Sending SMS to your teams

Where to find it

Open your campaign dashboard and go to Marketing & Outreach → SMS Center. The toolbar has two views: Compose and History.

Writing the message

Type your text in the Compose SMS card. As you write:

• A circular counter shows characters remaining and how many SMS Segments your message will use. A standard segment is 160 characters; emoji or non-Latin characters (like Hebrew or Russian) switch the message to a different encoding and shrink each segment to 70 characters — the studio warns you when this happens.
• A live phone preview on the right shows exactly how the message will look in a recipient's messaging app.

Personalize with the Insert Variable menu or the one-tap variable chips below the message box: Team Name, Team URL, Team Code, Campaign Name, and Donation URL. Each recipient's message is filled in individually at send time.

Tip: Keep it to one segment when you can. Short messages read better, cost less, and the Team URL variable gives every team a tap-ready link without eating your character budget.

Choosing recipients

Click Recipients in the toolbar to open the recipient panel. Three source tabs are available:

• Team — the default. Select teams (or Select All Teams) and the message goes to each selected team's leader phone number.
• Manual — paste phone numbers directly, one per line or comma-separated.
• Excel/CSV — upload a spreadsheet of numbers; see Uploading recipient lists from Excel or CSV.

The Manual and Excel/CSV tabs are locked until your campaign is approved for open recipients — texting beyond your team roster requires a one-time approval from the Pledgix team. See Texting beyond your team roster.

Every number is validated and normalized at send time, and every number — from all three tabs — is screened against the Do Not Call lists (your campaign's list plus the platform-wide one, which includes everyone who has texted STOP). Blocked numbers appear in the per-recipient list as DNC blocked, and a team whose every number is blocked is reported that way rather than silently skipped. Teams that have opted out of SMS entirely are skipped too. See Do Not Call and opt-out management.

Sending

Click Send SMS. Your blast is queued instantly and the messages go out in the background — you'll see a confirmation and can keep working. To send later instead, use the clock button to schedule (see Scheduling SMS and time zones).

Before anything leaves, the message is checked against carrier content rules — external links and certain restricted words are blocked. If your message trips a rule you'll see a Carrier Compliance Alert explaining exactly what to remove. See SMS content rules for the full picture.

Watching delivery

Switch to History to see every blast with a status pill — Queued, Sending, Sent, Partial, Failed, Scheduled, or Cancelled. The list refreshes automatically while a blast is in flight.

Click any blast to open Message Details: the full message body, a live progress bar, and counts for Total, Delivered, Sent/Pending, and Failed — plus a per-recipient list showing each person's individual delivery status. Carrier delivery confirmations arrive asynchronously, so counts keep updating for a few minutes after sending.

Related articles

• Scheduling SMS and time zones
• SMS content rules
• Tracking delivery: sent, delivered, failed