Integration of SMS (easier than you think?)

[mikesg]

Our youth dept asked me about a service they could use to text groups of people. They said this is the best way to get a hold of someone in their circle and I agree. I looked into a couple services that allow you to send a text message to multiple recipients, and one of them has an API so you can roll your own front end, or integrate it into your application. I think this deserves to be looked into at the very least. You already have an email function, and SMS would be a logical next step. So anyway, that's my feature request.

The company I looked at (I'm sure there are plenty):
http://www.clickatell.com/products.php

Tha API (I think):
http://www.messagingmarket.com/index.php

[Zorak]

We have looked at this type of feature integration in the past. We haven't had a lot of requests for it as of yet. Also, in looking at all of these third party SMS gateways, you (the church) would be paying a per message fee. The site that you linked charges 4 cents per message sent. This is probably one of the lower rates out there, too.

So, is this something that many of you would be interested in?

Of course, we are at the end of version 11's development and are not adding new features at this time, just curious for future enhancements.

[randandy]

I would LOVE a field for texting. Now you do not have to have a third party for most texting, one just needs to have the info to add to a number to turn it into an email... like "number@carrier.com" or whatever is needed for verizon, att, sprint... the church would have to know what carrier each number is associated with, but its very doable.

[Zorak]

It is doable, but hard to keep accurate if you have many people in membership. Since you can take your number with you, hopping from one carrier to another, they would need to remember to let the church know each time their carrier changed, which probably wouldn't be at the front of their minds to do.

[RevWJones]

I would be interested in a feature of this sort as our new technologically savvy pastor sends tons of texts, emails, etc. to keep us informed. I agree that this would be somewhat of a maintenance nightmare to track and update carriers if we are not willing to incur the cost of texting.

[randandy]

People switch emails just as often (students are a nightmaire about keeping up with emails) as phone carriers. If we want to keep people updated, we have to keep up with the technology. When we get our emails to sms bounce back then we pick up the phone and do a contact update just like we would do with our emails. In our remote area, we have few choices of carriers anyway. A new field that would contain this info would be so helpful, and free to send.

[tg6386]

I would very much like a way to send information via text message. I wouldn't want to have to pay for it though. Now I have to keep all the personal profile info on my cell phone so that as reminders or prayer requests need to be sent out I send to those requesting info by text using my cell phone and those requesting info to be sent via email with PC+. I have one of the fields identified as "contact by?" and have given the congregation the option to choose, text, email or phone call. We have those wishing info by call in a calling circle so we only have to call one person in the circle and they call the next one.

[RLM]

Just so that this thread doesn't die of natural causes I would like to keep it alive a while longer. We had to cancel services this past Sunday due to an ice storm in the Midwest. At the start only Sunday school was cancelled, but then as conditions continued to deteriorate all services were cancelled. We really don't have a fast, reliable method of communicating alerts to our members. We have several options, but SMS definitely would be the fastest! Below are some options that we have to consider:

NsFCC Office (recorded message)
Website
Radio (which stations?)
E-mails
Texts
Word-of-mouth
Facebook, etc.

I understand that 'maintenance' is the show stopper here because each carrier has their unique gateway for SMS transmissions and that would be a nightmare to manage. We are less impacted by that due to our rural setting and the fact that most of our community uses the same carrier.

This isn't a short putt, but my thanks to the PC+ technical team for at least exploring the options. You are in a much better position to do that than most of us that don't work exclusively with that piece of it on a daily basis.

[red3recon]

We haven't had a lot of requests for it as of yet.

+1 request

[kdhughes]

We would be interested in this, in the future it may become essential.