CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello

Hi

I am new to CiviCRM and investigating its SMS capabilities for some use cases in developing countries.

Neat. The charity I worked for until a couple of weeks back uses Civi's SMS capabilities extensively - it's great for engagement.

- sending out SMSes (and allowing only particular people to send out SMSes to particular groups of contacts)

I am 99% sure that you can do this just through configuring Civi & Drupal. Perhaps someone else would like to confirm?

- allowing contacts to send SMSes into the system, with the SMS getting logged as an activity so that someone can read it and reply to it from within the system

Yes, absolutely. You'll need to rent a provider's line however (although at FF towers we use Clickatell there are others to choose from).

- allowing contacts to use keywords within the SMS they send into the system, for example keyword to specify which department they are sending the SMS to, so that the SMS is visible in the system only to people in that department/group

Sadly, this capability would need to be customised for you, as it's quite a specific use case. I'm sure a lot of freelance developers would be happy to help you here though.

- allowing contacts to self register in the system by SMS through sending a keyword together with their name and one other field to the system

Ooh. No, not out of the box. If an unknown contact SMS your system a contact will be created with their number attached. You could:

a) go through them manually - contacts created this way are really easy to find, and with a tiny bit of code tweaking would be easier still.
b) pay a developer to add this functionality to Civi for you. FF has a huge number of customisations to help us do things that are uniquely specific to their work, but using Civi as a basis takes you 99% of the way there and is therefore a tiny fraction of the cost of developing it from scratch.

- allowing contacts to include hashtags in their SMS (#) like in twitter, and these being interpreted by CiviCRM as tags so that we can get aggregate statistics on numbers of SMSes with different tags

Again, this is quite specific functionality that would need to be developed for you, but using Civi as a basis makes this far cheaper.

My understanding is that the first two are possible in the current code but the last three are not - is that correct ?

Basically yes, but like I say, Civi is very easy to extend & customise at a code level.