We are pleased to now offer the ability to send and receive SMS directly from FAST. There are a few key points to introduce the SMS functionality that are necessary to understand the restrictions of the toolset and provide an optimal starting point for your institution to get up and running successfully. It's important to know how the system works, what the limits are, and a few "best practice" suggestions along the way.
We have developed the FAST Communication Centre to allow you to communicate with your student body and employee groups using a variety of methods. SMS is one of those tools. We allow you to communicate directly with a single person (student or employee) and we refer to this as direct 2-way SMS. We also allow for bulk or "mass" communication with students or employees and offer SMS as one of the methods to do so. We also allow you, when composing "mass" messages from a report, to include report values in the message to help personalize or add additional detail and context for your recipients.
While we cannot say what all the limits will be, there are always going to be restrictions when trying to send out "mass" SMS. These restrictions relate to the country of origin, the country of the recipient(s), the cities, the mobile carriers, the local and federal governments and more. When setting up SMS in your own FAST environments, we have taken these restrictions into account and established conservative thresholds to assist you in ensuring the best possible results and the highest probability for success when using SMS to communicate to larger groups.
In cases where you wish to use the SMS toolset to create and send out "mass" messages to larger groups of employees or students, it will be important to understand the limits that are system-imposed. These limits are crucial to try and limit the sending numbers being "marked as spam" by carriers or networks.
Here are several key metrics that have been set-up as Configuration Settings that you should be aware of:
Send opt-out instructions reminder after [in days] = 180
Daily send limit (per sending phone number) = 1000
Daily unique recipient limit (per sending phone number) = 200
Per message character limit = 320
Un-map recipients after period of inactivity [in days] = 90
Load Balancing is a concept that we have introduced to try and mitigate larger messages (i.e. messages to a larger audience) being "marked as spam" by the carriers or mobile networks. It is important, when sending out mass SMS texts to ensure that there are an adequate quantity of numbers in the sending Pool. In other words, if there are 5 numbers in a sending Pool, and 300 recipients in the intended "send to" list, we will automatically ensure that the system chooses to send "from" a balanced percentage of each sending number. This will ensure the highest possible success rate and lowest risk for being flagged as a "spam" sending number.
Here is an example:
Pool = Financial Aid Office
Total numbers in the Financial Aid Office Pool = 10
Total potential recipients for any single "mass" text = 500
FAST will auto-balance the sending numbers to send from all 10 numbers and will not exhaust the first number until it hits the 200 person daily limit.
If you were to try and send those 500 texts using only 1 or 2 numbers, it would fail as both the daily limit and the daily unique recipient limit would both be exceeded.
Mapping is a concept that ensures a certain level of continuity when speaking, via SMS, with a certain student or employee. If I send out a mass SMS message using the scenario above (Financial Aid Office Pool), I may, as a recipient, get a text message from 1 of 10 different numbers. To provide the best possible client experience, we ensure that if the Financial Aid Office sends out a second mass SMS in the days or weeks to follow, the "sending" number will be the same for the duplicate recipients. This ensures that those students have a single SMS thread on their mobile devices for clarity and simplicity. It also allows them to respond with a greater degree of certainty as to where the message is being delivered to.
After a period of 90 days, if there has been no communication (sending or receiving) between a sending number and an employee or student, we will un-map the linkage between them.
So if another SMS message is sent to the same student from the same Pool within 90 days, it will be sent "from" the same number.
If an SMS is sent to the same student from the same Pool after 90 days of no activity, it may or may not send from the same number as the history then becomes "un-mapped".