Contents
General Tips
Welcome to our Best Practices page for sending Peer to Peer messages in compliance with 10DLC regulations. Please be aware that 10DLC regulation may change or be updated; check back here for updates. We're working with Twilio directly to ensure your texting program isn't affected, but we need you to do everything you can to minimize list errors and opt-out rates.
If you are unable to find the information you are looking for or have any additional questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Support Team at support@impactive.io We’re here to help!
- Identify Yourself as the Sender
- Every message you send to folks who have not opted into receiving text messages must clearly identify you as the sender, except in follow-up messages of an ongoing conversation.
- Encourage Opt-Outs
- The initial message that you send to an individual needs to include the following language: “Reply STOP to unsubscribe,” or the equivalent using another standard opt-out keyword, such as Stop2Quit, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, and QUIT.
- Do Not Send Links in the Initial Message
- Including a link in the initial message is one of the easiest ways to have your messages flagged or marked as spam. The easiest way to avoid this is to simply not include links in initial messages. If you absolutely must send a link we recommend sending it within a follow-up response to avoid getting flagged as spam.
- Make Sure Landlines are Scrubbed from Lists before Uploading
- Impactive will try to remove any landlines from your uploaded contact list for you, but it’s good practice to remove all non-textable phone numbers from a list before uploading it to an action to ensure higher deliverability rates.
- Monitor Text Banks Closely
- We recommend keeping a close eye on the metrics under ‘Carrier Filtering,’ ’Twilio Errors,’ and ‘Impactive Safeguards’ during your text banking actions. These values are some of the best predictors of whether your text bank is at risk of violating 10DLC regulations. If you see high carrier filtering or error rates, pause your text banks, adjust your scripts, and then attempt to resume and repeat. Or try again on another shift. Additionally, you can always message our Support Team at support@impactive.io if you’re seeing high rates and aren’t sure what is going on.
To view the results of your action in real-time navigate to the View Results page of your action within the Admin Dashboard.
Twilio Errors
These are the total number of messages that Twilio (our carrier) encountered an error when attempting to deliver the message to the receiver. You can see the total under the "Twilio errors" box.
If you want to explore more context, you can try exporting messages under the "export messages" button at the bottom of your "view results" screen.
On the messages export, these messages are listed with a 5-digit error code in the "error_code" column. For example, the error code 30003 means that the device that you texted was switched off when the message was received.
Twilio has more context on these in their documentation; however, if you're pressed for time, you can simply navigate to the "aasm_message" column to get a human-readable error message like "Contact has unsubscribed".
Impactive Safeguards
These are the total number of messages that were prevented from being sent by Impactive to protect your texting reputation and save you money; examples of these include landlines that were scrubbed from your list of phone numbers, and removing contacts who have previously opted out from receiving text messages.
If you want to explore more context, you can try exporting messages under "export messages".
On the messages export, they’re listed by the 4-digit error code, for example, 1302 (aka contact is unsubscribed).
Carrier filtering
These are the total number of messages that were filtered by the carriers (ATT, T-Mobile, etc…) prior to being delivered to the receiver. On the messages export, they’re listed as a Twilio 5-digit error code, specifically, 30007.
As a best practice, we typically encourage campaigns to cease the text bank if messages start to get filtered. You can email support@impactive.io for more direction on how to respond to carrier filtering.
In the meantime, we're working with our texting provider to ensure that campaigns maintain high deliverability in light of carrier 10DLC updates. Please continue to check back here for more updates from Impactive on how to continue to stay up to date with 10DLC best practices.
Filtering Safeguards
To help our clients maximize their message deliverability, protect their texting reputation, and to ensure compliance with 10DLC regulations, we have created filtering safeguards. The way these safeguards work is they detect messages that are highly likely to be blocked or filtered by the carriers and prevent them from being sent. If this is happening on your action, you will be notified through a series of emails so you can pause texting and adjust your script or target list accordingly.
After sending your first 1,000 messages, Impactive will begin automatically tracking your message deliverability. If it detects that carrier filtering or opt out rates are too high, an email will be sent to administrators to give them a heads up that something is wrong with their program. This means that too many messages that have been attempted to send were filtered by carriers and/or recipients opted-out of further communication. To resolve the situation, you can pause texting and review your target list and scripts to ensure you are following texting best practices.
Once 5,000+ messages are sent for any given action, if these problems are still detected, the action will be automatically closed.
Warning emails are sent to all campaign admins at both steps. Again, if a script is not revised upon receiving an initial warning email resulting in a decrease of filtering and opt-outs, the action will automatically close to protect the campaign. This ensures texting program is being spent on messages that reach intended contacts.
Why Safeguards Are Important
While we understand these safeguards may be inconvenient in the short term, they are designed to protect your long term texting reputation. This reputation relies on low error and opt out rates. Once this reputation is lost, carriers may shut down your entire program and it could take weeks to get it back up and running. For this reason, the Impactive platform is proactively protecting you from a total program outage. Another major benefit is that you will not be charged for any messages that are filtered by our internal safeguards.
How to Prevent Warning Emails
To prevent warning emails, always follow our 10DLC best practices. In short: always identify your organization name as the sender, include clear opt-out language in scripts, do not include links within initial scripts, and scrub contact lists of landlines and other non-textable numbers.
What to Do if you receive a warning email
To avoid having your action automatically close, we highly recommend reviewing the initial script and editing it as needed.
Double check that within the initial script you have:
- Clearly identified your organization as the sender
- That the initial message includes clear opt-out language
- That the script does not include any links.
In some instances, certain words, capitalization, and punctuation can trigger high carrier filtering, if all other best practices are met we highly recommend rewriting the script before continuing the action.
What to Do if your Action was Closed
If your action was automatically closed, you will need to create a new action. It is not possible to reopen a closed action. You can make a copy of the action but must edit your scripts. Impactive’s outbound messaging lock protection will allow you to proceed without double texting folks who were already outreached in the initial action. If the texting action was over a period of longer than 6 hours use our contact filters to create a new contact list for the action.
Wrap-up
We highly encourage you to plan ahead by creating a few other ongoing actions for your volunteers to engage with in the event that your action receives a warning email in the middle of an event, and you need to pause outreach to edit/revise the action. This could look like inviting volunteers to sync their personal contacts, participating in a friend-to-friend action where they invite friends to an upcoming event, or creating a video story about why they are supporting your cause/candidate.
We know 10DLC can seem complex, but we're here to help reach out to support@impactive.io with any questions or concerns.
Get in touch