Shortcut to send the same message to multiple people

iOS
1

In drafts i have a few actions which take the draft text and then add the content from one of three templates and then sends this message to a predefined group of people (only 3) as individual messages. This works, however, i need to press the send button for each message when the drafts action runs.

Shortcuts looks like it will allow me to press once to send and it will send the chain of messages in the background. However, i cant figure out how to create this shortcut.

I made a simple one:
Ask for input
Get text from input
Message to contact 1
Message to contact 2
Message to contact 3 (all of these have show when run off)

When this runs, it sends the first message without needing me to hit send, but then i am just prompted to send the next two messages. So iā€™m Doing something wrong here.

I looked for a few examples, and there are some out ther but they make you select the contacts each time, which is what i want to avoid (as the messages go to the same group each time).

Any suggestions?

2

I do this from Drafts, with checkboxes to select from a handful of people I might include each time. Itā€™s a nice middle ground between having to select from my contacts and autosending to the same people every time.

3

Try putting a ā€˜nothingā€™ block in between the messages; that seemed to work for me?

4

Try this?

Just select your contacts in the contacts block. By default it will select all contacts, but you can uncheck them if you wish, or remove that option to select if you would never change it.

5

To expand: I think itā€™s something to do with the last message being passed in as an input. When I tested I had the same issue as you but it went away with the empty blocks.

6

Here is a post I did on this: https://brianrenshaw.com/2018/12/24/shortcut-monday-text-multiple-people-at-once/

I use it often

7

This seemed to work really well. I donā€™t really follow the logic of how the shortcut knows what text to put in each message, but it seems to work. Thanks.

8

What is an empty block?

9

It is an action called ā€œnothingā€. I used this action in the repeat loop in the example I provided above.

10

Whenever you see lines connected between the blocks the information is being passed through. Thus, you first input the text and since a message block receive text it takes that as the input

11

I would always recommend checking what the input and output are specifically, e.g. the send mail action outputs the input - so itā€™s an unbroken line, but you canā€™t get the recipient or subject.

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