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This new feature from ThruText allows your message senders to spend more time on what matters most – having real conversations.
For anyone who has burned out their mouse and their fingers clicking through thousands of ThruText messages, we want to ensure you know there’s now a better way: QuickSend!
QuickSend is a new(ish) feature from GetThru that allows you to send all of your text messages with the single click of a button. More than 200 of our clients already use QuickSend, and many rave about its positive impact on their P2P texting for organizing and fundraising. Donna Miller, CEO of Michigan’s Vote Voiced, lauds it as an “excellent feature, which allows our senders to work faster and with a deeper concentration on replies.”
But we’ve found that many GetThru clients are unaware of the QuickSend feature, so we wrote this quick post to let you know how it works and why it’s now OK to skip clicking.
When texters log into an assignment where QuickSend is enabled, they will see a “Send All” button instead of just “Send.” Texters can simply click “Send All,” and ThruText will do the rest.
To turn on QuickSend, account owners simply need to email our support team and ask that the feature be enabled. Once QuickSend is on, every new campaign launched in ThruText will default to QuickSend, but admins can toggle QuickSend off for any campaign where they want senders to click send on each message. Here’s what that toggle looks like during Step 2 of the campaign launching process
Why might clients want to turn QuickSend off? One reason is that some clients do highly targeted texting where their senders review each message and make minor tweaks to some messages. That’s why we have made QuickSend optional at both the account and campaign level, so clients have control over whether and when they want to use this feature.
In deference to our lawyers, we must disclaim that this blog post does not constitute legal advice, and clients should always consult their own lawyers when understanding the legal landscape surrounding P2P texting! That said, we believe it’s now OK to skip clicking.
Way back in 2016, when GetThru was still called Relay, we built our texting system to require a button click for each text message. We did that because the prevailing understanding of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) at that time was that 1) you could text anyone for political outreach as long as you were not using an autodialer, and 2) “human intervention” was what made our technology NOT an autodialer. That “human intervention” test was formally confirmed in 2020 by this FCC ruling.
However, in 2021, the Supreme Court threw out the same human intervention test in Facebook v. Duguid. The Court ruled that the human intervention test was nowhere to be found in the TCPA statute, so it should not be used to test what constitutes an autodialer.
After Facebook v. Duguid, we worked closely with our legal counsel to review the case’s implications for our software. We concluded that we could now allow most clients to dispense with clicking the button on each message. And that will remain true until Congress rewrites the TCPA or the FCC makes new rules in response to the Supreme Court ruling.
Clients may wonder whether there are any relevant state laws on this topic. The answer is yes; since Facebook v. Duguid, some states have passed laws related to autodialers (sometimes referred to as ‘mini TCPAs’). For example, in 2021 Florida passed Senate Bill 1120, which prohibits “mak[ing] or knowingly allow[ing] a telephonic sales call to be made if such call involves an automated system for the selection or dialing of telephone numbers or the playing of a recorded message when a connection is completed to a number called.” (Emphasis added)
Importantly, for many GetThru clients, that law is aimed at commercial texting (telephonic sales calls), so we don’t recommend QuickSend for any clients using ThruText for sales. But the Florida law, and another one like it in Oklahoma (HB 3168), does not appear to impact organizations doing outreach for causes or political campaigns.
If you are ready to turn on QuickSend or have questions about the feature, email support@getthru.io. Trust us, your fingers will thank you!
GetThru was created by veterans of Bernie 2016, where we helped build the campaign’s historic voter contact operation. In the process, we saw the need for better technology for large scale 1-to-1 communication that reaches people where they are—on their cell phones.
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