Suggestion: E-mail, phone call, and SMS blast program

I apologize if this has a lady been posted before.

I am the YM steering committee representative. Part of my duty is to inform my constituents of any upcoming stake events that they are allowed to attend. To do that, I currently send e-mails. Unfortunately, I cannot reach some of my constituents or their parents via e-mail. Therefore, perhaps the Church should purchase some software that would allow people like me to draft a letter and have it sent via e-mail and SMS, and read aloud over the phone to those whose cell numbers I do not have.

First, usually you'll want an SMS message to be shorter and simpler than an email message. You may want to compose a different message for each of those formats to send out.

If you have an iPhone or Android phone, you can create a custom list using the LDS Tools app that pulls contact information from the church directory for whichever members are in the list. You can email or text everyone in the list all at once. This is only useful if the clerks in the ward have made sure that accurate contact information is recorded for each member.

If you don't have a smart phone: Most email programs let you put contacts into groups and and when you type the name of the group in the "To:" field it automatically puts in the email addresses for anyone in that group with an email address recorded. A lot of cell phones have similar functions, creating a group of contacts, then sending a text to the whole group.

You will probably need to do some manual checking to see if the contact information you have is correct and whether a phone number is a cell phone or a landline. If all you have for a person is a landline, I would suggest calling each one individually rather than using a recording. Nobody likes picking up a phone and hearing a recorded voice start talking to them without a "Hello" or "How are you?".

These are all good suggestions, but we have run into some issues.
- The phone number in LCR has no way to designate if it's a phone capable of receiving text or not.
- Many texting plans limit the number of recipients for a single text. Even though a leader can access all the phone numbers for his/her group, the provider doesn't allow a message to be sent to all of them.

douglasalbrechtsen wrote:I see several posts about SMS to large groups. I know that units are purchasing and using commercial solutions to work around this. This could become an expensive solution given the number of units.

Although texting is good it seems that push notifications to the app would resolve compatible number issues, be inexpensive, and scale globally really well.

Are there any plans to provide push notification to the app that can be composed in a way similar to current email group messages?

Do you mean something like the Circles functionality in Gospel Living?