How we’re making Chained SMS even better.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with Evan Summers and Chris Doten at the National Democratic Institute on the Chained SMS extension that we originally wrote for Future First back in 2012. They are keen to use similar technology in their work with political organisations around the world and we’ll be starting with pilot projects in Ukraine and Uganda.

Phase 1 (now complete) was a relatively small peice of work to bring Chained SMS back to life and get it working on the latest version of CiviCRM. It was a ‘proof of concept’, giving NDI something to play that would inform the direction we take in phase 2, which is starting in earnest now.

Key priorities for phase 2 include is the ability to have answers to questions populate contact fields and have contacts added to groups automatically. We’re also looking at how we might integrate with CiviRules to trigger various other actions on receipt of an SMS (e.g. register for an event, sign a petition, etc.). We’ve also decided to rename the project as SMS conversation to better reflect the functionality.

It’s great to see this project come back to life, and even though it has been as while since we released ‘version 1’, I’m happy that NDI will be able to benefit from the work and lessons learned back in 2012.

We should have something to show for our work in late spring early summer.