Send survey links by text message (SMS)

On the Team and Enterprise plans, survey invitations and reminders can go by text message as well as email. Each text carries the person's own personal link, so responses are tracked the same way.

Phone numbers

Add a phone number to a contact on the People tab (click the Phone cell), or import a Phone or Mobile column with your spreadsheet. Numbers need their country code, like +44 7400 123456; numbers without one are left out of the import and counted. Texts always go to the contact's current number.

Sending

1. 1On a survey's Participants tab, choose Email links or Remind.
2. 2Under Send by, choose Text, or Email, then text to email everyone you can and text the people who can't be emailed (unsubscribed, bounced or marked as spam) if they have a number.
3. 3Edit the message if you like. Use {name}, {survey}, {organization} and {link}; the link is added at the end if you leave it out. Name your organization so people know who's texting.
4. 4Watch the count under the message: one text holds 160 characters, or 70 if the message uses characters outside the basic text alphabet (curly quotes, emoji, many accented letters). Longer messages are split and each part is billed. A message can use up to four texts.

People without a phone number, who replied STOP, or whose number can't get texts are skipped and listed with the reason. Automatic reminders go by the channel each person was last reached on.

In a survey offered in several languages, each person gets the text in their contact's language, with a tab per language to write it in. The count under each tab is for that language: letters such as č, ć, š, ž and đ use Unicode, so one text holds 70 characters instead of 160.

Delivery

Twilio reports what happened to each text after accepting it. The Participants tab shows Texted · delivered when it arrived, and Couldn't text with the reason when it didn't (the phone was unreachable, the carrier filtered it, the number doesn't exist). A text that wasn't delivered counts as not sent.

When the number itself can't get texts (not a mobile number, no such number, a landline, or it blocks them), it's added to your Not emailed list with the reason Can't get texts, so later sends skip it. Fix the contact's number and the new number is texted as usual; an admin can also remove the entry.

Opting out

Anyone can reply STOP to stop texts, and START to get them again. Texts come from a number shared by every organization on wrkflow, so a STOP stops texts from all of them. A STOP adds the number to your Not emailed list with the reason Replied STOP.