Composing Text Messages

To send a text message:

Go to the Emails & Texts pane
Click the "+ Compose" button in the upper right corner
Choose "Compose Text" from the drop-down menu
Fill out the following fields

To

By default, the recipients will be all volunteers in your database, but you can choose to limit this by deleting "All volunteers" and:

Choosing to text volunteers in one or more opportunities or folders
Typing the name of specific volunteers in the database
Adding a new volunteer

Note: Volunteers must have a phone number with +1 country code (United States or Canada) to be sent text messages.

Related schedule (optional)

If you want to include additional information about a specific schedule, you can select that schedule here. Doing so will give you additional tokens to use in the body of your text:

Schedule Title
Schedule Link
Organizer Name

Body

The body will contain all of the content of your text. Messages must be 160 characters or less.

Using tokens

Tokens are used to represent information that changes depending on the volunteer being texted.

Tokens are always enclosed in curly brackets when used in a text message. For example, the text {{FirstName}} will be replaced by the first name of the volunteer being texted.

Some tokens are only available if a Related schedule is specified.

To access the list of tokens to include, click on the token icon to the right of the text message body.

Save as Draft

To save a text message to continue working on later, click the "Save as draft" button in the lower left corner.

Previewing Texts

To see what your text message will look like to volunteers, click the "Preview" button. A list of recipients will appear on the right. Clicking on the name of a volunteer will fill in the tokens with information relevant to that volunteer. Here, you can also choose whether to send the text message as an email to the volunteers who do not have cell numbers on file.

If you still need to make changes, choose "Back" to continue editing the message until you are ready to send it.

Sending Texts

Once you like the way your message looks, preview the email and then click "Send to # volunteers" to send those individuals the email shown in the preview.