In this article, we are going to look at reasons why message responses can be delayed, and what we can do about it.

In the event of a phone carrier outage or slowdown, this is out of your's and Txt2Give's control.  These aren't regular occurrences, though, so If you are consistently having reports from donors or your staff that message replies from Txt2Give are taking longer than they should, it's likely not a carrier-related issue, and we need to look elsewhere.

They are somewhat rare, but from time to time, the Txt2Give platform can have issues.  After all, no technology is perfect and issue-free.

The best way to stay informed of a Txt2Give issue is to subscribe to our Status Notifications.

If the issue is with Txt2Give, know that our team is working as quickly as possible to get the issue resolved, and will update our customers through the status updates.

If you believe that the issue is with Txt2Give and the status page shows no current issues, please get in touch with Txt2Give support immediately.

Another reason for slow or delayed messages from our system is message replies from your account have exceeded the character limit of the SMS standard.  

Like with any text message, there is a character limit for messages to be sent out as a single message. This limit is 160 characters in any one message.  When the limit is exceeded, the message is split into 2 separate messages and is then merged back into one message when it is delivered. This can result in message delays on the carrier end.

To prevent delays due to exceeding the character limit, let's look at 3 ways you can that can influence text message length.

In the message shown above, the reply stating, "Here's how to give to Our NPO.  Please enter a number:" as well as the numbers in the list, account for 64 of the 160 characters that are allowed.  The names of the Causes, which you set when you create your Causes, account for the remaining characters.

Keeping your Cause names as concise as reasonably possible will prevent your messages from exceeding the character limit.

The more Causes you have active, the more characters they will occupy in the text message reply.  Again, try to keep the number of Causes as concise as reasonably possible.  We recommend no more than 4 or 5.  Any more than that and expect messages to get split and subsequently delayed.

It's possible to set an auto-responder message to be sent out after a donor texts a keyword.  Keep this auto-responder message under 160 characters to prevent message splitting and delays.

Hopefully this article was helpful in keeping your message replies free of delays.  If you have any question, please let us know!