Rock U - Communications - SMS Conversations

Transcribed Video Content

Text messaging is one of the fastest, most personal ways to reach people. Rock makes it where you don't even have to leave the system to send and respond to SMS messages using phone numbers that you've set up in Rock. Let's look at how to use the SMS conversations block right now. Before you get started with SMS conversations, you're going to want to have system phone numbers set up. I'm gonna show you how to do that. So first head to admin tools then settings, then from settings, type in phone and you'll see system phone numbers. Now we already have a few phone numbers set up here. I'm gonna click on one and show you how we did it. So first of all, we entered a name that makes sense depending on the phone number you're using. Also, a description can be nice if you have multiple different phone numbers for different purposes and you wanna outline what the phone number is used for. Then we've entered a phone number here. And as you can see, the format is to add a plus one in front and then the digits afterwards. And something to note is you wanna make sure that you have a phone number set up already. In this case, we recommend using the service called Twilio, which is really nice for sending SMS messages, and we are using this phone number. Now here are the messaging settings. We've decided to enable SMS, which is important for this use case because we're gonna use the SMS conversations block. Now we've also picked to assign this phone number to a person. That's not something you have to do, but doing this will allow you to pick whether you want to forward SMS messages that come into this number that you've set up to a person. This will allow them to reply to those phone numb or those messages directly. You can also pick a workflow that you want to run every time an SMS message is received. You can pick a group of people that you wanna be notified when a new SMS message comes in. That can be really helpful if say there's a team the communications team that has their own number and you want them to be aware when someone's chatted back to them, then this is something where you'd actually get the notification within a Rock mobile app. So you'll wanna make sure you have a Rock mobile app set up, then you can link that mobile app from here. Now there are two special settings down here. This first one, suppress opt in, opt out auto replies is essentially a way to when someone picks whether they want to opt in or opt out of your messages, this is something that some providers such as Twilio will do for you. But if they don't do it, this is pretty important for compliance purposes. So you'll wanna make sure to leave this unchecked and allow Rock to do this opt in, opt out, auto reply handling for you so that if someone says stop and they don't want to receive messages anymore or they wanna opt in to receiving messages, Rock can help you do that. Then you can also pick if you wanna disable opt out tracking. That would mean that if someone opts out of your messages, if you were to enable this, Rock won't go update their SMS preferences. But if you left it not clicked as it is now, then Rock will handle that for you, meaning once someone opts out, they won't receive more messages. We're just going to save this. And another quick note is security is important here. There might be some phone numbers that you don't want staff members or volunteers to have access to, and you can easily pick that here. Now we're gonna go to the actual SMS conversations block. So to do that, you're gonna go up to people, scroll down and click SMS conversations. And this is a really nice interface to handle messaging with people, especially with multiple numbers. As you can see, we can pick which number we wanna work with here for sending or receiving, and we have some people we've already messaged. You can also pick to filter on the people that you wanna see here in case there's a specific person that you're looking for. But we've just been in a conversation with Jim Simmons, sent him a message, and you can see there's quite a few things we can do other than message sending. From here, we can add a note on a person's profile. In this case, it would be Jim's profile. And this note will allow us to basically from here, say Jim responds and he says, actually, I'm in the hospital right now. I need prayer, or this is an update on my life, you can easily add a note for them. You can also add a reminder. So for Jim, say, we want to follow-up with him in three months, you can easily add a reminder here so that that doesn't slip away and you can keep this relationship going. You can also easily mark a message as unread if you don't if you've already viewed the message but you wanna remind yourself to go look back at it again. Then you can make this full screen, say you're gonna be replying to messages for a while or you just want a nice full screen view, you can easily do that. Then in sending messages to a person, it's just any other text. You can type it out, click send. And in addition, if you want to add images, Rock makes that really simple for you. If you want to send a new message to a person, you can click here. This is what the dialogue will look . You pick a person in your database, type a message, you can add an image here as well. That will start a new conversation with them. Then something that's really special I wanna show you is SMS snippets. Now there's probably some communications that you find yourself sending again and again, and you don't wanna have to type them out, you can add a list of snippets that make it easy for you to pick something and the message is automatically put together for you and you've predetermined what that message looks . You can pick some that are shared for your team or even just personal ones. And here's an example. The children's ministry invite will insert and immediately you can see it says, hi, James. We would love to see your child at the next children'sministry..dot. And this is a message we set up and it entered Jim's name. This is his his government name. But you can use Lava to customize those snippets. I'll show you how that works in just a second, but I wanna show you the block settings here. So if you go to the settings on this block, there's some important things. You can pick which SMS numbers are allowed. And an example of when this would be helpful is say you wanna put this block on a different page and each team in your ministry or your organization has their own phone number, you can make sure that their SMS conversations block is configured to just use the number that's relevant for them. You can also pick whether you want to show only a person's personal SMS number, meaning one that's assigned to them. You can hide those personal SMS numbers. You can pick how long ago you wanna show conversations from, the max number of conversations, even what the Lava template is for what's shown on a person's info, and the note types you can pick from and more. So this is super, super helpful. But let's look at SMS snippets. So to edit those, we'll go to settings under admin tools and type in SMS. You'll see SMS snippets pop up. And we have some here already that we've created, but let's add a new one. This is really simple. Let's just call this one invite, add a description, pick the owner, and this is important if, you want only this person to be able to see the snippet. That's for a personal one here, but you can also create a shared one for your team. You can pick who has access to it and you can also categorize it to make it easier. But in this invite, what's special is you can just type plain text or you can use Lava. So we can say, hello, person dot first name. And when we send this, it will actually populate the person's name, meaning this communication is more personalized. We can say hello, person dot first name, come to our new event, and we'll save this. And we'll just leave this under the children's checking category even though that isn't relevant here. We're gonna head back to the SMS conversations block, go to Jim, and we're going to pick the invite. And there we go. That SMS snippet we just created is at our disposal. Now your team has one place to keep track of all of your SMS conversations, so get to messaging right now. And thanks for watching this video. Have a great day.