Meet ¡Oye!
¡Oye! is a browser-based broadcast text messaging platform for organizations who want to use the direct connection of SMS and MMS texting to communicate with their constituents. Our partners use ¡Oye! to send important alerts about their programs and services, have ongoing one-on-one interactions, and manage their contact lists.
Code the Dream has opened up a pilot program for small to midsize organizations to try out the ¡Oye! platform while paying only the pass-through costs of messaging, without any overhead. Read on for more details, or fill out our partner information form below to see if ¡Oye! is a good fit for your organization’s texting needs.
Pilot program ends June 1, 2024. Last day to enroll is January 31, 2024.
About ¡Oye!
Texting is a powerful way to communicate with anybody who has a mobile phone, without the need for them to adopt another specialized mobile app (or for you to maintain one). However, the always-changing consumer protection regulations in the wireless network industry impact the way organizations can use text messaging to communicate with large groups of people at once.
For this reason, Code the Dream facilitates partner organizations’ enrollment with The Campaign Registry (TCR), the entity that governs mass texting communications. Anyone that wants to send mass texts must register their entity as a Brand, and their message content as a Campaign, to avoid their messages being marked as spam or going undelivered. For example, the Code the Dream “Brand” sends texts with information and reminders about our classes and educational events (our “Campaign”) to staff, students, and interns who have opted in.
On the ¡Oye! platform, organizations can quickly upload their contact lists, estimate message costs, and send broadcast messages with just a few clicks. Recipients can manage their customer-facing group subscriptions and other preferences by texting the built-in ¡Oye! chatbot, and administrators can manage contact data through private internal tags. In addition to larger-scale broadcasts, agency staff or volunteers can interact with individual recipients in a one-on-one text thread for a personalized conversation, without ever leaving the ¡Oye! platform.
Pilot Program and Pricing
The ¡Oye! pilot program allows partner organizations to use this platform to broadcast messages at cost. That means you pay only the pass-through costs of registering your organization with the governing entity, owning your phone number, and sending messages to your recipients. ¡Oye! currently uses the Signalwire API, allowing us to offer a more affordable platform.
¡Oye! provides an in-app cost estimator to provide a general sense of how much each message will cost you to send, however, this is truly an estimate as costs can vary and change over time due to industry factors. Our pilot partner organizations play a vital role in helping us to validate our estimates and ensure we are providing the most affordable texting option for nonprofits and other human service organizations.
Setup
Enrollment and registration with The Campaign Registry cost $19 for a single campaign: $4 for Brand Registration and $15 for Campaign Registration. The Campaign Registry additionally charges a monthly campaign fee, more info below.
Maintenance
The phone number that your organization will send messages from costs approximately $1.20 per month, and you can purchase a number that uses your local area code. (Actual cost may be lower or higher, depending on number selected.)
Each message sent through a mass texting platform incurs a flat-rate cost, plus an additional Network Access Fee (NAF) specific to the recipient’s wireless carrier (such as Verizon or AT&T). The actual cost of the messages you send greatly depends on the content of your messages, the number of recipients, and their wireless carriers. Your organization type is also a factor- nonprofits receive a discount on account and message fees.
Currently, ¡Oye! is poised to offer significantly lower per-broadcast costs than any other texting platform on messages sent to U.S. and Canada phone numbers. Messages sent internationally (including to Mexico) incur a much higher cost and are not supported at this time.
The Campaign Registry charges a monthly fee depending on the use-case of your messages. Typically $2-3, up to $10 a month.
Example Pricing for Pilot Partners
As mentioned above, the actual cost of the messages you send varies greatly on a number of factors. However, here are some samples, just to give a very rough example of the possible range you might expect (remember this is pricing only for pilot partners, with 100% pass-through costs). These examples do not constitute actual estimates, but only serve to give you a general idea.
SMS
(approx .007 -.025 per segment, or about 120-160 characters, including base message cost and wireless carrier fees)
130 character message from a nonprofit entity, with no emojis, accents, images or attachments:
– Message sent to 100 people , total cost of around $0.70- $0.90
– Same message sent to 1000 people – $7 – $9
– Same message sent to 5000 people – $35 – $45
MMS
(approx. .046 – .06 per message , including base message cost and wireless carrier fees)
120 character message with image (MMS):
– Message sent to 100 people – $4.60 – $6.00
– Same message sent to 1000 people – $46 – $60
– Same message sent to 5000 people – $230 – $300
