Mass Texts

Hi all. I am the new communications specialist in my YSA ward. My bishop would like me to send "mass texts" out to the ward. I saw a thread from 2014 about using the "lists" on LDStools. What else do you guys use?

My last ward used Twitter for mass texts (SMS follow), and it worked surprisingly well. The person responsible for sending texts set up a Twitter account, and everyone in the ward was invited to opt in by texting "Follow @___" (ward's account name). Everything posted is public, so you do have to be careful what you post and how much detail is included.

Lists in LDS Tools work great, except because they rely on your phone's texting ability, they're limited by your service provider's maximum number of recipients (usually 10 people at a time).

My last ward actually did that too. Thanks for the recommendation!

Our YSA Stake would like to go one step up. We'd like to pull their cell phone information from the MLS. Our dream would be to have the functionality to pull similar contact information for singles from the family wards parallel to our YSA wards. Their records would stay in the family wards, but we would be reaching out to them so that they could opt in as desired.

When I sent out texts in my last two wards, we gathered people's cell provider and cell number and used Gmail to send out the text messages. ( I.e. 8015551234@vtext.com). T-Mobile did start to block us and not all low cost carries are supported.

I don't use Twitter so I'm not sure if people who don't have an account can use sbradshaw's method.

We also had subgroups for those who wanted alerts about sports, rs/eq activities as well.

Our youth organization use text messages managed by GroupMe because of the ability both for leaders to add and remove people as the age out of classes and for the users to unsubscribe themselves. Most youth can receive texts but are on all manner of social media platforms so we can't standardize. https://groupme.com/en-US/

Because I'm not on facebook. I hate that the only way to know where activity days is to ask someone who is on facebook who was permitted to friend our ward primary so ton of sympathy for those who are stuck on a system that is convenient for someone else but not them! (youngest daughter turns 12 this year so I'm just biting my tongue)

I recently saw the "Remind" app recommended as a way to communicate in a ward. Has anyone used that?

I’ve used that for institute classes. Works wonderfully.

sbradshaw wrote:I recently saw the "Remind" app recommended as a way to communicate in a ward. Has anyone used that?

A few years ago, my wife and I were added to a "Remind" app without our permission or desire by a well-meaning stake choir director. We got lots of "communication" we did not want nor request. There was no way to get off the list without offending someone - I finally just marked it as spam in my e-mail program to get it all to stop.

I haven't found a working solution yet and I've tried almost everything mentioned here. The Twitter features suggested has been shut down. Remind says it's stricking for Schools.

My ward was just affected by hurricane Florence and we want another way (other than mass emails) to get something out to the ward. We don't mind if we have to ask the ward to send a text to opt-in. We just need an app that will send the mass texting.

Are there any solutions out there?

gbernal wrote:Are there any solutions out there?

Our family uses GroupMe. Someone needs to manage the group to approve sign ups, which may be a bit cumbersome at a ward level, but once established it works well.

A disadvantage might be that anyone can send a text to the group and everyone in the group will receive it. I have not explored whether or not there are broadcast with no response allowed options because our family does not need that.

quandmeme talked about it a few posts back.

i have created a list in LDS tools and sent a text. It was 48 texts. My problem was I used an Iphone and everyone who had an Iphone received the text and anyone that had an android did not receive the text. Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks

My best guess, and it is only an educated guess, is that the message was sent using the proprietary iMessage protocol (Apple Push Notification) as many of the mobile providers in the US limit the number of SMS (standard format across all platforms). I know that Verizon limits my recipients to 10.

i was going to post this as a separate thread but it’s similar enough to this one that I’ll post it here.

Considering the recent direction for wards to communicate announcements to the ward without taking Sacrament Meeting time there is a need for an additional LCR function. It would be very helpful if entries in the LCR member list had space for a text/SMS number. Additionally it would be helpful if there were a blast text feature in the send a message application.

I just submitted this feedback to LDS.org. If these features would be helpful to you I encourage you to add your voice to mine by requesting using the feedback option on LDS.org

wrigjef wrote:Considering the recent direction for wards to communicate announcements to the ward without taking Sacrament Meeting time there is a need for an additional LCR function.

That would be nice, but considering the shutdown of bulletins in the past, I'm not optimistic. I'd imagine that the thinking here is more along the lines of making sure all the announcements are in the program. Also, I'd question if SMS is an appropriate method of distributing bulk announcements.

There was an official communication that referred to electronic communication of announcements.

wrigjef wrote:There was an official communication that referred to electronic communication of announcements.

Which can happen in multiple ways and is encouraged but not required...

It falls to the local leadership to determine the best method based on their specific situation. If texts are subject to provider limitations, I would consider them less than ideal for mass communication that needs to reach the entire population of a large ward. But I almost never text and have very limited text capability on my dumb-phone so perhaps I'm missing the whole point of the discussion.

I can only speak for my ward, but if leaders relied on texts or SMS messages only, they would completely miss about 30% of the active adult population.

"Considering the recent direction for wards to communicate announcements to the ward without taking Sacrament Meeting time there is a need for an additional LCR function. It would be very helpful if entries in the LCR member list had space for a text/SMS number. Additionally it would be helpful if there were a blast text feature in the send a message application.

I just submitted this feedback to LDS.org. If these features would be helpful to you I encourage you to add your voice to mine by requesting using the feedback option on LDS.org"

If these features would not be helpful to you, don’t feel obligated to leave feedback

wrigjef wrote:There was an official communication that referred to electronic communication of announcements.

Can you give me a reference? All I can find is about making "minimal" announcements in the meetings.

russellhltn wrote:Can you give me a reference?

Elder Cook mentioned it in his October 2018 Saturday morning conference talk.

To help members prepare for the Sabbath, some wards already send an informative email, text, or social media message midweek. In view of this adjustment, we strongly recommend this type of communication. These invitations will remind the members of the Sunday meeting schedule for that week, including the upcoming class lesson topic, and support continuing gospel conversation at home.

"Strongly recommend" has caused our leaders to start looking for a way to do this, along with the realization that Church support for this activity is not very robust at this point. My preference would be email, but even that is problematic using available Church resources.

Our Stake gives us direction that builds on Church policy. It is possible that a message from the Stake quoted the above and added electronic communications methods. All of the units in this Stake have ward Facebook pages that follow policy. He wants to use those as well as the send a message feature on LCR to send announcements. We've also been instructed to have a "funnel" so members don't get multiple emails from different auxalaries.

Interesting. No such mention in the official announcement in letters or on the website. Is like to hear from some of those wards mentioned to see what lessons they've learned.

Our relief society just sent its first message via text through the LDS Tools App to all sisters in the directory. Several of our "members" who haven't been to church in decades are replying all with less than Christian responses demanding to have their phone numbers removed from the texting list. As noted earlier in this thread, that isn't an option. It would be nice if there were an opt in for text messages, especially since there doesn't appear to be an opt out. It would also be nice to not have those being contacted given the ability to respond to all.

theagteacher wrote:... It would also be nice to not have those being contacted given the ability to respond to all.

Would you really want to be sending mass texts with no reply capability? I would think that would irritate even some active members and likely drive at least some less-active members to go anti-. I'm very active, but if I started receiving mass texts with any significant frequency, I would have words with the sending quorum/auxiliary leaders and insist on the ability to opt out.

Using the "mass text" from LDS Tools is very different from using the Send A Message from LCR. The texts from LDS Tools are not using the Church servers or a Church program. They are using your mobile provider to send the texts. Your mobile provider does not offer an opt out, and probably never will. I object to mass texts simply for the reason that all replies go to everyone and suddenly my phone is alerting me to messages very frequently.
On a related note, during the recent round of hurricanes in North Carolina we were using the Send a Message application much more frequently than normal. I had several members respond to me that they did not wish to receive the messages. Some because they were no longer in the ward, some because they did not wish to have contact. After offering to move records to their new ward (if they provided an address) or explaining that we were simply trying to help them/check on their status I never heard from the members again.

I would estimate that if we used only text in our ward we would hit more than 80% of our people. Email is very low use. We are really needing some help to make our communications more effective.

GroupMe seemed great for managing our priests list plus their parents except that if users do not chime back after a certain number of messages they stop receiving messages. So it is a pain to roll out to the whole young mens because everyone has to say, "thanks" to acknowledge each message or else they eventually stop receiving.

So my office uses flowroute for VOIP and it has a really cheap SMS API and I have some extra DIDs that my office isn’t using. Twilio has similar pricing for its API. Problem is that even with their python templates, I don't have a webserver that I could use to integrate.

With 30 young men and if we have 50 parents who want notifications, that's between 320 and 600 texts a month or between $2.20 and $4.50 a month for the ability to do bulk texts.

I'm looking at tracking all the quorum members, their parents, and the bishopric in google sheets, triggering the messages from a google form, using a free AWS account to handle the triggers from the form to the provider's messaging APIs.

So now I’m just looking for some time to be able to see if it’s possible to tinker together the scripts and tie this all these platforms together. Or someone with enough development experience to tell me I’m nuts and that it can’t be done without a real web server and a paid solution.

Anyone out there willing to tell me if its feasible or if there is a better way to connect my recipient lists to whatever carrier? Once we get near $20/month, though, there are solutions like flocknote.com that mean I don’t have to try to tinker (and I don't risk getting my ward fined because it would have unsubscribe functionality).

Our Ward is running into all the issues I just read about in this thread, so we've started to look for a 3rd party option.

I've attached criteria.png which lists what we are looking for in such a system (many of the points are mentioned in this thread).

Here are the vendors we're exploring:

• http://www.clearstream.io/
  https://www.dialmycalls.com/sms-text-messaging-churches
  https://www.eztexting.com/who/ministries
  http://www.flocknote.com/
  http://www.protexting.com/
  https://simpletexting.com/text-messaging-for-churches/
  https://www.slicktext.com/industries/ch ... stries.php
  http://www.textinchurch.com/
  https://www.textmarks.com/industries/sm ... -churches/
  http://www.trumpia.com/
  http://www.txtsignal.com/

I'm honestly not sure we'll go down this road but we are exploring it.
Note that, like printed newsletters, these services are not free -- they start at about $30 a month and go up from there.

A simple solution for us has been using gmail to send out weekly reminder text messages. All you need to do is have someone send a text to a gmail address that you want to use to send the announcements out from, then you will have the correct address that you need to send the message out to. The message is then created in gmail as an email and sent to the list of addresses on file in the BCC field. Super easy, free and no problems with group text messages, as long as it's sent out to the BCC field. We actually have a 14 year old YW that manages it for us.

Thanks for the suggestion jsorens6.

When I googled for documentation on this process, I found this gmail help page.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/ ... T4XP-MDRmc

According to this documentation, the email needs to be addressed like so 0000000000@carrier.net
How do you find out the carrier (AT&T, T-Mobile ...) of each of your members?

Thanks again for the suggestion.

You're welcome! When they send the text to the email address specified you will be able to see the return address so you can make sure it's addressed according to their specific carrier format.

kmilleca wrote:How do you find out the carrier (AT&T, T-Mobile ...) of each of your members?

It appears they opt in by sending you a text that goes to gmail, and then you update the bcc field with the text to email address for everyone who opts in.

Of course, if people would rather get the messages via email, that's easy to do as well. They just send the opt-in message via email.

This looks like a really good system. As long as members don't mind all this information going though "the great Google".

I used to use email to text for my YSA ward. Some problems I had were that sometimes members on certain carriers (it varied which ones, but I seem to remember Sprint was a frequent culprit) would never receive the messages. The other struggle if it's a larger group like an entire ward was removing people. Since there isn't way for someone to opt themselves out, whoever maintains the list has to keep track of that.

A lot of the YSA wards here have used Remind. It's free, people opt themselves in and out as they want, you can create different groups within the system (like a Ward Council group, groups for different committees, etc.). It's targeted at schools, but their FAQ (https://help.remind.com/hc/en-us/articl ... se-Remind-) says anyone sending out non-advertising texts can use it. The other nice thing is that because people are opting themselves in, you don't end up going against any sort of data privacy policy with member data since the ward never provides any actual information to Remind. Definitely worth looking at at least.

I'm a Bishop of a YSA ward. I'm curious what wards are using now for mass text. The Remind app now costs $4 per person per year. For us with 200 members to text that is $800 per year. Does anyone else use a different app or does the "list" function in LDS Tools work? I can't get it to. Thank you!

I believe if you know everyone's carrier, you can email them a text message.

For example to send a text to (801) 555-1212:

AT&T: 8015551212@txt.att.net
Sprint: 8015551212@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: 8015551212@tmomail.net
US Cellular: 8015551212@email.uscc.net
Verizon: 8015551212@vtext.com

I've found that a lot of carriers block email to text anymore. Too much spam. Remind still has a free tier from what I can see. It has a 150 person per class cap. If you need more than that for your whole ward you could split it into Elders and Relief Society and then just send to both for general announcements. Maybe I'm not seeing where it says it costs the $4.

davesudweeks wrote:

sbradshaw wrote:I recently saw the "Remind" app recommended as a way to communicate in a ward. Has anyone used that?

A few years ago, my wife and I were added to a "Remind" app without our permission or desire by a well-meaning stake choir director. We got lots of "communication" we did not want nor request. There was no way to get off the list without offending someone - I finally just marked it as spam in my e-mail program to get it all to stop.

Nobody should be adding anybody's contact information to a third-party service without permission. It's against Church policy and in some places against the law. But most services do have a way to unsubscribe. For example, here's a help page about unsubscribing from Remind messages:
https://help.remind.com/hc/en-us/articl ... f-messages

I am a new elders quorum president. Has texting to a group improved since the last posting here in June 2018. Can you text the entire quorum at once? Do carriers still limit this to 10 numbers? Who is using this well and tips to use this function?

kleavitt56 wrote:Has texting to a group improved since the last posting here in June 2018.

Not that I've heard. However, the new Gospel Living app may change that - when it's finally released in all countries.

Hi kleavitt56:
I believe all of the limitations you've listed above still exist with standard texting (carrier limits).
I also have not heard about an updated offering from the church.
Our ward has been using Remind (remind.com) for more than a year now.
We have a master group for the ward, and smaller groups for the RS, EQ (and even a group for the parents of the Primary Activities for Girls).
Remind has allowed us to call a "communications committee" with several members that are empowered to send messages via text.
Messages can be sent from a web browser or from a smartphone via the Remind app.
The only drawback we've seen is you can add members to the group but they have to accept the invitation -- and some don't.