In compliance with mobile carrier requirements for sending mass text messages, Planning Center's texting partner will assign your organization a 10-digit toll-free phone number. An organization administrator must register this number on the Billing page in Accounts to enable text messaging.
Go to the Text Messaging tab to register a number.
Important
Texting is only available to US customers. If you are an international customer, use a third party.
You must have a credit card on your account to register a number. If you don't already have a credit card on file, select Add Credit Card to go to the Billing page.
After adding a credit card, return to the Text Messaging tab and select Register.
Complete the registration form.
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Select the estimated amount of texts to send per month.
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Add the public URL to your Consent to Text form here.
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Check the box to affirm that you are a religious non-profit organization and verify that your organization details are correct.
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Select the number of text messaging credits you want to start with. You can adjust that number in account settings as needed.
Once you've reviewed and completed the registration form, the mobile carriers must verify your application, which can take up to four weeks. Once approved, you'll receive an email from Twilio and can begin sending texts.
In addition to the $5 monthly fee to maintain your phone number, you must purchase text credits to send texts. Credits are $0.02 each and can be purchased as needed.
Total cost: A credit is one text message of up to 160 standard characters to one recipient. Messages using more than 160 characters will be broken into two messages, with a 300-character total limit. The message size limit will decrease if your message uses special characters like emoji. Special characters are any characters not found in the GSM-7 encoding standard.
From the Text Messaging tab, use the dropdown to choose the number of credits you need, and then select Purchase credits.
Credits never expire. If you run out of credits, you'll be prompted to buy more when composing the text message.
Tip
To avoid insufficient SMS credits, an organization administrator can enable auto-refill in Account settings. This optional setting allows your organization to automatically purchase additional SMS credits when your account drops below a set threshold.
You will always know how many credits a message will require before it is sent.