Rock U - Communications - sms-pipeline

Transcribed Video Content

Connecting with your community through SMS is about more than just responding. It's about managing the back and forth. And you can be overwhelmed by the number of messages that your organization is receiving. The SMS pipeline really just helps you set a structure for what happens when your organization receives a message. Let's get into this powerful tool in Rock right now. Okay. Let's go find the SMS pipeline in Rock. All you have to do is go to admin tools, then settings, and search for the SMS pipeline. There it is. So it's really easy to add a new pipeline whenever you want, but we're gonna go in and edit one we already have. So when you're looking at a pipeline, there's some simple details you'll want to configure right off the bat, such as picking a nice name, whether this pipeline is active. And it's important that you make sure it's inactive if you don't want this pipeline to be working in the background. And then also the description so you and other people remember what this pipeline was created for. But an SMS pipeline is simply made up of actions. And here's an example. Right off the bat, the first thing that always happens is an incoming SMS message. So when you receive a message, that's when the SMS pipeline goes into action. And I'm gonna drag in all the different actions we have here so that you can see them all working. One thing I wanna note is if you're ever wanting to test this with phone numbers that you have at your disposal, by clicking the settings icon, you can easily do some debugging and test what's actually gonna happen when this pipeline runs. Alright. Now let's look through these actions. The first is the reply action, and this is pretty important one. You're probably gonna end up using it pretty often. But let's just start by naming this reply for serving because we're gonna make this a thing where when someone sends us a message, we'll reply to them, but we're gonna make it conditional. So first of all, we're gonna make sure this action is active, and we're gonna click continue, and I'll explain what that means in a minute. And if you want to configure these advanced settings such as picking when this action expires or if you want to utilize interactions in Rock to log an interaction when this action runs, you can also do that from here. But we're gonna move on. We're gonna talk about filters. So these are really important if you only want an action to run under certain conditions. And what that means is, say, we have a phone number that contains a certain area code, and depending on that area code, we wanna respond in a certain way, then we could add that phone number area code here, and we could pick the response to those people. In addition, this is a really helpful one, message content. So let's say in this case, whenever we receive a message that says serving or serve, we know we wanna respond, thanks for your interest in serving. And the reason we know we can send this message is because this action will only run when any of these things are true. Now for this reply action, you can also pick to add an attachment. Then if you want to easily be able to log what went on with this conversation in the future, you can pick the save response, meaning that this response right here will be saved to your communication history, and you can see how people responded to it. Now I'm gonna save this, and you'll notice there's a little down arrow here. This is important because it's indicating we have continue selected. Now imagine this kind of a waterfall. The conditions of each of these actions have to be met for a continue to happen. So when someone sends an SMS message and it includes serving or serve, then we'll continue on to the next action. If not, we won't continue at all. So these actions actually wouldn't happen at all. But we do have continue on. Let's imagine we received one of these messages. We're gonna move on to the next action, launch workflow. And up top here, it's gonna look pretty similar to what we saw before for configuration. The difference is down here. So this action allows you to launch a workflow and pass in some information that we have from this person. So I've just picked photo request. Imagine we want these people that are gonna end up serving to have their profile photo in Rock. So what we're gonna do is right now we have pass nameless person enabled. That means that if someone who sends us a message doesn't have their phone number tied to a record in Rock, we'll still pass that person into this workflow. If you don't want that to happen, you can just disable it. Then we can use a workflow name template. And what's nice about this is you can use Lava merge fields here to make the naming of your workflows dynamic. Then we can also pick the workflow attributes that we wanna pass in here, so relevant things that we need to do this photo request. Let's just save this. We're gonna go to the next action. Now this give action, we cover completely in a different video. I'm just gonna do a high level overview. Again, there's some similar settings here, but the nice part is you can select some giving keywords for your organization or a keyword to set up your giving. Then people can pick to send money to a specific financial account through SMS. And that's really nice to help handle giving for your organization. That will allow you to automate a bunch of things that would have taken a lot of effort in the past. Now people can easily just message your organization's phone number with specific keywords, and they can even handle refunds as well. So it takes a lot of weight off of your load. Now the last action we're gonna cover is the most simple one, and it's SMS conversations. This basically is gonna be the end of the process most of the time for this pipeline. Now, this means at the end of your pipeline, these messages will basically end up where they left off in the SMS conversations block. So Rock has functionality for you to message with people through the SMS conversations block, and this will take the things that have already happened in the pipeline, and you can just pick it up. You can easily message the person who messaged you. After watching this video, I suggest you take a minute to go set up your own SMS pipeline and then take a breath and rest because you've just saved yourself some valuable time. Thanks for watching this video on the SMS pipeline feature in Rock. Have a great day.