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I'm not exactly sure on the best way to go about doing this or if I am posting this in the correct location. I want to send a text message to a group of employees about upcoming open shifts. I have the employees in a table and i have the upcoming shifts in another. I am able to text individual employees a standard message now. I am not sure how i can add the open shift date to the message and then pick which employees i want to send the message to and have the date added into it as well. The employee table and the shifts tables are linked. Right now i am able to send the message with an automation that is sent by a button in an interface I created. maybe it isn't possible or maybe its super easy and i am overthinking it. Thanks for any help in advance!

Hmm... that might be a little tricky to setup.

I don't have an immediate answer off the top of my head for how to structure your base to do this, but I have created many different text messaging systems in the past for my clients with Airtable.

I demonstrate one of the Twilio text messaging systems that I've created on this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast. Perhaps this video will give some inspiration.

As you will see in the video, many of my automations are automated using Make’s advanced automations. If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

However, if you still can’t get it to work, it may be a blessing in disguise, because Twilio is actually a terrible SMS provider, and I do not recommend them. Twilio is extremely complicated to setup & maintain, Twilio is extremely overpriced, and Twilio’s customer support is essentially nonexistent.

There are actually much better SMS providers out there than Twilio, all of which are much cheaper and much easier to use — and can all be automated from Airtable using Make’s automations and integrations.

Instead of Twilio, there is MessageBird, TextMagic, SimpleTexting, and much more.

SimpleTexting is my current favorite, and I give a demonstration on Airtable and SimpleTexting on this Airtable podcast episode.

I’m currently in the process of switching several of my clients away from Twilio to these other services, because they’re so much easier and cheaper.

As I mentioned above, if you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

Hope this helps!

If have budget for your project and you want to work one-on-one with an expert Airtable consultant to help figure all of this out with you, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

Thank you for replying! I will check out the podcast. What would you say is the reason you prefer the others over Twilio? Is there something that stands out or just more ease of use?

Primarily ease of use. In my personal opinion, both the Twilio website and the Twilio API are extremely confusing, and the customer service is not great. However, tons of my clients use Twilio because they were "the original text messaging service", so I have certainly setup a ton of Twilio systems.

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