Cusotm Messages

[Srinivasa Rao Yedida]

Hi

I Recently started using Frontline SMS.2. Really it is grate software. It is useful a lot to Us.

Please help me about creating custom message to Our student parents about their marks like

1) Created  Parents Mobile numbers as a one Group

2) Student obtained marks as their performance in each subject.

Now I want link each subject wise student marks to their parents mobile numbers and same date plan to import (CSV File) into frontline and sending to Parents

Thanks

Srinivas

[Sitati Kituyi]

Hi Srinivasa,

Glad to hear you're finding FrontlineSMS useful.

This is a very interesting use case. Unfortunately there's no very simple way to include custom data about a contact in outgoing messages, except for contact name and contact number.

We have discussed this in the office and have added this to our plans for upcoming releases. We will make it possible to access custom fields using the 'magic wand' tool, so that you could import this CSV file as you have set it up, and access the new fields using the magic wand.

Until we add this to the software, you could possibly achieve the same with the following workaround:

• Importing the CSV of contact with the 'name' set as the text you want to send out, e.g. "Your child's latest results: English - B, Computing - A"
• Send a message to all members of the parents group
• Use the magic wand to add ${contact_name} as the content of the message
• When this is sent, the ${contact_name} will be replaced with the text you set in the CSV file

The obvious downside of this approach is that instead of normal contact names, you will have the text above, but you can fix this by reimporting the contacts with the corrected names after sending the texts. Also, the maximum length of the contact name is 255 characters - you will not be able to import if the text is longer than this.

Let us know how it goes, and thanks for the suggestion!

Sitati