SMS announcement service?
February 24, 2015 9:29 AM   Subscribe

I am looking for a way to send SMS texts to a small group of employees (200-250 people) in case of weather delays & emergency closures (3-4 times a year). If I can set this up by tomorrow, I will be a superhero.

I saw this question from 2013 - are there any other options? Needs to be an announcement text (rather than group texting). Are there subscription services that will do this? Or should I look into rolling my own using twilio (or another provider)?
posted by wearyaswater to Technology (13 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
If the employees use twitter, you can have them receive SMS notifications for a special twitter account for this purpose. (It's a feature twitter provides).

As a bonus, now they can consume the notification in any way that reads twitter.
posted by phildini at 9:38 AM on February 24, 2015


Best answer: Twitter requires internet access. Old fashioned sms has more chance to get trough in times when its really needed... Google for "Bulk sms service" and you will find plenty to choose from :-)
posted by Mac-Expert at 9:40 AM on February 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


We use dialmycalls.com and I know they have a SMS feature.
posted by FergieBelle at 9:47 AM on February 24, 2015


If you have any programming ability, I'd roll my own with Heroku + Twilio. Their API and documentation are top notch. It wouldn't take long to set up at all.
posted by AaRdVarK at 9:58 AM on February 24, 2015


A lot of schools use Remind101 for one way texting.
posted by tamitang at 10:02 AM on February 24, 2015


If you're in the US, your cell provider may have a package. For a while, I had something called "Business Messaging" that was for precisely this purpose (though I didn't use it).
posted by onetime dormouse at 10:03 AM on February 24, 2015


http://www.sendwordnow.com/ is still, I think, the industry standard.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 10:07 AM on February 24, 2015


Twitter has SMS notifications for which you do not need internet access.

That aside, we use e2campus in our institutions (US higher ed), but there are others.
posted by idb at 10:13 AM on February 24, 2015


The easiest would to use their provider's e-mail to SMS gateway. The only hard part would be to figure out what carrier everyone is on to get the email address, after that you can just setup a mailing list.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:30 AM on February 24, 2015


I was coming to suggest Remind too!
posted by guster4lovers at 10:45 AM on February 24, 2015


My local school district uses a module from Infinite Campus to do this.
posted by 724A at 10:55 AM on February 24, 2015


I also came to suggest Remind. It works really well for me in exactly the scenario you describe.
posted by charmedimsure at 11:04 AM on February 24, 2015


Wearyaswater - coincidentally, I was researching this very question about 18 months ago. I just memailed you the raw notes from that (a list of various vendors and pricing that was current at that time).
posted by kovacs at 6:04 PM on February 24, 2015


« Older What is wrong with my peace lily?   |   What are some good resources for music therapy... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.