Texts tend to be seen quickly, and a donation link in a text is one tap from a checkout page they already trust. That makes SMS one of the few channels where a small nonprofit can put an appeal in front of its whole list on Giving Tuesday morning and see gifts arrive before lunch. The same speed works against you if the list is wrong, the registration is missing or the cadence feels like nagging. Carriers filter unregistered traffic. Donors reply STOP. And the TCPA puts a price of $500 to $1,500 on each unwanted text.
This guide covers the four parts that decide whether donor texting raises money or causes trouble: consent, carrier registration, cadence and measurement. It also includes the cost math, so you can judge whether an appeal paid for itself.
Text-to-give vs. a donation link: know which one you're running
"Text-to-give" covers two different setups, and they work differently.
Carrier-billed text-to-give is the older model. A donor texts a keyword to a short code, and the gift goes on their phone bill. It needs a short code and a specialist provider, and the gift amounts are small and fixed.
Text-to-donate with a link is what most nonprofits run now. You text a supporter who has opted in, and the message carries a link to your existing donation page (your CRM's form, your payment processor's page and so on). The gift is processed there, at whatever amount the donor picks, and the donor's record lands in your donor database.
Ready handles the second model. We send the texts over registered 10DLC numbers. Your donation platform processes the gift. We don't process donations or run short codes. If you specifically need carrier-billed giving, you'll need a short-code provider. For everyone else, a link to a page you already own is simpler, and it raises more per gift.
Before the first appeal: get our written OK
Fundraising texts fall under Ready's acceptable use policy. Before you send your first donation appeal, email support@tryready.com with a short description of your organization, your list source and what you plan to send. Then wait for our reply. Signing up and registering does not, on its own, clear an account to send donation appeals. The check is quick, and it protects your sender reputation and everyone else's on shared carrier infrastructure.
Consent: the part that decides everything else
Donor texting only works on people who agreed to receive texts from you. In practice:
- Opt-in sources that count: a checkbox on your donation form with clear wording, a keyword someone texted to your number after seeing it at an event, or a signup form on your site that says "you'll receive texts from [Org]."
- Sources that don't count: a purchased list, a partner coalition's spreadsheet, or a donor's phone number collected for receipts with no texting consent. A phone number on a gift record is not permission to text it. If you're working with a shared list, read what to do before texting a partner coalition's contact list first.
- Cold outreach to prospective donors goes by mail and phone. Texts go only to people who opted in or replied to you.
Your form, CRM or donor database has to keep the per-person consent record: who opted in, when, what wording they saw and on which page. Ready records the sender's attestation on every campaign you send and every API send that attests consent (who sent, to how many, when). That gives you an audit trail of your own promise. It is not a per-donor consent record, and a keyword reply doesn't create one either. Keep the opt-in evidence where it starts.
If your list is thin, how to build an SMS marketing list covers the opt-in mechanics in more depth.
Risk reducers worth switching on
Ready's compliance tools lower risk, but compliance stays your responsibility:
- STOP handling: an inbound STOP or UNSUBSCRIBE is honored automatically. The opt-out applies across every campaign, so the next appeal can't reach that person.
- Quiet hours: a send is held outside permitted local hours for the recipient's area and goes out later. 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.
- TCPA litigator and DNC scrub: this screens out known litigator and DNC-complainer numbers before send. As an account setting, it's $0.003 extra per segment. Run as a standalone scrub, it's $0.005 per contact. Both settings are off by default. On an older list, turning the scrub on is cheap insurance.
Carrier registration: what nonprofits need to file
Every US business texting from a regular 10-digit number needs A2P 10DLC registration: one brand (your organization) and one campaign (what you send). If you haven't run into it yet, our 10DLC explainer covers the background.
On Ready, registration happens in the app:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Charge at submit (first month) | $25 |
| Registration, monthly | $25/mo |
| Each number, monthly | $2/mo |
| Setup fee | None |
Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. File well before your campaign date. Registering the week of Giving Tuesday is cutting it close.
Pick a campaign use case that matches what you'll actually send. If you send donation appeals, event reminders and volunteer updates, describe all of them, and make your sample messages look like your real ones. A mismatch is one of the most common causes of throttling, which this use-case picking guide walks through.
The daily-cap trap on big appeal days
T-Mobile caps how many messages a brand can send per day, based on its trust score. The lowest tier is roughly 2,000 messages a day, and higher tiers allow roughly 10,000, 40,000, 100,000 or 200,000. A new campaign also starts slow, at roughly 1 to 4 segments per second.
Here's what that means for a list of 4,000 donors. At an assumed 2 segments per second, one single-segment send takes about 33 minutes. If your brand sits in the lowest T-Mobile tier, though, part of that list could get held until the next day. Optional brand vetting ($79 Standard or $179 Enhanced, one-time) can raise your trust score. It only moves the daily cap if the new score crosses into a higher tier. Smaller lists rarely need vetting. Check your registration status before a big day, not on it.
Cadence: how often to text donors
There's no universal right number, but these starting points hold up for most organizations:
- Welcome text within minutes of opt-in. Say who you are, what they'll get and how to opt out ("Reply STOP to opt out").
- Thank-you text shortly after every gift. Skip the ask. This is the text donors remember.
- Appeals: one or two a month at most in normal months. Campaign moments (year-end, Giving Tuesday, emergency response) can justify a short burst of two or three texts over a few days. Send the follow-ups only to people who haven't given yet.
- Impact updates between asks: one line and a photo link showing what last month's gifts did.
A good rule of thumb is to send at least as many texts without an ask as with one. If your STOP rate jumps after a send, that's your cadence telling you something. Our nonprofit SMS guide has more message examples by type.
Write for one segment
A single segment holds 160 GSM-7 characters. One emoji drops that limit to 70 characters (67 per part in a multipart message), and every segment is billed. Accented characters can do the same thing, which matters if you send in Spanish. Ready converts curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses to plain characters before sending, so those never change the count.
Measurement: the math that tells you if it worked
Ready's Standard rate is $0.0075 per segment, plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment. Replies you receive are billed the same way. These are worked examples with stated assumptions, not benchmarks.
Example appeal, plain text: 4,000 opted-in donors, a 150-character message with no emoji (1 segment).
- Send: 4,000 × $0.0075 = $30, plus 4,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees
- Replies (assume 5%, or 200 replies): 200 × $0.0075 = $2, plus 200 × $0.0045
- Gifts (assume 1.5% give an average of $50): 60 gifts × $50 = $3,000
Those figures exclude the compliance surcharge. If the scrub is on, add $0.003 × 4,000 segments = $12.
Same appeal with one emoji: 150 characters is now 3 unicode segments. That's 12,000 segments × $0.0075 = $90, plus 12,000 × $0.0045. The emoji tripled the cost of the send.
Track these figures for every send:
- Cost per dollar raised: total send cost divided by gifts attributed to that text. Use a tagged link (a UTM parameter, for example) so your donation platform can attribute gifts.
- Click rate and gift rate per send, compared appeal to appeal.
- STOP rate per send. A rise means the message or the frequency is off.
- Reply themes. Donors ask real questions by text. Someone on staff should answer them from the inbox.
Where Ready fits, and where it doesn't
Ready gives you registered 10DLC sending, automatic STOP handling, quiet hours, an optional litigator scrub, two-way messaging, campaigns and templates. All of it runs from the app or through one API, and billing uses prepaid credits with carrier fees itemized separately. Raw messaging APIs such as Twilio, and GoHighLevel's built-in messaging, cost less per message. If your team has developers who want to build registration, opt-out handling and scrubbing themselves, those options are reasonable. What Ready adds is the compliance layer and the app around it. If you need carrier-billed short-code giving, we're not the tool.
The practical takeaway
Before your next appeal, confirm four things:
- Consent: each number on the list opted in to texts from you, and your form or CRM holds the record.
- Clearance: you've emailed support@tryready.com and heard back.
- Registration: you filed early enough for an approval that can take 2 to 7 days, under a use case that matches what you send.
- Measurement: each appeal fits in one segment, carries a tracked link, and gets measured on cost per dollar raised.
When those are in place, you can create an account and start the registration. The pricing page lists the per-segment rate.
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.