Difference between Broadcast Texting and P2P Texting
My target audience for this post is a rather small group of people, but of course anyone is welcome to read it.
For a long time I misunderstood how P2P texting worked.
Broadcast texting is easy to understand: an organizer drafts a message, associates it with a contact list, and hits "send," and the message goes out to the contact list.
With P2P texting, an organizer drafts a message, associates it with a contact list, and creates a form for volunteers to use. The volunteer gets the link, sees the form which has the message and one contact from the contact list. The volunteer hits "send," the message goes to that one contact, and the form refreshes with the next contact.
That difference is important. With Broadcast, it's easy to get marked as a spammer and easy to run afoul of legal requirements, so services often have tight restrictions on who you can send to.
With P2P, the fact that a volunteer is taking an action on each individual message makes it less spammy. For that reason, the restrictions are looser.
ActBlue, for example, will allow a P2P message to a new contact, but broadcast messages can only go to users who opted in to receive messages, perhaps by checking a box on a contact form.
That's why you get so many messages that are something like, "Hi Sally, I'm Roger, a volunteer with Baba O'Riley's campaign..."
Before you can send broadcasts or P2Ps with services like ActBlue or GetThru, you have to go through a registration process that proves your campaign or committee is legitimate. This could take a couple of weeks, and if you're not properly registered or there's any kind of problem with your registration, it could take longer.
Texting services also may impose requirements on your messages — for instance, ActBlue requires you to tell the user they can reply "STOP" to stop getting messages from you. When ActBlue gets a "STOP" reply, that contact's number gets blocklisted, and ActBlue won't send any more messages to that contact from your campaign, unless that contact opts in later.
These requirements are important. If a carrier, such as Verizon or AT&T, decides you're a spammer, they may stop carrying your messages.
I should note that my confusion about P2P texting was that I thought the first step was a text message to volunteers, and that the ask was for volunteers to then send a message to someone else from their phones.