The Schedule Extension, now allows “schedule plans” to be created.

A schedule plan allows you to send out a series of messages to group members, based on the date when they joined the group. The joining date could be the day when they first subscribed, or the date when you, as the site administrator, manually added them to the group.

You can add as many items to a plan as you wish and you have the option to send out messages days. weeks, months or even years after the subscription date.

SMS, MMS, audio file or text-to-voice message types can all be added to the schedule plan.

The image below shows an example of a schedule plan for a group called “Schedule Planner Test Group”. The plan consists of 6 items; messages will be sent out to members, 1 day after the joined the group, 2 days after they joined etc.

Schedule Plan showing 6 plan items,

When you add a plan item, you can configure the following:

• When you’d like the message to be sent, i.e. the duration after the group member’s subscription date.
• The time of day when you’d like the message to be sent
• Whether this plan item is currently active or not
• The content of your message, which can include merge tags such as %firstname%, %number%
• An optional message suffix, which may be your site or company name.
• The message type (SMS, MMS, audio/text-to-voice).
• And a Sender ID,  which replaces your Twilio number with an an alphanumeric string, such as your company name, when people receive your message. (Alphanumeric sender ids are not supported in the USA).

The Schedule Planner functionality is outlined in the video below.

Stuart