If your team is set up for classic peer-to-peer sending, every text in your campaigns will need to be sent out by a person clicking “send” on each message.
By default, Spoke accounts are set up for peer-to-peer sending, where every message is sent out by hand.
To get your texts out, you’ll assign a portion of your contact list to a user on your account - this “texter” then sends out the texts to those contacts. You can add as many texters to your campaigns as you like. You can also assign out your whole contact list to texter(s), or have texters send out the texts in batches.
How to assign texts to texters
There are two main ways to assign contacts to texters. You can either:
add texters to your campaigns manually, and give them a set amount of texts to send,
or have them click a link to assign themselves texts in batches.
We'll call these two approaches manual assignment, on the one hand, and dynamic assignment, on the other.
Option 1: Dynamic Assignment
You can let texters add themselves to campaigns and assign themselves batches of texts by clicking a link.
Dynamic Assignment can be turned on in the “Assignment Management” section of the campaign.
To turn on the link, go to "Assignment Management" in your campaign and toggle on "Dynamic assignment for initials", then hit "Save". Once your campaign has started, share that link with texters, and they'll be able to start sending texts. Learn more about how to use dynamic assignment here.
Option 2: Manual Assignment
Manual assignment means that you add people to your campaign, then specify how many texts they get to send. You can assign texts manually in the "Texters" section of a campaign or by using "Message Review".
Note: Dynamic assignment and manual assignment are mutually exclusive. If you want to assign manually, you don't need to turn on the links in "Assignment Management". If you want to assign via link, you don't need to use the "Texters" section.
Using Texters to Assign Initials
Every campaign has a section called “Texters”. This section allows you to assign initial messages to people who have created accounts with your organization. Look for “Texters” on your campaign’s creation page.
The “Texters” section of a campaign can be found between “Overlap Management” and “Assignment Management”.
Note: To access this page after a campaign has launched, click “Edit” on that campaign.
Image of a campaign’s data display page, where you can access the “Edit” feature to get to the “Texters” section of a campaign. To access a campaign’s data display page, click on its name.
Step 1: Add Texters to Your Campaign
To assign initial messages using the “Texters” panel, you’ll first want to add people to the campaign. You can either add everyone in your organization at once or add selected people individually.
Only people who have created an account with your Spoke organization can be added to your campaign; read more about how to invite users here.
To add everyone, click “Add All”. You can then delete people who you don’t want texting in the campaign by clicking the trash can icon next to their data.
Image showing the “Add All” button and the trash can you can use to remove people from a campaign.
To add select people, start typing a name in the field under “Who should send the texts?”. This will bring up matching people in your organization. Click the name of the person you want to add from the dropdown.
Image showing where to type a person's name from your organization to add them to your campaign.
Step 2: Assign Texts to Your Texters
Now that you have texters in your campaign, you’ll want to give them texts to send. Without this step, your texters would not have anything to do in your campaign. You can either write in the exact amount of texts you want each person to send, or split the texts in the campaign amongst all the texters you’ve added.
To write in the number of texts a person should send, type in a number in the field under “Unsent Initial Texts” in that person’s row.
Image showing where to write in a specific number of texts you want a person to have.
To split the assignment evenly amongst everyone you’ve added to the campaign, click the “Split assignments” toggle.
Image showing the “Split assignments” toggle, which splits the number of texts amongst the people added to the campaign.
Once you’re done, hit “Save”. The moment your campaign is launched, your texters will have texts to send!
Example of what a texter would see once they’ve been assigned texts in a launched campaign.
Texters will see the campaign on their Spoke homepage, a “Send First Texts” button, and a badge showing how many texts they have to send. All they have to do is click “Send First Texts” to begin the process of sending initial messages. For a guide on sending messages, check out this slide deck.
Note: The “Texters” panel can only be used to assign and track the initial messages in a campaign. To assign replies (texts where the contact has responded to your initial message), you’ll want to use Message Review or Dynamic Assignment.
Releasing Initial Messages from a Texter
Texters also lets you release any unsent initial messages from a texter’s account by clicking on the trash can icon in their row. If a texter has yet to send any messages, clicking the trash can icon will also remove them from the campaign.
When would you use this feature? Let’s say one of your texters is unable to send their messages because something comes up for them at the last minute. By releasing their initials, you will be able to assign them to someone else.
Using Message Review to Assign Initials
Texters allows you to assign initial messages before your campaign has even launched, as well as at any point in that campaign’s lifecycle. If you’d like to assign or release initial messages after a campaign has launched, you also have the option to use Message Review.
To do this, go to Message Review. In the Message Filter at the top of the page, type in the name of the campaign you want to handle. To view only initial messages in the campaign, use the “Contact message status” menu to select “Needs First Message”.
Image showing how to call up unsent initials in a campaign in Message Review: enter the name of the campaign, then select the conversations that “Need First Message”.
If you wish to further refine your search, you can additionally:
Toggle “Unassigned Only” to see only those initials which have yet to be assigned to a texter
Type in the name of a texter whose messages you want to move elsewhere
Now that you’ve used the filter to call up the initial messages you want to handle, Message Review will show you a list of every conversation matching your filter criteria. You can now reassign or unassign these messages by following the guidelines outlined here.