Consent requirements for text and voice messages

Students, parents, and faculty who provide mobile numbers to schools are effectively granting consent to receive SMS text messages for “important information" — sent as Important Announcements — as well as sending out non-emergency messages related to the school's "educational mission."

Best practices

• Send an email when a person signs up or provides an email. Obtain clear opt-in from your recipients before sending them messages (the opt-in does not need to be via SMS).

• Provide easy ways for your users to opt-out of messages by letting them know to "reply with STOP." Doing this will help you maintain a very low opt-out (STOP reply) rate from your recipients.

• Send SMS via Important Announcements, and limit it to notices such as school closings and important deadlines and announcements. More guidelines on the appropriate use of Messages XR can be found in our FAQ section.

• Use shortened, branded URLs for the highest deliverability levels when sending links in the message body. Do not use shared URL shorteners (especially free ones), as most are banned by U.S. carriers and may result in messages being blocked.

Unsubscribing from text messages

Users who text "STOP" to your SMS message number will be unsubscribed from all SMS messages. If they have unsubscribed and wish to begin receiving messages again, they should text "START" to your SMS number.

Unsubscribing from voice messages

When recipients listen to the voice message, they will hear an audio prompt to press a number to unsubscribe.