A Text Message is an electronic message that will be received on the recipient's cell phone. Text Messages can be sent from your Text In Church account to individual People Records or entire Groups of People Records. Text Messages can be sent immediately, scheduled to send at specific dates and times, or programmed as a part of an Automated Workflow. People can reply to your Text Messages and you would see the reply in your Text In Church Inbox and within the People Record’s Conversation History. People’s replies to your Text Messages do not count towards your monthly allotment.

A Segment is used for Text Messages, it is the 140-byte chunk of data that makes up a single SMS Text Message. The Standard SMS encoding uses the GSM character set which takes 7 bits to encode a character. 140 bytes x 8 bits in a byte divided by 7 bits to encode leaves us with the 160 character message segment. So, that’s where that 160-character limit came from. Message segments are how Text In Church (and the SMS industry as a whole) count messages.

A Character is the letters numbers and punctuation that make up a Text Message. Most are encoded using GSM character set Emoji characters and some accented characters are encoded using USC-2, which takes more bits of data to send than standard GSM Characters

An Email Message is an electronic message that will be received at the email address of the recipient. Email Messages can be sent from your Text In Church account to individual People Records or entire Groups of People Records. Email Messages can be sent immediately, scheduled to send at specific dates and times, or programmed as a part of an Automated Workflow. When creating an Email Message, you will be able to set a “reply to” address. If your recipient were to reply to this Email Message, their reply would automatically forward to the designated “Reply-to” address that you’ve indicated. Email Messages do not count towards your monthly allotment.

Marking something as read is when an incoming text message is received in your Text In Church Inbox, it will be flagged as “unactioned” with bold font. Because an Inbox can be shared between multiple Admins and Users, opening the message will not automatically mark the message as read. To clear the notification, you can manually mark the message as “Read.”

Archiving something is when you are finished with a message in your Inbox, you can move the message to the Archive section, so that the Inbox remains clear and ready for new messages. For your records, messages cannot be deleted from your Text In Church account, but they can be Archived to keep your messages organized.

The Inbox is where an incoming text message (that is not a keyword) is received by your Text In Church phone number, the text message will be placed here. You can take additional actions to read, archive, or reply to the messages from here.

The Sent Folder is where Text, Email, and Automated Workflow messages that are sent from your Text In Church account will display under the “Sent” folder within the “Messages” Section of your account.

The Pending Folder is where scheduled Text and Email messages that are currently in the process of sending from your Text In Church account are held. You can edit and delete messages from the Pending tab as needed before they are actually sent to the intended recipients. Scheduled Automated Workflow messages are not housed here and can be found within the Automated Workflow Report.

A Message Varaible is a piece of code inserted into a message that upon delivery will be replaced with a specific value. The First Name Message Variable can automatically insert the First Name of the recipient into the message when it is delivered.