Twilio SMS: Promoting Group SMS

Question

I am creating an emergency response application for my company. I have a corporate electronic database that lists all mobile numbers, email addresses, and hundreds of email groups. The goal is to build something that integrates with our supported groups.

Suggested stream:

• Users send an email to [goupname] @ mydomain.com with the subject '* text'.
• A mailbox listener selects this on the server, scans the group for all members and gets their phone numbers.
• The server sends Twilio SMS to all users in the group using their phone number.
• Any user in this group who replies to this message sends the entire group.
• I want my listener to come out of the picture at this moment. From here, it’s just a plain text group, phone to phone (s).

All of this is pretty easy for me, with the exception of part of Twilio.

As you can see, server / Twilio has a limited role. It really is just a gateway that allows us to use our extensive list of groups for group SMS. Can this be done with Twilio? I see many examples of iterating through a list of numbers with a FOR loop, but these answers return to my SMS #, I believe, and my Twilio number will still participate in the answers. I want to start a group SMS, and then I will not go any further.

Any thoughts / suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I am an evangelist from Twilio. I would like to help here.

This is all perfect for me. Of course, in order to send your first group SMS message as your example, you will need to sort through the list of numbers and send SMS to each of them from your Twilio number. This text appears to be coming from your Twilio number to the end user. If they answered SMS, you could get your Twilio number and send the website to your server, which will then send messages to everyone else on the list.

This should work like this, because SMS messaging is inherently one to one. So, in order to blow up messages for the whole group, you will need to send a message to the central number (Twilio).

Hope this helps. Drop me an email at philnash [at] twilio.com if you want to talk more about this.