Rock U - Communications - SMS Conversations

Transcribed Video Content

SMS conversations are a great way to maintain and reply to incoming text messages, especially if you have large volumes. Now, you might already be used to having a dedicated response recipient set up for incoming text messages, and that's great because you'll get a text message coming in and you can send it to someone's phone. The conversations page is, again, better for if you have a lot of messages or if you have various different people that you want to be able to respond to messages and not just a single dedicated recipient. And so let's check out how that's done. So here from the SMS phone numbers page, which you can get to by navigating through the admin tools under the communications heading and then to SMS phone numbers, you can see that we have a few phone numbers set up. And two of them, the bottom two, have a response recipient identified and so those people will receive the responses to those phone numbers. However, the number at the top does not have a response recipient. So again, when you're setting that up, yes means that the responses will be sent back to a person directly. No would place the phone number on the SMS Conversations page. And so now that we have these numbers configured here, let's navigate to people and SMS conversations. And so this is an example of the SMS conversation page. And so if we walk through it, we're going to start near the top right where you can see that there are phone numbers that you can toggle from. You can see the drop down menu there that lists the phone number, so you can have multiple different phone numbers that you're tracking conversations for from within this page. If you have messages in the SMS conversations page, and in this case we do in this example, you'll see them listed along the left, along with the person's name, and then a brief intro of what the text message content is, and then you would have to click on it. And so in this case, we have the Kristen Marble conversation highlighted along the left there near the bottom, and near the top center of the block, can see Kristen Marble's name up at the top there just as a reminder that this conversation in particular is with Kristen Marble. Last but not least, you can start a new communication from this page by clicking the pencil inside the box icon there just above the list of recipients and just below the SMS conversations block header. When you click that, you'll be presented with a pretty simple window and it confirms the from phone number, so the phone number from which you'll be sending the message, the recipient, and then your message. So pretty basic there and then it'll automatically be on the SMS conversations page and then when they reply to that number, you'll see their reply on the page. The other way to start a conversation is in bulk from the new communication page, which is under people and new communication. And here you can send text messages to either lists of people or groups of people en masse, very similar to an email that you might send but with fewer options since it's a text message. And so that's already pretty convenient. You can go to the SMS Conversations page. You can start conversations from there, continue conversations from there, be able to see everybody with whom you're communicating in a quick and easy way, but it gets even better because of course one of the great parts about Rock customize it and add your own pages to set things up the way that you want. And so, let's say that you have three departments in your organization and they all want to use the SMS Conversations feature, but they don't want to step on each other and have to toggle back and forth between phone numbers and it could just get a little bit confusing. And so you could create your own page that would allow them to work separately but within the same area. And so let's take a look at that. You can create multiple pages and then use the block settings that you see here to set which number you want to be able to appear on each page. And so you can, if you have multiple departments who are all vying for SMS conversations, you or a technical resource perhaps would need to create separate pages and then you can define which SMS numbers are allowed to be accessed on those pages. So you can set the security settings so that, for example, first impressions can't see what the adult ministry's conversations are. And that's the SMS Conversations page. We hope you found this video to be helpful. Be sure and check out the Communicating Using Rock guide posted online. And thank you very much.