Texting beyond your team roster (Open SMS Recipients)

The default: team roster only

Out of the box, the SMS Center sends only to your campaign's Team recipients — the leader phone numbers already on your team roster. These are people with an established relationship to your campaign, which keeps your texting squarely within messaging best practices.

That's why, in the Recipients panel, the Manual and Excel/CSV tabs appear with a lock icon. Hovering over a locked tab shows the reason: "Ask a Pledgix admin to enable Open SMS Recipients for this campaign."

What Open SMS Recipients unlocks

Once the Pledgix team approves your campaign for open recipients, the locked tabs open up and you can:

• Manual — paste any list of phone numbers, one per line or comma-separated.
• Excel/CSV — upload a spreadsheet of numbers, with smart column detection and per-column personalization variables (see Uploading recipient lists from Excel or CSV).

Everything else works the same as a team blast: content rules, scheduling, and per-recipient delivery tracking all apply. Every number you provide is validated, normalized to international format, and screened against your campaign's Do Not Call list at send time.

Getting approved

Approval is granted per campaign by the Pledgix team. Contact us and tell us:

1. Which campaign you'd like enabled.
2. Where your phone lists come from and how those people consented to hear from you (event sign-ups, donation forms, membership records, and similar sources are typical).

We ask because you — and Pledgix — are responsible for texting only people who have agreed to be contacted. Purchased or scraped lists are never acceptable and put the entire platform's sending numbers at risk.

If your campaign loses the approval later, the composer automatically returns to team-only mode; a send that includes outside numbers without approval is rejected with a "Not approved for open recipients" message.

Consent, in practice

Before uploading a list, make sure each number belongs to someone who:

• Gave you their number directly (a form, a sign-up sheet, a donation), and
• Would reasonably expect texts from your organization, and
• Hasn't previously asked you to stop.

Tip: Keep a simple record of where each list came from and when. If a recipient ever questions why they were texted, you'll have the answer — and if you ever need to demonstrate consent, it's one search away.

When someone does ask to stop, add their number to your campaign's Do Not Call list right away (see Do Not Call and opt-out management) — after that, every future voice broadcast and every future SMS blast skips them automatically, even numbers hiding inside a big spreadsheet upload. (Recipients who text STOP are suppressed platform-wide without you doing anything.)

Related articles

• Sending SMS to your teams
• Uploading recipient lists from Excel or CSV
• Do Not Call and opt-out management
• Consent, quiet hours, and compliance