Setting up a TNS text campaign involves specifying the recipients, composing your message, choosing when to send it, then saving, testing, and launching your campaign.
Starting a new campaign
To set up a new text campaign in TNS, click the Text campaigns option on the left.
The screen that appears will display a number of options. These options are templates that provide the starting point for your campaign.
The following templates are available:
-
Text to email non-openers
If you want to send a text to recipients of a particular manual email successfully sent from your Wild Apricot account within the last 21 days who have not opened the message -
Remind about membership renewal
If you want to send a text to members with a status of Pending - Renewal -
Send update to event registrants
If you want to send a text to contacts who are currently registered for a particular event -
Create a campaign from scratch
If you want to choose from the available campaign filters yourself
After you choose an option, the Campaign details screen appears:
From this screen, you can:
- choose or change the filter used to narrow the scope of recipients
- display the list of recipients
- compose the message to be sent
- choose when to send the message
- save, test, or launch your campaign
Choosing a campaign filter
Filters are used to specify the recipients for your message. Depending on which template you chose when you created the campaign, a filter might already be selected.
To choose a filter, click the dropdown list under Recipients.
For each filter you choose on the left, you choose a corresponding option on the right.
For example, if you choose the Event attendees filter on the left, you can choose a specific event on the right.
For information on specific filters, see TNS filters.
Displaying the recipients
Based on the filter options you choose, TNS will display the estimated number of recipients.
The estimated number of recipients is the number of recipients with a value in the specified phone number field who match the filter criteria. The number of actual recipients may differ from the estimated number. If a contact's phone number is not a valid US or Canadian number, a message will not be sent to them. If you have set up a consent field and the contact has not consented to receive text messages from your organization, the message will not be sent to them.
To view the list of possible recipients, click the Show list button.
For each possible recipient, the status of their phone number is displayed.
A red phone icon indicates that the phone number is not a valid US or Canadian number. A message will not be sent to the recipient in this case.
To view the contact record in Wild Apricot for a possible recipient, click the icon beside the recipient's phone icon.
Composing your text message
To compose your text message, click within the Message box and start typing.
To personalize your message, you can insert macros. When you send a message with a macros, the system replaces it with an appropriate value before sending it to recipients.
For example, you could insert the recipients full name and the name of an upcoming event in a text message to be sent to registrants for that event.
For a description of the available macros, see TNS macros.
When you enter a macro in your message, a notification will appear below the Message box.
If your message includes macros, the system cannot accurately calculate the final message length before sending. Once the macro is replaced by an actual value, the message length may change. If the resulting message length exceeds the maximum SMS limit, the system will split the message into smaller chunks, and the final campaign price will increase since multiple messages chunks will be sent.
Choosing when to send
You can send your text message immediately or choose a date and time for it to be sent.
To send your message immediately, click the As soon as possible option under When to send.
To schedule your message for delivery later, click the On selected date/time option and specify the date and time using the specified format.
Saving, testing, and launching your campaign
Now that you've finished setting up your text campaign, you can take one or more of the following next steps:
- Save the campaign as a draft
- Send a test message
- Launch the campaign.
To save the campaign as a draft, give the campaign a title then click the Save as a draft button.
A screen confirming that the campaign was saved will appear. To resume editing, click the Edit button from that screen.
To send a test message, click the Send test message button.
In the window that appears, you enter the phone number you want the test message sent to.
You can send the test to any valid US or Canadian phone number. The test message will cost $0.04 just like any other message.
To launch the campaign, click the Launch the campaign button.
A screen appears confirming that the campaign is scheduled for delivery. At this point, you can cancel the campaign or duplicate it.
As TNS begins to send messages, this screen will automatically refresh to display the current status of the campaign.
For more information, see Viewing campaign results.
