Texting services for nonprofits and political campaigns

Nonprofits and campaigns get more scrutiny from carriers than almost any other sender. A donation appeal, a "call your senator today" alert or a get-out-the-vote reminder can be exactly what your supporters asked for. It is also the kind of traffic carriers vet separately, filter hardest when registration is missing, and see in complaint data.

This guide is for the person choosing the texting provider: an executive director, a digital director, an ops lead at a campaign. It covers how 10DLC registration treats charity and political senders, what consent has to look like, how peer-to-peer and broadcast sending differ in practice, and what a send costs, with the math worked out. Where Ready isn't the right fit, we say so.

Start with the one rule that applies to us

We make Ready, so here is our own requirement first. Advocacy alerts (call-your-rep, petitions, hearings), donation appeals and any texting to voters need Ready's written OK before the first send. Email support@tryready.com, describe what you'll send and where the consent came from, and wait for our reply. Signing up and registering is not enough on its own for these use cases. Our acceptable use policy has the details.

We ask because the risk lands on everyone sharing the same carrier infrastructure. One bad fundraising list can draw filtering that hurts other senders.

How 10DLC treats charity and political senders

Every business texting from a regular 10-digit number in the US has to register a brand (who you are) and a campaign (what you send). Our 10DLC explainer covers the basics. For this audience, two points matter.

Charity and political are special use cases

The carrier registry has dedicated categories for charities (generally 501(c)(3) organizations) and for political committees and candidates. They are not the same as a generic "marketing" campaign:

• Charity campaigns are expected to come from a registered charitable organization. The brand details have to match what the IRS and state records show.
• Political campaigns generally need an extra verification step (Campaign Verify) that confirms you are a real committee or candidate before the registry accepts the campaign. That step has its own fee and timeline, separate from the carrier registration.
• Advocacy groups that aren't committees (a 501(c)(4) sending policy alerts, for example) often don't fit either category neatly. Picking the wrong use case is a common cause of rejection or throttling.

Tell us your organization type when you email support, and we'll tell you whether and how we can register it.

What registration costs on Ready

Registration is done in the app and has no setup fee. The charge at submit is the first month, $25. After that the monthly cost is $25/mo for registration + $2 per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. Start registration weeks before an election or a year-end giving push, not the week of.

Brand vetting is optional and costs $79 Standard or $179 Enhanced, one time. It raises your trust score, which can move your daily T-Mobile cap. Most small nonprofits don't need it.

Consent: what you need on file

The TCPA allows statutory damages of roughly $500 to $1,500 per text. On a 5,000-number list, a consent problem gets expensive quickly.

What carriers and the law want to see:

1. A clear opt-in. Examples are a signup form that names your organization, says texts are recurring, mentions message frequency, and includes "Msg & data rates may apply" and "Reply STOP to opt out."
2. A record of that opt-in that you keep. Store the timestamp, the exact wording shown and the page URL in your CRM or donor database. Ready records your attestation each time you send a campaign (and each API send that attests consent) (who sent, to how many, when). It also keeps the opt-in record (time, IP address and exact wording) for contacts who sign up on a Ready-hosted opt-in page. Any other opt-in, including a keyword reply, is yours to keep. See how to document SMS consent.
3. No borrowed lists. A coalition partner's spreadsheet doesn't carry their supporters' consent over to you. See what to do before texting a partner coalition's list.

Cold voter files are a no

Many campaigns buy or receive voter files with phone numbers and want to text them. On Ready, cold contact goes by phone and mail. SMS goes to people who opted in or who replied to you. If texting a cold voter file is the core of your plan, Ready is not the right tool. Our political campaign texting guide covers the rules in more detail.

Peer-to-peer vs broadcast

Campaigns often hear that peer-to-peer (P2P) texting, where a volunteer clicks send on each message, avoids the rules that apply to automated sends. The legal picture is narrower than that pitch suggests:

Carriers see application-to-person traffic either way, so a P2P tool doesn't exempt you from registration. If your campaign runs on a large volunteer bank clicking through thousands of conversations, a dedicated P2P platform built for campaigns may suit you better than a general messaging platform.

Ready supports both one-to-one conversations in a shared inbox and bulk campaigns to opted-in lists. Replies from supporters land in the same thread, so a staffer can pick up the conversation.

What it costs, worked out

Ready Standard is $0.0075 per segment plus a $0.0045 carrier fee, one flat rate. Replies you receive bill the same way. There's no volume discount. For large programs, talk to us about Enterprise.

A segment is 160 plain characters, or 153 per part once a message splits. An emoji or other non-GSM character drops that to 70 (67 per part).

Example 1, plain text: A 150-character event reminder, no emoji, sent to 5,000 opted-in supporters.

• 5,000 × 1 segment = 5,000 segments
• 5,000 × $0.0075 = $38, plus 5,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees

Example 2, same message with an emoji, now 175 characters:

• 175 characters in unicode = 3 segments
• 5,000 × 3 = 15,000 segments
• 15,000 × $0.0075 = $113, plus 15,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees

The emoji tripled the cost. Spanish accents can do the same. See which Spanish accents break GSM-7.

The rate above excludes the compliance surcharge:

• Litigator/DNC scrubbing costs $0.003 extra per segment when switched on for an account.
• Landline validation costs another $0.003 per segment when switched on.
• Both are off by default.
• The standalone TCPA & DNC Litigator Scrub is $0.005 per contact if you'd rather scrub a list once before sending.

On price: if you have engineers and only want the lowest per-segment number, Twilio's raw API runs about $0.0083 per segment, and GoHighLevel's LC Phone runs about $0.0128 per message all-in. Both cost less per text. With a raw API you build registration, opt-out handling, quiet hours and scrubbing yourself. With Ready they come included, along with the inbox, contacts and automations. Our Twilio alternatives comparison breaks this down.

Throughput before election day

Carriers publish no rate card, so treat these as rough figures:

• Per-second rate: a fresh standard campaign usually gets about 1 to 4 segments per second. At an assumed 3 per second, Example 2's 15,000 segments take about 83 minutes.
• T-Mobile daily cap: the lowest trust score gets roughly 2,000 messages a day.

If your GOTV list is 20,000 people, check your cap before the day you need it. Brand vetting can help, but only when it moves you across a tier.

The compliance stack you get

Ready includes these as risk reduction, not immunity. Compliance stays the sender's responsibility.

• Automatic STOP handling. An opt-out applies across every campaign, so a supporter who said STOP to a petition alert won't get the gala invite.
• Quiet hours. Sends are held outside permitted local hours based on the recipient's area, which matters for national lists. You're charged only when a held text actually sends. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.
• Litigator and DNC scrubbing. Known TCPA litigators and DNC numbers can be screened out before a send.
• Attestation trail. Each campaign you send (and each API send that attests consent) records who sent it, to how many, and when.
• Up-front refusals. Opt-outs and numbers on your Ban list are refused before sending and not charged.

If you send through the API, each request carries consent_attested: true, and bulk calls take up to 100 recipients each. See the bulk messages docs.

The practical takeaway

When choosing a provider for nonprofit or political texting, check:

• whether it registers your specific use case (charity, political or advocacy)
• whether it handles opt-outs and quiet hours automatically
• what a send really costs once emoji and accents change the segment count

Build your opt-in records yourself, and keep cold voter files off SMS.

If Ready fits, here's the order to do it in:

1. Email support@tryready.com with your use case and wait for our written OK.
2. Create an account. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it.
3. Use your first 20 free texts, which are one-to-one sends, before you register.
4. Submit your registration well ahead of the date you need to send.

For a broader look at fundraising and supporter programs, see our nonprofit SMS guide.

Before your first donation appeal: our acceptable use policy needs Ready's written OK for fundraising texts. Email support@tryready.com with your organization's name and its charity registration, or for a candidate, committee or PAC its FEC or state filing ID, and wait for our reply before you send an appeal.