Garnering a contact's consent is a requirement for any company to send text messages to contacts. Consent may be given to companies via many channels, but a common one is to ask for consent via a website. Textline helps our customers gain consent to send SMS messages by offering a webform where contacts can add their name and phone number and opt in to the messaging use cases for your department. Once the form is filled out, the contact’s information will be imported into your Textline Address Book, and you can text your new contact.

Textline’s Consent Webform lives at the department level. This is to help organizations collect consent based on the different use cases they may have for each department. This is also to help organizations conform to the current regulatory environment, which requires you to display the phone number that users will receive messages from when opting in to your messaging.

To set up your Consent Webform, head to your department list page in settings and select the department where you want to collect consent.

On the department’s detail page, select the tab for Consent Webform.

On the tab, you will be prompted to fill in a few details:

Select the name you'd like displayed on your webform. This will be your brand or department name as it must match the name on your compliance filing. This is to prevent carriers from flagging and blocking your messages. Remember, carriers can review compliance information anytime.
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It is a requirement that your contacts are aware of and opt in to the use case(s) for your messages. For those with compliance information filled out in Textline, we will pre-fill this item with what you have selected. If you do not have compliance information, please select the use case that matches the messaging for your department.

For departments where Marketing is a selected use case, your users will be asked to opt in to a separate, marketing-specific section. This is because opt-in for marketing/promotional messages requires separate, more explicit language by the mobile carriers.

By collecting consent on a website, the carriers require that you have publicly accessible Terms & Conditions and that they are linked in the webform. Please add the link here.

By collecting consent on a website, the carriers require that you have a publicly accessible Privacy Policy and that they are linked in the webform. Please add the link here. Your privacy policy must state that the consent you collect on this webform for messaging will not be shared outside your company.

The last item on the webform is an option to add a tag(s) to all contacts added to your address book via this form. If you would like to do so, check the box and enter the tag(s) you to add to these contacts. Type in the tags and hit return after the tag to confirm the tag. Tags must be a single word and contain no spaces.

Once you have entered the required fields, click save and your webform will be created.

Once created, your webform can be accessed via the link to the right of the page.

You can send this link to customers to collect their consent as it is a publicly accessible page. You can send it to them via email, have it on a form at your office, have a QR code at the register, etc, but please remember you must have their consent to send texts BEFORE sending the first text, so do not send this form in the first text message.

The webform is also iFrame compatible. This means that you may embed the form into your website so that customers may fill it out on your website without being confused by seeing the webform link. The code for the iFrame is available on the settings page. You may change anything within the code to stylize it for your website except for the URL itself.

Now that you have finished building your Consent Webform, you can begin using it to gather consent and ensure that you are collecting consent to text your customers appropriately!