https://notionhits.com/2hsin3pum4cr93qr/JKH7SP90W65YV1X6

In Switchboard you can customize your messages to make them personal to the individual receiving them.

Why should I customize my messages?

There are a lot of different reasons to customize messages, but the main reasons you should invest time into learning how to do this is because it could help:

1. Drive engagement: If the recipients of your messages are receiving multiple texts a day from other campaigns, you want to make sure your messages stand out! Either including their first name, or another custom element, could help ensure they click through your message over anything else they may be getting in their inbox!
2. Increase Donor Activity: By customizing your messages to donors, you are ensure that you are asking for the right amount of money from each donor (no more and no less). You can do this by utilizing their donation history within your messages.
3. Tracking Engagement: In Switchboard, we allow individuals to track clicks/engagement/donations down to the phone number. We do this by allowing you to use custom shortlink tracking with our free shortlinks we provide every Switchboard user! This way, you know who is engaging with your text and that can help you target for future sends.

Before you can start customizing your messages:

Before you can fully customize messages like a pro, you need to know what a custom field is.

A custom field is a variable that holds unique information about a specific person or entity that you want to include in your communications, such as a first name, last name, email address, phone number, donation amount, or any other data point that is important to your campaign or organization.

In order to ensure you can utilize custom fields when texting, you need to make sure the data is available in whatever format your phonelist is in. For CSVs this is just an additional column that has information about each phone number on your list. For NGPVAN and ActBlue lists, they automatically come with a set of custom fields you can utilize; they are not as custom as a CSV.

Customizing your Messages: Beginner

<aside> ⚠️ Note - Switchboard custom fields are built using Jinja templating! If you ask Chat GPT to help you with “Jinja templating” that is really useful for troubleshooting 🙂

</aside>

Using Custom Fields

• Use the format {{ custom_field }} to dynamically insert custom fields.

Using Conditional Statements

You can also use if statements. For example:

• Can you chip in {% if previous_donation and previous_donation > 20 %}$20{% else %}$5{% endif %} today?
• Hi {% if first_name %}{{ first_name }}{% else %}friend{% endif %}!