Using the Scale to Win Text Message Question Type, your callers can send a prewritten text message during calls to the person with whom they’re speaking.
You might use this question type to send a possible volunteer a link to sign up for an event, more information about your campaign or organization, or a link with information about their ballot.
An example of the Text Message Question Type in caller view.
The Text Message Question Type allows you to send a one directional text, so you won’t be able to engage in back and forth conversation via text using this question type. Think of this question type as a one time broadcast message.
Set Up
Before using the text message question type, one of your organization’s account admins must enable this feature in the “Messaging” section at the bottom of the Settings page in your dialer admin interface.
Turning this feature on adds a text message enabled phone number to your account to send messages from.
Your messages will be sent from a number matching the “default Caller ID” associated with your account, so be sure to make sure your default Caller ID is set correctly before enabling the text message feature.
Make sure your “Default Caller ID area code” is set correctly before enabling text messaging for your account
Configure Your Message
When building your call campaign’s script, select “Text Message” from the Question Type dropdown menu and write the content of the text message.
You can include any Contact Fields available in your Question script in the Text Message itself to customize the content of your text message by recipient (e.g. by including a first name field to address the text to each recipient).
Your Callers are not permitted to edit the text message script in a live call, though they will be able to edit the number to whom the message is being sent in case, e.g., the contact was called on a landline phone or the contact wishes to be texted on a different number.
Should you need to edit your text message script during a calling campaign, an admin can edit the text message question while your calling campaign is ongoing.
The “Text Message” Question Type in the script-building interface.
Reporting
In the View Results step of your campaign, this Question Type will display how many messages have been sent across the campaign.
Note that this is a count of how many messages have been sent, not how many contacts have been texted, so if you have multiple text message question types within your script, this number may diverge from the number of contacts messaged.
Text Message Question Type titled “Follow-up” displaying how many texts were sent through this campaign.
If you’ve included a Text Message Question Type in your calling campaign, then the campaign’s CSV export will contain columns recording the cell phone number that received the message in cases where your caller sent a message to a contact.
In many cases, this will be identical to the number you contacted, but in cases where your caller reached a landline number, and needed to manually input a textable number, this is where the new number will appear.
Text message question type information is not synced back to NGP VAN.