Manage internal announcements via bulk texting

Intro

In your personal life, what do you do when you want to get a message out to multiple people and have the best chance of everyone seeing it right away? You use bulk texting. So why aren't you doing that with your important work communications?

The internal announcements use case

There are many use cases where text messaging is the best option, but we want to focus on internal organization announcements in this article. The use case is when a message needs to go out to a group (or all) people in an organization and you want them to see and read the message as soon as possible so that everyone is on the same page. These are time-sensitive messages that will likely change the behavior of what your team does next.

Examples in the wild

Some examples of bulk text announcements that come to mind that you may already have experienced:

Inclement weather
Utility service outage
School closing
Event canceled
Location change

The same types of messages also apply to your job. There could be an issue that is impacting customers that your team needs to be aware of, along with updates to the issue over time. An off-site event could be happening and some extra details on where exactly to park could come about. These are random things, but still showcase the importance of getting info out to your team quickly. Think of those things your team may have implemented a phone tree for in the past - those are all perfect candidates for text messages to the entire team or department at once.

Why texting is better than the alternatives

If you want to get a bulk message out, you have options. You likely already have emails set up for everyone and it's easy to craft and send a message to many. You may also use a chat app like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, or a number of others.

All of those options suffer in one critical area, timeliness of people seeing the message. It's up to you to decide if your message can allow for a gap from when you send it to when people actually read it. Oftentimes, announcements or alerts are types of messages where you want to eliminate that gap.

Here's a list of reasons you should send text messages for announcements:

Instant read - 95% of texts are read within 3 minutes of being received (source)
Short and sweet messages - the nature of texting apps encourage short to-the-point messages, which are great for quickly garnering the intent of the announcement
Ubiquity and accessibility - nearly everyone has a cell phone, it's on their person most all the time, and it's not dependent on the internet
Avoiding group chat - when using tools like Rather Text, messages go out individually and are not susceptible to the ongoing reply chain to the whole group when a couple people have questions

Use tools built for business texting

Texting is better for announcements, but there's a catch (many, actually). In order to text, you need to do it from your personal phone, you can't easily share those messages, messages go out as group texts, and most devices have limits on the number of recipients for a given message.

The solution? Use a tool that was built to resolve all of those issues when it comes to texting. It's why we built Rather Text, to enable text messaging for businesses through the power of the web. Most of these tools, including Rather Text, have solutions built for texting in bulk and contact/group management.

Rather Text bulk message demo

Check out the video below that shows the Rather Text website in action of bulk texting to pre-configured contact groups using the tags feature.

Conclusion

In the end, regardless of the tooling you use for internal company announcements, you want to have your recipients have a clear understanding of the message, for them to read it in a timely manner, and to be able to respond in a way that doesn't distract everyone else that also received the message.

Rather Text was purposefully built to solve for the announcement-related problems called out in this article by using bulk texting.