Broadcasts

Overview

A broadcast calls a list of people and plays them one recording. Pick who to call from your labels, paste or import extra numbers, choose the recording, check the estimated price against your balance, and launch.

Use it for an announcement, a levaya notice, a reminder the night before a shiur, or a snow-day message. It is one-way: the recipient answers, hears the recording, and the call ends. There is no menu and no keypad.

Broadcasts cannot be edited once created. To run a variation, use Duplicate, which reopens the wizard prefilled.

How It Works

1. You create the broadcast and launch it.
2. The system builds the recipient list: every phone number on every contact in your target labels, minus anyone in a do-not-call label, plus the numbers you pasted or imported. Duplicates are dropped, so nobody is called twice.
3. Dialing starts, paced at 20 recipients per minute.
4. When someone answers, the recording plays from the start and the call ends.
5. If answering-machine detection is on and the call reached a voicemail, the message is dropped into the voicemail after the beep.
6. No answer, busy or failed calls are retried if you asked for retries, 13 minutes apart.
7. When nothing is left to dial, the broadcast completes and the totals are finalized.

Creating a Broadcast

Open Broadcasts in the sidebar and press New broadcast. It is a four-step wizard.

Step 1: Details

"Name, caller ID and dialing behavior"

• Name (required) — up to 255 characters, for example Monday reminder. For your reference only.
• Caller ID (required) — the number recipients will see. Pick one of your virtual numbers.
• Answering-Machine Detection — off by default. Turn it on to detect voicemails, so a machine is recorded separately from a live answer and the voicemail drop can work. See Answering machines and voicemail.
• Retries per recipient — 0 to 5, default 0. How many extra times to try a recipient who did not answer, was busy or failed. Retries run 13 minutes apart.
• Schedule for later — leave it empty to dial immediately when you launch. Set a date and time and launching only queues the broadcast; dialing waits until then.

Step 2: Audio

"What recipients hear when they answer"

• Audio source — Choose an existing recording (the default) or Upload a new audio file.

With Choose an existing recording:

• Recording (required) — searchable list of your active, unarchived recordings. Archived and inactive recordings are not offered. A recording with no name shows as Recording #123.
• Listen — an audio player appears once you pick a recording, so you can hear exactly what will go out before you commit.

With Upload a new audio file:

• Upload audio (required) — the file is converted for you, the same as anywhere else in the app. See Recordings, uploads & text-to-speech.
• Recording name — up to 255 characters, for example Monday reminder audio.
• Save into library (required) — the library the uploaded audio is filed into, so you can reuse it in a later broadcast or anywhere else on your hotline.

Step 3: Recipients

"Labels, pasted numbers or a spreadsheet"

You can combine all three sources; the results are merged and de-duplicated.

• Target Labels — contacts in any of these labels will be dialed, on every phone number on their contact.
• Do-Not-Call Labels — contacts in any of these labels are skipped, even if they are also in a target label.
• Additional numbers — one number per line (commas work too). These are dialed in addition to the labels above.
• Import from CSV / Excel — upload a .csv, .xls or .xlsx file, up to 10 MB. The first phone-like value in each row is imported. The file itself is not kept — only the numbers it produced are stored on the broadcast.

How numbers are read

Pasted text is split on line breaks, commas and semicolons. Every value is then reduced to digits, so (845) 555-1234, 845-555-1234 and +1 845 555 1234 all come out the same. Anything shorter than 7 digits or longer than 15 is thrown away, which is what stops an ID column, an amount or a date from being dialed.

In a spreadsheet, the first phone-like cell in each row wins and the rest of that row is skipped, so a sheet with a name, an ID and a phone column imports cleanly without you mapping anything.

Numbers are dialed exactly as the digits read, so include the country code. A ten-digit US number pasted on its own is not given a leading 1 here (unlike the contact importer), so paste 18455551234, not 8455551234.

Step 4: Review & Launch

"Numbers, price and go"

A summary of what is about to happen:

Underneath it tells you when dialing starts, either "Dialing starts immediately when you press Create & Launch." or the scheduled date and time, followed by: "The estimate assumes every number answers and hears the whole message; you are only charged for answered time."

Two warnings can appear:

• "No numbers to dial — go back and pick labels, paste numbers or import a file."
• "Estimated cost exceeds your balance — the broadcast will be saved as a draft until you top up."

The submit button reads Create & Launch. It saves the broadcast and immediately tries to launch it. If it cannot (no recipients, or not enough balance), the broadcast is saved as a draft and the Launch button stays available for when you have fixed the problem.

Launching, Cancelling and Duplicating

Launch

Launch appears only on a draft that has both a recording and a caller ID. It asks you to confirm: "This will dial 412 unique numbers. Estimated maximum cost: $82.40 (your balance: $150.00)." plus when dialing starts.

Then one of four things happens:

• Nothing to dial — "The selected labels and numbers contain nothing to dial. The broadcast was saved as a draft."
• Estimate above your balance — "This broadcast may cost up to $82.40. It was saved as a draft — top up your balance, then press Launch." Top up on the Billing page and press Launch again.
• Scheduled for the future — the broadcast goes to queued and waits. You get "Broadcast scheduled", with the number count and the start time in your account timezone.
• Otherwise — the broadcast goes to queued, dialing begins, and you get "Broadcast launched".

Cancel

Cancel appears only while a broadcast is queued or running. It warns: "Pending recipients will be skipped. In-flight calls will complete normally." Everyone still waiting is marked skipped; calls already connected finish as normal, and you are still charged for those.

Duplicate

Duplicate opens the create wizard prefilled from the original: the name with (copy) on the end, the caller ID, answering-machine detection, retries, the recording, both label sets and the pasted numbers. The scheduled time is not copied. Since broadcasts are immutable, this is how you repeat or adjust one.

Broadcasts can also be deleted, individually from the view page or in bulk from the table.

Statuses

The Broadcasts Table

Columns: Name, Status badge, Recipients, Answered (shown as 310 (75.2%)), Total minutes, Total cost in USD, Created, and, when you turn them on, Started at and Completed at. Newest first.

Filter by status (Draft, Queued, Running, Completed, Cancelled, Failed) or by Trashed. Each row offers View, Launch, Cancel and Duplicate, depending on the status.

The Broadcast Page

Open a broadcast to see everything about it.

Broadcast section: Name, Status, Caller ID (formatted for reading), Recording name, a Listen player, Target labels as badges, Pasted / imported numbers (how many), Retries (2 (every 13 min) or none), Scheduled for (or immediate) and Machine detection (on / off).

Results section: Recipients, Answered with a percentage, Total minutes and Total cost in USD.

Recipients tab

One row per number dialed, read-only.

Recipient statuses, all available as a filter: Pending, Dialing, Answered, Voicemail, No answer, Busy, Failed, Unsubscribed, Skipped.

While the broadcast is queued or running, the recipients table refreshes itself every 10 seconds, so you can watch it work. Refresh stats in the header recomputes the totals on the broadcast right now, which is handy if a carrier report arrived late.

Retries

Set Retries per recipient to anything from 1 to 5 and a recipient whose call ends as no answer, busy or failed goes back into the queue with a 13 minute delay before the next try. An answered call, a voicemail, a skipped recipient and an unsubscribed number are never retried.

Retries are counted per recipient, so 2 retries means up to three calls to that number in total.

Answering Machines and Voicemail

With Answering-Machine Detection on, the carrier reports what picked up:

• A live answer plays the recording normally and the recipient is marked Answered.
• A machine is marked Voicemail rather than Answered, so your answered percentage reflects real people.
• When the machine's greeting ends (right after the beep), the system restarts the recording into the voicemail, so the message is captured from the beginning instead of half of it landing before the beep.

With detection off, a voicemail simply counts as an answer, and the beginning of your message may be cut off by the greeting.

What a Broadcast Costs

Broadcast calls are billed per minute, rounded up, to your account balance:

• $0.10 per minute to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and everywhere else.
• $0.80 per minute to UK premium prefixes (numbers starting 449 or 4484 through 4487).

Only connected calls cost anything. A no answer, a busy signal or a failed call is free.

Billable time is capped at the length of your recording. If a voicemail keeps the line open for two minutes after a 40-second message finished, you pay for the 40 seconds, not the two minutes.

The Estimated maximum cost on the review step and in the Launch confirmation is the worst case: every unique number answers and listens to the whole recording, rounded up to at least one minute each. Real spend is almost always lower, and it is shown as Total cost on the broadcast once calls start completing.

Each charge comes off your account balance as it happens. Top up, or buy Broadcast minutes packs, from Plans, billing & balance.

Scheduling

Set Schedule for later in step 1 and launching puts the broadcast in queued instead of dialing. A background job checks every minute and starts the dialing once the time passes. The scheduled time is shown and confirmed in your account timezone.

A scheduled broadcast can be cancelled at any time before it starts. The balance check happens at launch, not at the scheduled moment, so make sure the balance is still there when the time comes.

Dialing Pace and Reliability

• Recipients are dialed 20 per minute, spaced a second apart, so your caller ID is not hammering the network and your recipients are not all ringing at the same instant. A 600-number broadcast therefore takes about half an hour to get through the first pass.
• A recipient is never dialed twice at the same moment. Hearing your message twice is worse than hearing it a minute later.
• If the phone network is briefly unavailable, the recipient is parked for 10 minutes and tried again without using up an attempt.
• A call the system loses track of is re-checked with the carrier rather than blindly redialed, and only written off after several checks.
• If a broadcast somehow stalls, a watchdog restarts the dialing. After five failed restarts it gives up and the broadcast is marked Failed.

Tips

• Listen before you launch. Use the Listen player in step 2. A recording with three seconds of silence at the front loses its opening words to voicemail greetings.
• Keep a Do not call label and put it in Do-Not-Call Labels on every broadcast. Removing someone then takes one bulk action on the Contacts page and applies everywhere.
• Turn on answering-machine detection for evening calls, when most numbers go to voicemail. Your answered percentage stays honest and the message lands properly.
• Start small. Make a Test label with your own numbers and run the broadcast against it first. Then duplicate it and swap the label for the real audience.
• Retries cost money. Each retry that connects is another billed minute. Two retries is usually plenty.
• Check your balance before scheduling. A scheduled broadcast is still balance-checked when it launches.