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

Bill Barry bill at billbarry.org
Tue Jun 7 05:14:13 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
> 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!

If you were going to be in India you could use google smschannels, but
it only works for Indian mobile numbers.
http://labs.google.co.in/smschannels/help?cr=in#create_channel


This company gives you a $10 credit to test their system. It might be
enough to get through a week.
http://www.groupflier.com/how.html

Bill



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