Text assignment involves moving unsent texts in your campaign to the accounts of people (texters) who can send them. By default, texts in your campaign are unassigned. In order to send out your texts, you’ll need to assign them to texters.

 

  • If you have a small group of texters, you can assign texts to them manually in the Texters panel of your campaign(s), following the instructions contained in this article. 

  • If more than a couple texters will be sending texts, we recommend using the Assignment Management section of your campaign to handle text assignment. Basically, these features allow your texters to assign themselves texts, and help you automate when texts are released from their accounts.

 

This article covers how to use Assignment Management. 

 

Assignment Management Overview

 

The Assignment Management section of every campaign is located beneath the Texters section and above the Script section.

 

Image displaying where to find the Assignment Management section in a campaign.

When you click on Assignment Management section, you’ll see three features:

  • Dynamic Assignment for Initials

  • Dynamic Assignment for Replies

  • Release Unhandled Replies



Image showing the three settings in Assignment Management.

We’ll cover each of these features below. As a general note on terminology, “Dynamic Assignment” is used in contrast with manual assignment, which is when you assign texts to people yourself using the Texters section of a campaign. Dynamic Assignment means that texters add themselves to the campaign by clicking on a link you create in Assignment Management. Once texters have added themselves to a campaign in this way, they’ll be able to assign themselves a “batch” or set number of texts to send. This saves you the step of having to individually specify how many texts each texter should send. 

 

Dynamic Assignment for Initials

For a more in-depth guide to Dynamic Assignment for Initials, refer to this article.


When you toggle on this setting, you’ll generate an assignment link that texters can use to assign themselves initial messages in a campaign. Clicking on the assignment link adds you to the campaign. Texters who use the link will then see a button they can click to receive a set number of initial messages to send. After completing their first batch of initial messages, texters can assign themselves additional initial messages (if more are available) by clicking on the button again.

 

You can customize the size of the batch dispensed with each button-click by typing into the “How large should this batch size be?” field. Batch sizes can be  changed at any point during the campaign. 

 

If you like, you can require texters to finish answering any replies from your contacts before they can click the button to assign themselves a new batch of initials. 

 

Optional: Make your Dynamic Assignment Links into Join Links

By default, the assignment link can only be used by texters who already have an account in your Spoke organization. If desired, you can turn on a permission to let new texters both create a new account AND receive a batch of texts when clicking the dynamic assignment link. 

 

To do so, enable this security setting in your Spoke’s “Settings” tab:

 

Image displaying the Security setting to allow texters to join your organization by clicking on a dynamic assignment link.

 

 

Dynamic Assignment for Replies

For a more in-depth guide to Dynamic Assignment for Replies, refer to this article.

 

When you toggle on this setting, you’ll generate an assignment link that texters can use to assign themselves unassigned replies in a campaign. Texters who use this assignment link will be able to access any unassigned replies from contacts that have yet to be answered by someone in your organization. 

 

Note: Replies are unassigned via the “Done Texting” button, Message Review, or the Release Unhandled Replies feature explained below.

 

When texters click on the link, it adds them to the campaign (if they weren’t added already). Texters will see a button they can click to receive a set number of replies. After completing their first batch of replies texters can assign themselves additional replies (if more are available) by clicking on the button again.

 

You can customize the size of the batch dispensed with each button-click by typing into the “How large should this batch size be?” field. Batch sizes can be  changed at any point during the campaign. 

 

Combined link:  If Dynamic Assignment is on for both initials and replies, Spoke will generate an additional link in the Dynamic Assignment for Replies section. Clicking on this link adds both the button to request initials and the button to request replies to the texter’s homepage. This can make it easier to manage many different text assignments at once.   

 

For ease of reference, each dynamic assignment link ends in either "initials", "replies", or “dynamic” (the combined link) so you can tell them apart. The rest of the link is unique, so just because a texter has one link doesn’t mean they can simply modify the end of it to access the other type of dynamic assignment link. They will need the unique link to access another type of assignment.

 

 

Release Unhandled Replies

Turn this on to automatically unassign any replies from the campaign that have remained unhandled (not gotten a response from a texter) for a set amount of minutes. This is a useful setting to turn on if you want to give texters additional flexibility, or if you’re concerned that texters won’t be able to keep up with their replies. This is also an easy way to generate unassigned replies for texters to claim with the Dynamic Assignment for Replies. Many campaigns will use these two features in conjunction to help ensure contacts are receiving responses as soon as possible.

 

Using Dynamic Assignment with multiple teams

If your Spoke account has multiple teams, you don’t need to ask people to join each team individually with a join link. If a texter has one account with your organization and you’d like them to text on another team, they can simply click a dynamic assignment link to be added to both the team and the assignment at once.