How to create an SMS campaign

Race Roster offers the ability for event organizers to create and send SMS campaigns to contact their subscribed recipients via text message. The SMS campaigns tool is great for sending any crucial updates concerning the event to participants prior to the race, sending results links to runners post-race, etc. 

To learn how to create an SMS campaign, please follow the steps below. 

1. From your event dashboard, click on Apps -> SMS Campaigns from the lefthand side menu.

2. Click the Manage Campaigns button associated with the event you're working on. 

3. Click + Create a campaign.

4. Creating a campaign involves four steps. The first step is to setup the campaign. Here you will want to name the campaign and select the appropriate credit pool to apply to your campaign. Please reference our guides on how to purchase SMS credits and how to share credits across organizations for more information on these processes.

Once you're satisfied with your setup settings, click save or save & continue. 

5. Next is the Criteria step. We will configure the campaign's send schedule and select when it should send. We have three options to choose for our campaign's send: 

• Upon match
  • Campaign will send to all contacts who match criteria, on an ongoing basis, until set end date
• At scheduled time
  • Campaign will send to all contacts who match criteria at set send time
• Immediately upon enabling campaign
  • Campaign will send to all contacts who match criteria when campaign is initially enabled

You will also want to ensure you are selecting any necessary campaign send/end dates appropriately. 

Next, we will configure filters and triggers for our campaign. For our filters, we will select which sub-events and/or races (races are results sets that are created within the results dashboard) we want our campaign to send to. When setting up triggers, select which trigger or action will initiate the send of this campaign to a participant. Triggers can be selected based off of: 

• Finish time
• Challenge (progress made during the challenge)
• Segment (segment place, segment race or split time)

6. Next is the content step. Here you can compose your message. You can also use merge tags to customize your message to the participant. Please note that one text message can contain a maximum of 140 characters. Merge tags can also increase the length of your text and may result in multiple messages. Do not add emojis to your message as this will cause sending and display issues.

Once you're satisfied with your Customize settings, click Save or Save & Continue. 

7. Next is the overview step. Your campaign details will be listed out on the left-hand side. You will be able to review your campaign to see if there are any errors or incomplete steps, review how many available credits you have to use, and send a test test message to yourself (test messages will use available credits). 

Once you have reviewed your campaign, click send & enable campaign to send. 

If you have any questions about SMS campaigns, please contact us at director@raceroster.com