If your organization is on the Pro plan, then you have access to a great feature called Contact Consent. There is a similar feature for those on the HIPAA plan and documentation that can be found here. Contact Consent allows you to request and manage your Address Book’s opt-in preferences within Textline. Opt-ins are required in the United States and most countries for SMS conversations, so instead of having to collect these through a third party form or at your office, you can use Textline to manage the whole process for you.

To set up Contact Consent, head to your Organization’s Security Settings. Once on the Contact Consent page, you can turn on the feature on the first tab and edit the message on the second. The message can contain whatever you’d like in the middle, but we require that you include your Organization’s name at the beginning and the phrase “To consent, reply YES.” at the end. Here is an example with the pre-filled, required portions in bold:

The Giant Pixel would like to message you over SMS/MMS. To consent, reply YES.

When Contact Consent is turned on, you will need to request consent before being able to message the Contact. When an agent tries to message a Contact for the first time, they will not be allowed to type anything into the message bar, instead, they will see a button that the agent can click to request consent.

When an agent requests consent OR a contact messages in for the first time, the Contact Consent feature will automatically send the message you set up. The Contact can reply Yes or No only. Any other reply will cause the consent message to fire again. If the Contact replies Yes they will get:

Great! You will now be able to message with The Giant Pixel. Reply STOP any time to remove consent and stop messages.

If the Contact replies with No, they will get:

You will not be contacted by The Giant Pixel. Please message us again if you change your mind.

Consent applies to the whole organization. If a Contact gives consent for one department, they give it to all departments, so it is important to manage consent accordingly.

Only if the Contact replies Yes will you be able to send messages, surveys, or announcements to the Contact. Not responding, responding with any other word, or responding No will mean the Contact remains unreachable.

If a Contact has replied No, you will not be able to request consent from this Contact again, ever. They will need to text you on their own to initiate the Contact Consent feature.

If a contact has not yet received or responded to a consent request and you want to send them an Announcement or Survey, Textline will send them the consent request when you send your Announcement or Survey. IF the contact responds yes within 72 hours of sending the consent request, we will send them your Announcement or Survey. If they respond no, do not respond, or respond after 72 hours, they will not get the Announcement or Survey.

You can always check the consent status for a Contact by looking at their info in the sidebar or in the Address Book. The consent status will state whether they have or have not given consent, or not responded to the Contact Consent feature. It will also give the date and time consent was or was not given.

The only way to remove consent that has been given is for a Contact to text in STOP. This unsubscribes a contact and removes their given consent. They can text in START again to re-subscribe and re-start the Consent process.