How Can We Help?
Unlimited Texting
If you need to send more and/or longer text messages, you can activate “Unlimited Texting” in Faith Teams. Text Messages are billed at 1.9 cents per 160-character segment.
*** Note: If you use special characters not included in the standard SMS character set, it will increase the number of segments your messages use, thereby increasing your cost. This is unrelated to the Faith Teams platform, and is related to the SMS technical specification, and affects all texting platforms. Faith Teams displays the estimated number of segments and credits for each message
The standard SMS character encoding, GSM-7, includes the following characters:
-
- Latin letters A to Z
- Numbers 0 to 9
- Some special characters, such as exclamation marks
- Some Greek characters
GSM-7 is the most common character encoding for SMS messages and allows for up to 160 characters per message, including spaces.
Special characters, such as many accented letters and Unicode characters, use a different encoding called UCS-2. Unicode characters require more space than GSM characters, so using Unicode encoding reduces the number of available characters in a message from 160 to 70.
If an SMS message contains more than 160 characters, it will be split into segments of 153 characters. The recipient’s device and carrier will determine whether a longer message is split or converted to MMS. Likewise, shorter non GSM-7 encoded messages will also be split up by the carrier.
To activate “Unlimited Texting”, click the Button below to request Unlimited Texting.
NOTE: Text messaging should be used with common sense and caution. It isn’t meant to be used for every message your church sends. If you over-use it, or if you use it to send lots of long messages, your people will not appreciate it, and your texting number will get pinged as a “spammer”.