SMS Notifications

Motion Meetings can send bulk SMS text messages to participants before, during, and after a meeting. SMS notifications are useful for reaching participants who may miss email reminders, particularly for large-scale events such as union town halls or government consultations.

What SMS Notifications Can Be Used For

• Pre-meeting reminders — Remind participants of the meeting date, time, and their dial-in or join link, sent at a scheduled interval before the meeting starts (e.g., 24 hours before, 1 hour before).
• Meeting-day alerts — Notify participants that the meeting is starting or that voting is now open.
• Post-meeting follow-ups — Send a thank-you message or link to the recording and results after the meeting ends.
• Urgent announcements — Deliver time-sensitive communications such as schedule changes or technical notices.

How SMS Delivery Works

SMS messages are delivered through carrier integrations (Bell, Rogers, Telus, and other Canadian and North American carriers). Each message is counted in SMS segments — a standard SMS is one segment (up to 160 characters). Messages longer than 160 characters are split into multiple segments and reassembled on the recipient's device.

Delivery status is tracked at the carrier level and reported in the Communications dashboard.

Configuring SMS Notifications for a Meeting

1. In the Platform Admin Panel, navigate to Organizations and select the organization.
2. Confirm that SMS is enabled in the organization's feature entitlements. If not, toggle it on under the Features tab.
3. Navigate to Communications > SMS.
4. Select the meeting you want to configure notifications for.
5. Click New SMS Campaign.
6. Set the Send Time:
   • Scheduled — Choose a fixed date and time, or set it relative to the meeting start (e.g., "24 hours before", "30 minutes before").
   • Immediate — Send now.
7. Write the message text. Keep in mind:
   • Messages up to 160 characters are one segment.
   • Include the participant's name using the {{first_name}} merge tag if needed.
   • Avoid URLs that expand to long strings — use a short link service.
8. Select the Recipient List: All participants, phone participants only, or a custom filtered list.
9. Click Schedule or Send Now.

Viewing Delivery Reports

After an SMS campaign is sent, delivery results are available in Communications > SMS:

• Delivered — Confirmed receipt by the carrier.
• Failed — Delivery failed (invalid number, carrier rejection, or opt-out).
• Pending — In transit; check back after a few minutes.

You can search for an individual phone number to look up its delivery history across all campaigns.

Opt-Outs and Compliance

Participants can reply STOP to any SMS to opt out of future messages. The platform automatically suppresses opted-out numbers from all future campaigns for that organization. Opt-out records are permanent and cannot be manually overridden.