New to Spoke? This guide covers the basics you'll need to get started as an admin.
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Access your account
After you sign a contract, Scale to Win will send an email with sign up credentials for your Spoke account within 2-3 business days. If you don’t see the email, check your spam folder. You can also reach us at support@scaletowin.com.
Your Spoke account will have a custom URL with a unique domain name, i.e. https://yourorganization.text.scaletowin.com
Step 1: Click a join link
To access your Spoke account, you’ll click a join link. This link is specific to your domain, includes a series of numbers and letters, and ends in /join.
Sample join link: https://yourorganization.text.scaletowin.com/9zz9zzz9zz-9999-zzzzzzz/join
Everyone who will be using your account - whether to text or to help you build campaigns - should click this link.
Note: For security reasons, it is not possible to create a new account by simply navigating to your custom URL.
The join link for your Spoke organization can be accessed by administrators on the “People” page.
Administrators can always access this join link by clicking the + button on the “People” page of your account. For more detail, read on here.
Step 2: Sign up
Clicking the join link will take you to a page where you can enter your information to create an account.
Example of the “Sign Up” page seen after clicking an organization join link.
Use the “Sign Up” section to enter this information, then click “Sign Up”.
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be shown the texter homepage, which will say “You have nothing to do!”. This just means you aren’t currently participating in a text campaign.
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll see the texter homepage. This page will say “you have nothing to do”.
Step 3: Get Promoted
In order to access the rest of the tool, you’ll need to be given administrator privileges. If you’re the main point of contact for your account, reply to the initial email sent with login credentials, and Scale to Win staff will promote you.
Once you’ve been promoted, you can refresh your Spoke homepage, then click on your first initial in the top right corner. Click the name of your account to be taken to the backend of the tool.
To access the backend of the tool, click the name of your team in the righthand dropdown menu.
Account Admins and Owners can also promote other users from the “People” page in Spoke, following these instructions.
Step 4: Navigate the backend
Once you’re in the backend, you’ll see a left-hand menu with pages for building campaigns, managing people, adding opt-outs, and more. Here’s a guide to each of these pages.
The backend of Spoke is where you’ll build campaigns, register for texting, and more.
Register for texting
Texts on Spoke are never sent from your personal phone number, rather from numbers that have been set up for sending texts at scale. Your account will have phone numbers set up for you to use by default, but you can also access additional types of phone numbers by going through a registration process.
Many customers register for 10DLC, which gives you access to a ten-digit local phone number with an area code of your choice. You can also register for toll-free, a number with an 833 or 844 area code. Note that the carriers want groups to register for phone numbers, and that registration requirements are only expected to get stricter over the course of 2023; given this, we recommend registering asap.
Read more about registering here:
Enable blast mode
Spoke gives you the option to turn a feature called blast mode. By default, Spoke is set up for a peer-to-peer texting experience. Popular with volunteers, peer-to-peer texting means that every message in a text campaign is sent out by a person clicking a key or button.
In peer-to-peer texting, each individual message is sent out using a send button.
Blast mode means that your campaign script will be sent out automatically, at the click of a button. When blast sending is enabled, you can choose to send a portion of your texts, schedule your texts to send in the future, or send all texts at once.
With blast sending, the first messages of your campaign can all be sent out at once.
Blast mode will only send out the first scripted message you add to your campaign. To reply to contacts, you’ll still need texters to individually send scripted responses or type a response.
Blast mode can only be enabled by a user with Owner permissions. For more on how to set up blast, read on here.
Set up VAN Integration
Spoke campaigns can be integrated with NGP VAN, EveryAction, and NGP 8 and above so that data captured in your text campaigns automatically syncs back to your database. In addition, you can sync lists from VAN to Spoke.
To set up VAN integration on your account, please follow the instructions in this article.
Build text campaigns
To build text campaigns, you’ll use the “Campaigns” page on the Spoke backend.
Example of the Campaigns page, where you’ll create and edit text campaigns.
Click the + sign in the bottom right corner to create a new campaign, and click on any existing campaign to edit it, or view its stats.
Campaign creation: step by step
You can quickly create a text campaign by naming and describing your new campaign, uploading a contact list, and adding a script that those contacts should receive.
For a step-by-step guide on how to create campaigns, read on here, or check out our training slide deck. If you’d like to add pictures to your campaign script, read more about how to do this here.
Beyond the basics: scripted responses and data collection
You can further customize your campaign by adding more than one variation of your initial message, uploading scripted responses to guide conversations, and setting up data collection to track the answers you’re receiving from contacts. Here are more in-depth guides on how to customize your campaign:
Send text messages
Once your campaign has been created, you can either have messages sent out individually, or use blast mode to send out your first messages automatically.
View and move conversations
Once you’ve sent out the initial script in your campaign, contacts will respond to your message.
You can respond directly from the texter homepage or use a page on the backend called Message Review to manage responses. You can also move conversations between texters to ensure the best possible response is being sent, or to speed up response times.
Sort and manage conversations from Message Review
Message Review allows you to view and search the conversations in your campaigns, and move or release them from texters’ accounts.
Automatically release and reassign conversations in need of reply
You can also set up a timer to automatically release any conversation where the contact has been waiting to hear back from your organization for more than a certain amount of time. Released conversations can also be auto-assigned to texters who click on a link. Read more about the timer here, and the link here.
View and export campaign data
Every campaign has its own data dashboard where you can quickly view stats on its performance. Learn how to access and read the data dashboard here.
You can also export a campaign’s data as a CSV file to view saved data and any error codes. Learn how to export a campaign here.
If you are experiencing deliverability errors in the form of carrier filtering, these stats and error codes will also be surfaced on the data dashboard and in your campaign exports. For more on why filtering occurs and how to troubleshoot, read on here.
Managing opt-outs
When someone asks to be removed from your texting list, you’re obligated to remove them. Spoke has several features to help you manage opt-outs, including an automated filter that handles most opt-out requests for you. Once someone has been opted out in Spoke, you will not be able to text them again, even if you uploaded their number into a campaign.
If you need to upload a list of phone numbers that you never want to text, you can do so on the “Opt-Outs” page - more about this here.
Getting support
Need additional help? Find additional support articles here, or reach out to us directly by filing a ticket here.