Receiving Incoming Messages

When you send an SMS or voice broadcast, parents can reply by texting your camp’s phone number. Campflow forwards their message to your email and logs it on the family’s record so you can see what they said. You can text the parent back by replying to that email, or from the family’s page in Campflow.

What Happens When a Parent Texts You

1. A parent sends a text message to your camp’s phone number (the same number your broadcasts come from).
2. Campflow matches the phone number to a family in your system.
3. You receive an email at your camp’s email address with the parent’s message. If Campflow found a matching broadcast you recently sent them, the email shows both your original message and their reply in a conversation view.
4. The message is logged as an SMS Received entry in the family’s Collection History.

If Campflow cannot match the phone number to any family, you still receive the email — it shows the phone number instead of a family name.

How to Reply

You can respond in two ways.

Reply to the Email

Reply directly to the notification email. Type your response and send it — Campflow turns your reply into a text message and sends it back to the parent from your camp’s phone number. You do not need to delete the quoted conversation below your reply; Campflow sends only the part you wrote.

Your reply goes to the exact number the parent texted from, so it appears on their phone as part of the same conversation. When the message is matched to a family, your reply is also logged as an SMS Sent entry on the family’s Collection History.

Reply from Campflow

You can also respond from the family’s record:

1. Click the View family in Campflow link in the email. This takes you directly to the family’s Communication tab.
2. Click Send Message.
3. Choose SMS, select which parent to send to, type your reply, and click Send.

Choose Email instead of SMS if you prefer to respond by email. See Collection History for more on composing messages from the family page.

Keyword Replies

Some text replies from parents are handled automatically:

• STOP — Opts the parent out of all future SMS and voice messages from your camp. They will not receive any more messages until they opt back in.
• START — Opts a previously opted-out parent back in to receive messages.

These keyword replies are industry-standard and required by phone carriers. You do not need to configure them — they work automatically.

If a parent texts STOP and later wants to receive messages again, they need to text START to your camp’s phone number. You cannot opt them back in from Campflow.

Good to Know

• Incoming messages are only forwarded to your camp’s primary email address (the one set in Settings > General).
• Campflow matches incoming phone numbers to the father’s and mother’s phone fields on the family record. If a parent texts from a number that is not on their family record, the message will not be linked to their family.
• The SMS Received entry in the family’s Collection History includes the sender’s name (if matched) and the full message text.
• If a parent replies to a voice broadcast by texting the number that called them, it is handled the same way as an SMS reply.
• You can reply to a notification email for up to 14 days after receiving it. After that, respond from the family’s Communication tab instead.
• Replying to the email works even when the message was not matched to a family — it is the way to text back a parent who wrote from a number that is not on their family record.
• You can send a text to any family at any time from their Communication tab — you do not need to wait for them to text you first. See Collection History.
• Incoming message notifications only work if your camp has completed SMS & Voice setup.