How to send an SMS to a particular person each time a form is submitted

  • veenstrateam
    Asked on August 20, 2016 at 9:37 AM

    The application you recommend for SMS is jottext but that site is not up.  Are there other options to get the form to send a text message??  I want to send a specific text message to a particular person each time a form is submitted.  

     

    Do you have other recommendations??  

    Cindi

  • Boris
    Replied on August 20, 2016 at 11:02 AM

    The sending of SMS depends on outside (third-party) services, and the third-party SMS sending service behind JotText unfortunately went out of business over a year ago.

    1. Sending an SMS to your user. Our currently available alternative is to send your SMS messages through a service called Twilio:

    https://www.twilio.com/

    This service will send an SMS to the person submitting your form. In this SMS, they will receive a special code to enter on form and verify that their phone number is indeed valid and in their possession.

    If you have an account with Twilio, you can set your form to send these confirmation SMS messages by using our SMS Confirmation widget:

    https://widgets.jotform.com/widget/sms_confirmation

    The following guide explains how to add a widget to your form:

    https://www.jotform.com/help/252-How-to-Add-a-Widget-to-your-Form

    2. Sending an SMS to you/form owner. If you are instead looking to have your form send an SMS to you each time you receive a form response, I'm afraid we don't have such functionality available. If you are concerned about having instant access to your submissions on a mobile phone, may I suggest trying our JotForm Mobile App:

    https://www.jotform.com/help/362-How-to-Download-and-Start-using-the-JotForm-Mobile-App-

    If you still wanted to receive it in the form of an SMS, you would unfortunately have to setup your own system for sending the SMS. This means you would have to use one of the services that supports sending of SMS, and trigger the sending of that message from your own system - you would likely need to hire a developer to set this up.

    We do have some examples available for setting up your own SMS notification system, where our form sends a webhook to your system, and then your system triggers an outside third-party to send the SMS based on the webhook your system receives. You can see this example on the following page:

    https://www.jotform.com/help/245-How-to-Setup-Webhook-with-JotForm

    https://www.jotform.com/help/248-Webhook-PHP-Script-Examples

    For receiving a notification on your mobile device each time your form is submitted, our Mobile App may be the best choice. I hope this helps.