The fundamentals of political texting for campaigns: what it is, how SMS and RCS voter outreach works, and how to get started.
SMS is text only, cheapest, and universal. MMS carries images, longer text, and media, costs more, and is great for a candidate photo or a shareable graphic. Pick SMS for reach and cost, MMS when the image does real work.
Yes, Apple added RCS support to the iPhone, so the addressable RCS base now includes iPhones on supported carriers. That's why RCS matters for campaigns now in a way it didn't before, verified, branded messaging can reach a huge new share of voters.
10DLC registration has two layers, the brand and the campaign, and campaigns confuse them constantly. Here's what each one is, how they fit together, and why you need both to send deliverable political texts.
A vanity short link is a branded short URL on your own domain. Here's what it is, why public link shorteners get texts filtered, and why campaigns should use their own branded domain in every message.
A text campaign is an organized political texting effort with a goal, an audience, a message, and a plan. Here's what makes up a text campaign, the pieces that have to be in place, and how they fit together.
A P2P platform loads a list, presents contacts one at a time, and routes replies to a person, all while keeping a human in the loop. Here's how peer-to-peer texting tools work and what to look for.
A voter file is the master list of registered voters and what's known about them. Here's what a voter file contains, how campaigns use it for targeting, and the critical point that a voter file is not texting consent.
A blast is one message to many, one-way, efficient for reminders. A conversation is two-way, a voter can reply and a human answers. Blasts scale information; conversations build persuasion and trust. The strongest programs use both for what each does best.
The Campaign Registry is the central body where senders register for 10DLC. Here's what TCR is, how it fits between campaigns and carriers, and why every political texter passes through it.
Deliverability is whether your texts actually arrive. Here's what SMS deliverability means, what determines it, why it's often invisible, and why it's the metric that underpins every other result.
A message template is a reusable, pre-approved text with placeholders for personalization. Here's what templates are, why they keep a program consistent and compliant, and how they power both broadcast and P2P.
Judge a platform on compliance (automatic STOP and quiet-hour handling, consent logging, 10DLC support), deliverability, true two-way and RCS, and whether your data stays yours. Price per message matters less than whether the tool keeps you legal and delivering.