[PLUG] Looking for a Simple Way to Send SMS to a Group

Rogan Creswick creswick at gmail.com
Tue Jun 7 05:07:38 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Mark Phillips
<mark at phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
> I have a club softball team, and we are going to nationals at the end of
> June. We communicate very well using an email list, but when we are on the
> road not everyone has access to email. I am looking for a simple way to
>
> A. allow a member to send a broadcast SMS to everyone in the group. Not all
> members have Internet services on their phone, so email is not an option.
> B. allow a member to send an sms to a subset of the group, or an individual
> member of the group.
>
> I thought of this scenario, but it seems rather clumsy:
> For A:
> 1. Use a google voice phone number as the broadcast number

If you're able to add each phone to the google voice account, I
believe you can have SMSs go to all the selected phones, removing the
hacking on your end with the burden of doing the authorization
handshake with each phone.  Which way to go depends on how easily you
can produce correct python and how many people you need to SMS.

--Rogan



> 2. have google voice send the sms message to an email address
> 3. have a python script forward the email via each carrier's email to sms
> email address
> For B:
> 4. modify the python script to look for a tag in the sms body (e.g.
> "to:sammy"), and the just send the sms message to sammy, not the whole group
>
> I am sure there is a better way to do this. I only need this capability for
> 10 days, so I really don't want to spend a lot of money on it. My users are
> not technically savvy, so signing up for a twitter account is probably more
> effort than they want to expend. If I give them a phone number and say "Send
> text messages to this number", they will probably do it.
>
> Thanks for any suggestions you may have!
>
> Mark
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