Bulk Messaging and Your SMS Number

Bulk messaging sends an email or a text to a group of patients at once, chosen by the tags on their records. Two things need setting up first: the hours campaigns are allowed to send in, and - if you want to text - a phone number for the practice.

The send window

Campaigns are not sent the moment you press the button. They are queued, and a background process works through them. The window decides when that is allowed to happen, and it is set in BackOfficePro admin under Only send during these hours, with a From and a to, plus Skip weekends.

Set it to hours a patient would not mind hearing from you - most practices use something like 9am to 6pm and skip weekends. A text arriving at 3am does more damage to a practice's standing than the campaign was ever going to earn.

Understand what the window does to a send: press Send now outside the window and the campaign is accepted and queued, and nothing goes out until the window opens. Progress sits at zero in the meantime, which looks exactly like a fault. It is not.

Getting an SMS number

Texting needs a phone number that belongs to the practice. In SMS Messaging Settings, Request an SMS number provisions one, and you will see New Number Provisioned and then Your SMS number once it is live.

This is the number patients see, and replies come back to it, so treat it as a published clinic number rather than an internal detail. Release this number gives it up - do that only if you are certain, because a released number goes back to the pool and cannot be reclaimed.

Tags decide who gets it

An audience is built from patient tags, so bulk messaging is only as good as the tagging underneath it. Tags are managed in BackOfficePro.

Keep them meaningful and few. Tags describing something durable - a programme a patient is on, a condition you run recalls for - are useful for years. Tags describing a one-off event stop being true almost immediately and quietly ruin later audiences.

Before the first campaign

• Set the send window, and check the times are in your own timezone.
• Provision the SMS number if you intend to text.
• Tag a small group and send yourself a test - the campaign screen offers Send Test Email and Send Test SMS for exactly this.
• Agree internally who may send campaigns. This reaches every tagged patient at once and cannot be recalled.

One legal point worth being clear about: patients who have asked not to receive marketing must not be in a marketing audience, whatever their tags say. The software will send what you ask it to send.