Text me, privately.

September 9, 2020 8:31 AM

At my job, people will often say "can you text me that info". We would like to find a way to send requested, one time only texts to people without sending them from our personal phones.

I work at a University. Students will often request we text them info (typically a link to a document or web page). We would like to find a tool that will allow us to send them a text easily, but which doesn't require staff to send text from their personal accounts.

I've found a number of "text to give" tools out there, and also some for sending mass texts, but neither are quite what I want. Do you know of a tool we could use -- ideally a web based tool -- that will allow us do this?

posted by anastasiav to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

you can just email a text message. That's what I did in college. You need their number and cell provider, then you type in the information ([e-mail]) based on the correct info. There's lots of sites explaining how to do this:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-to-send-a-text-from-your-email-account/
posted by bbqturtle at 8:35 AM on September 9, 2020 [16 favorites]

What you're talking about, I think, is an SMS Gateway. You sign up for one of those services, purchase a number of SMS messages in bulk, and then you can use them to send messages that won't be from your personal phone.

These are mainly set up for bulk emailing/texting, i.e. for marketing or customer service things, but many of them are perfectly usable for one-off messaging.
posted by pipeski at 8:35 AM on September 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

You can do SMS with Google Voice numbers on any cell phone. Get a number, set up texts to forward to your phone, and ask the student to text the google number. Once that connection is established all texts to the student (each gets a unique 406 area code to differentiate it from other contacts) all reply texts will be sent from the Google voice number instead of the personal number. Here's instructions
posted by ananci at 8:46 AM on September 9, 2020 [7 favorites]

As a developer, I'd put together a simple app with twilio to do this- it would be pretty easy, and probably cost a few bucks a month.

If you don't have a developer available (and aren't a dev yourself), it looks like the Front system has a nice twilio integration: https://frontapp.com/integrations/twilio
posted by jenkinsEar at 8:46 AM on September 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

memail sent
posted by askmehow at 9:30 AM on September 9, 2020

You may have a requirement to keep a record of electronic communication, particularly if you're a state school, so while the technical side of solving this is pretty easy like with what jenkinsEar mentioned, having something that keeps you protected and within the bounds of your institution may be more difficult. The e-mail solution is a pain but is already part of your electronic records keeping process.
posted by Candleman at 10:12 AM on September 9, 2020 [9 favorites]

Send that info to the student's university email address. Please do not use 3rd party SMS services to send text messages to students on behalf of your organization. Personal phone numbers are consider PII and need to be treated the same as any other PII. I suspect your university has a policy on sending SMS messages to students and I suspect the policy for departmental level communications is "don't do it".
posted by jmsta at 12:17 PM on September 9, 2020 [4 favorites]

The company I work for uses Podium to do this. It has other functions like sending review invites, etc. But we use it primarily to text with customers. It can also be linked to Google business or Facebook accounts so messages appear and can be responded to from there.
posted by hannahelastic at 2:23 PM on September 9, 2020

Our schools use Remind for stuff like this. It's built for educators.

There's a web portal and free apps for iOS and Android/Google Play. You can send simple messages, links, or even transmit files to the class all at once.
posted by mookoz at 2:48 PM on September 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

SimpleTexting does this. You can send more than one text and reply if they reply to you. However, there's a small fee.
posted by rockyraccoon at 4:17 PM on September 9, 2020

And you can always just ask them for their email address and get it to them that way. They're students, they have an official university email and so do you. I did this with students for many years, I'd just tell them the university did not supply me with a cellphone but did supply them and me with email.
posted by mareli at 5:02 PM on September 9, 2020 [11 favorites]