Sending Text Messages and Push Notification to multiple users that "follow" you

[jrricker]

Our app includes the ability to follow a user/business. Now, I’m looking to build out a solution so that a user can send both a text message and push notification to everyone following them. I’ve seen text/sms solutions, but none mention how to text multiple users at once. As for push notifications, I’m sure it’s do-able but still have some confusion on how push notifications work when sending to multiple users. Thanks for the help!

[Erik]

Hi!

The SMS is more difficult, as I think you can only send it to one individual through a custom action. The alternative would be to send it to zapier, have zapier iterate through the list and sms each individual.

Here’s an example of how you can do this for push notifications. In this example users have followers. When a post is created, you could notify every user that’s in the followers relationship.

[jrricker]

Thanks Erik! I figured Zapier would need to be involved with the texting side of things. Can you describe how you might send that text to the group as a whole? It seems to be straighforward for one user, but more difficult when attempting to text multiple users.

For the push notification, can you describe what the “screen” input represents? How exactly would you suggest sending push notifications to followers? Do we need to have a screen just for notifications or no?

Thanks again Erik.

[Erik]

For zapier, you should think that you actually need to send an individual test to each person, not to the group. Basically you’ll use a zapier loop for each person in the group and send them the message.

The screen input is what screen the user will be taken to when they click the notifications. If you have a list of all the user’s messages, that’s usually a good place or the home screen.

For best practices, you’ll need to put the request notification permission somewhere at the beginning of your app workflow (signup or home screen) so you have that permission (Or the notifications won’t trigger). @pford has a video on creating a screen to manage this - Creating a Notifications Screen in Adalo - YouTube. In short though, you can create an option for the user to turn off notifications. Make sure all notification triggers filter out users w/ notifications off.

Hope that helps!