
For context, Message Review allows admins to view conversations by clicking on the arrow icon in the “View Conversation” column of the conversation list.
Image displaying the conversation list under the Message Actions box. Click the arrow icon to open up the conversation.
This will open a window showing the whole conversation, the names of each texter who contributed to the conversation, an opt-out button, and a read-only view of any survey questions applied to the conversationYou can type a response and send it to the contact directly from this window, and you can view and delete tags from conversations. Note, however, that you cannot change survey questions, access scripts or canned replies, or add new tags from this view.
Image displaying a conversation viewed from Message Review. You can type a response and send it from here, view survey questions applied to a conversation, delete tags applied to a conversation, opt out contacts without a message, and click “Go to Conversation” on assigned conversations to access scripts.
If the conversation has been assigned to a texter, you can easily access the campaign’s survey questions, scripts and canned responses, and tags menu by using the “Go to Conversation” button. Unassigned conversations need to be reassigned to a texter in order for “Go to Conversation” to appear.