Shortcuts help - send text reminder to all members of a group

iOS
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1

Hi Automators!

I am embarrassed to confess that I am a Shortcuts newbie, and I’m not sure if this is the best solution. Posting in iOS since I can imagine a situation where I might want to send from my phone, but a Mac or web solution would be fine if it’s the most efficient.

My use case
I’m a volunteer coordinator for a non-profit group. We currently use Mailchimp to send emails to announce our schedule of upcoming events, request volunteers, etc. But of course, sometimes young-ish folks like me ignore our personal emails after we are done emailing all day at work, so I would like to send a text to our members when I send an email.

The dream scenario would be to automatically do this inside of Mailchimp or with an integrated service that would sync back to Mailchimps reports of who opened or didn’t open the email, but I can’t imagine how complex that is or if that is even possible. I have investigated some services like Textiful, and could use that, but all members would have to opt in, and it seems like overkill for a group of about 40 members. I have reached out to Mailchimp support, but realized a DIY solution might be just as good, and free!

Shortcut goals
Happy to try writing a shortcut myself, but nervous about doing it with many contacts. I’m hoping you can direct me to the start of a shortcut that might already exist that I can tweak.

Here is what I would like a shortcut to do.

  • I can make a group in Contacts of all the members I would like to text. Some contacts have home or work numbers, so I would only want to text mobile numbers. I could create a group with just those with cell phone numbers, but it would be ideal to skip contacts without a cell number, so I could use the same group for emails if needed.
  • I would like to reference my iCloud contacts group in the shortcut and not have the human error of choosing 40 contacts each time.
  • Give me space to enter text and paste a URL to the web version of the Mailchimp email as the body of the text message.
  • Send an individual text to each of the 40 or so people in the group, not a group text.

Any links to example shortcuts or tutorials would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Katherine

2

Probably worth you taking a look at Zapier.

I think(?) Shortcuts only supports individuals and not groups for messaging. It used to be you had to enter individuals and judging by the wording in the contacts actions that looks to be the same today. So you might find it necessary to maintain two lists or just purely have a single list maintained in Shortcuts.

In terms of a starting point, search in the Shortcuts in-app gallery for ‘Help Message’. Just pull the page down and enter the details. That shows sending a message with additional information.

For entering the URL, you could use an Ask for input action, but I’m guessing yo may have copied it to the clipboard, so consider using the clipboard variable in the body of your message.

When testing ensure you keep the option to show when run enabled so you can sense check the content and opt to cancel the sending.

Hope that helps.

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3

Here’s a shortcut I’ve made that I think does what you want? https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e3174b4ec3b3493590ff45124712850c

It gets the contacts from a specific group (Shortcuts Test in my example), loops over them finding all phone numbers that start with an “07” (that’s the easiest way to identify a mobile number in the UK, that I could think of), and prepares a text to send to each that includes a URL from the clipboard. You could easily adjust it to prompt for additional text, or take the URL from somewhere else, etc. It will skip contacts that don’t have 07 phone numbers, too. If you untick the “show when run” button on the Send Message action, it will do it all behind the scenes.

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Thanks so much! I will test this week and report back.

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