Sendhub Blog

SendHub adds Auto Attendant and Android in-app purchase

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:39:00 -0700

Our engineers continue to ship new features for our customers.Last month, we shipped the new Android app, expanded business features, and added unlimited SendHub to SendHub calling. Last week, we launched sound notifications and iPhone in-app purchase. Today, we’re excited to announce two more updates:

Auto Attendant

Direct your calls from your main business phone line to any department. Record a message with numerical codes (ex: Dial 1 for Sales, 2 for Support etc.) to let the caller know what the dialing options are. When the caller types a number into their phone, they will be automatically transfered to their selection. You need multiple phone lines in order to use “Auto Attendant”. Click on “Add a Line” now to get started.

Android in-app Purchase

You can now buy texts, calls, and groups right from your android app. Click on menu options (three dots) on the top right of your SendHub Android app and select “Settings” to upgrade now.

Sign-up for SendHub if you haven’t already, and let us know how we are doing on Twitter and Facebook.

Hacking Flask: A Success Story

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:17:00 -0700

AKA Flask Howto: Add request execution time to log output

By Jay Taylor, published April 24th 2013

I scoured the internet high and low for a way to add request execution time logging to my Flask server console output, but failed to find any examples of how to do it. Here is my formula for one way to make it happen.

We are going to turn this:

INFO:werkzeug:127.0.0.1 - - [24/Apr/2013 18:36:46] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -

into this:

INFO:werkzeug:127.0.0.1 - - [24/Apr/2013 18:45:13] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 - [37ms]

It turns out that the HTTP server component of Flask is a super thin wrapper around the Werkzeug WSGI library. The strategy is simply going to be implementing our own subclass of werkzeug’s BaseRequestHandler with a few overrides to capture and then inject information related to HTTP request execution time:

serving.py:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import time
from werkzeug.serving import BaseRequestHandler

class MyFancyRequestHandler(BaseRequestHandler):
    """Extend werkzeug request handler to suit our needs."""
    def handle(self):
        self.fancyStarted = time.time()
        rv = super(MyFancyRequestHandler, self).handle()
        return rv

    def send_response(self, *args, **kw):
        self.fancyProcessed = time.time()
        super(MyFancyRequestHandler, self).send_response(*args, **kw)

    def log_request(self, code='-', size='-'):
        duration = int((self.fancyProcessed - self.fancyStarted) * 1000)
        self.log('info', '"{0}" {1} {2} [{3}ms]'.format(self.requestline, code, size, duration))

gist

Next we tell the server which request_handler to use where the server gets started:

Before:

app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=port)

After:

app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=port, request_handler=MyFancyRequestHandler)

And then that’s it, we’re all done.

I’m impressed with Flask’s potent combination of simplicity and flexibility. It’s second to no other python web framework I’ve encountered.

SendHub adds iPhone in-app purchase and sound notifications

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:13:00 -0700

Our engineers are hard at work launching new features for our awesome customers. If you missed our news last week - we launched an Android app, unlimited SendHub to SendHub calling and expanded business features. This week, we have some more news for you.

iPhone in-app purchase

We have added a new feature exclusively for our iPhone customers. If you are an iPhone user, you can now buy more texts, calls, and groups right from your SendHub app. We have also added special promotional pricing: $9.99/month only for unlimited texts, 150 voice minutes and 10 groups of 100 contacts. That’s a steal! Click on your profile settings now to upgrade.

Sound notifications for texts recieved on your PC

This has been one of the most requested features from our customers. Now when you receive a text message on your PC or your laptop, you will get a sound notification immediately. Don’t miss any more SendHub messages while you are browsing the web.

If you haven’t tried SendHub yet - sign up now for free. If you need more than 5 business lines or the premier plan, contact our sales team for special pricing.

The SendHub Team

SendHub launches Android app and expands business features

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:48:00 -0700

In 2011, Garrett, John and Ash started SendHub to build a communications platform for Garrett’s nephew’s school. Since then a lot has happened - we graduated from Y-Combinator, raised $2M from a handful of angel investors and have been hard at work building out our platform.

Our mission has always been to build a simple, fast and reliable communications platform for businesses and organizations. Today, we’re one step closer with the availability of Android app, unlimited SendHub to SendHub calling, and some rockin’ new business features.

Android app

The Android app is finally here. Download it from the Play Store and get all the awesome desktop features on your Android smartphone and tablet. Call and text over WiFi, 3G/4G data, or cellular voice networks using your SendHub number.

You can even use the native dialer of your Android phone to make outbound calls with your SendHub number - avoid the extra hassle of opening the Android app to place a call.

Unlimited SendHub to SendHub calling

No more worrying about SendHub minutes when you call your co-worker using a SendHub number. Unlimited SendHub to SendHub calling is now available on all plans. (Unlimited SendHub to SendHub texting is already available on all plans.)

New business features

We’ve recently added a collection of new features making it easy to use SendHub for your business or organization:

Call Forwarding: Receive your sendhub calls from any device, whether it is your home phone, tablet, laptop or desk phone.
Call Transfer - Someone dialed the wrong department? No worries! Press the call transfer button to transfer that call to any phone number on your contacts list.
Auto attendant (Coming Soon!) - Transfer your calls on your main business phone line to any department. Record a message with the codes for your respective departments ex: Dial 1 for Sales, 2 for Support, 0 for receptionist etc. The caller will hear the message and will get automatically transferred based on the code selected.
Shared Groups - Add all your contacts to a particular group and share it with your co-workers and employees.

Why SendHub is right for your business?

If you are a business owner or an IT admin, you want a phone system that is easy to use and manage, and also allows your employees to use their own devices. Using SendHub, you can easily add, delete or reallocate phone lines, monitor usage and download analytics with a single click.

You have no hardware to setup, no contracts and it just works on any device. You get the first phone line for free and additional phone lines start at $10/month - Try it now for free. If you need more than 5 business lines or the premier plan, contact our sales team for special pricing.

P.S. Don’t forget our group texting feature, which you can use to broadcast marketing and reminder text messages to all your customers, employees and suppliers.

The SendHub Team

How to serve Django Statics (and not go insane)

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:03:00 -0800

It’s crucial for a website like ours to be as responsive as possible. One of our goals over the last couple months has been to improve our website’s performance. Not that page load time was particularly slow for a single page web-app, but we knew there was room for improvement. This post will take a look at some of the steps we took to improve performance.

Before we even start you might be thinking: “Aren’t there libraries which solve all these problems for you? Why not just install one of those and be done with it?”

Normally I’d probably agree with you, and in this case we did start with a library - we used Django Compressor. But (for legacy reasons we wont go into here) it drove us insane. Eventually we just bit the bullet and built our own. Sometimes its easier just to roll your own library than to try and bend an existing solution to fit all your needs. What was probably most surprising about this process was just how many little changes were necessary to finally make a dent in the numbers. Here’s how we did it.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

We already knew about the Performance Golden Rule:

80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend. 
Start there.

And two crucial tools: PageSpeed and YSlow. These tools will help you identify problems that cause your site to run slow.

Here were things we did:

Enable GZIP

We had GZIP enabled for all our pages (through django middleware), but we were serving static assets from an S3 bucket. There’s a workaround to this problem but it has the side effect of breaking anyone who doesn’t have support for GZIP. This is not acceptable. And its an unnecessary problem.

Instead, serve your assets with your web server and use a reverse-proxy CDN to cache them. Both Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare can solve this job, however we found that CloudFlare (not amazon) was easier to use and did not have any worse performance. GZIP will be handled properly (with the addition of appropriate Vary headers) and you’ll get two nice side benefits: (1) it works the same way locally and (2) there’s no additional step when you deploy.

Combine Scripts & Styles

We were already doing this but its worth mentioning because it makes such a big impact. Something like this:

def get_package(typ, package):
    contents = ""
    for file_name in package:
        file_path = os.path.join(root_dir, file_name)

        _, file_contents = get_file(file_path)

        contents += file_contents + "\n"

    if typ == 'js':
        contents = process_javascript(contents)

    return (hashlib.sha1(contents).hexdigest(), contents)

Don’t Combine All Scripts

This is in conflict with #2 but it turns out there’s a major downside to combining all your scripts together. Anytime any one of them changes you have to redownload the whole thing. Depending on the size of your scripts this could be a huge hit. So instead consider breaking up your large package into a couple of smaller packages. One to house relatively unchanging libraries (like jquery) and another to house the code that you are changing every day.

The other key here is to use a library like head.js to dynamically load these scripts asynchronously (so they are loaded simultaneously).

Embed Images

Embed your images directly in your css files using data-uris. You can generate them fairly easily:

def get_data_url(fp):
    _, ext = os.path.splitext(fp)
    encoded = ""
    with open(fp, "rb") as handle:
        encoded = base64.standard_b64encode(handle.read())
    return "data:" + mime[ext] + ";base64," + encoded

Embedded images like this work mostly across the board, but a simple fallback is just to serve the images directly for browsers that can’t handle the data-uris. (IE < 8)

If that doesn’t work out, at least sprite your images together. Then there’s only one request needed. (Like this: https://www.google.com/images/nav_logo114.png)

Defer 3rd Party Libraries

For 3rd party libraries that aren’t really needed immediately (facebook, twitter, google+, …) load them after page load. This can work for tracking js libraries too.

Static Domain

Use a separate cookieless domain to serve assets. (We use shtatics.com) This cuts down on http request overhead.

URLs

Use a URL scheme like this:

http://{cookie-less-domain}/assets/{hash}/{path}

Not like this:

http://{cookie-less-domain}/assets/{path}?version={hash}

Because proxies don’t like the ? in the URL. Or this:

http://{cookie-less-domain}/assets/{hash}

Because that makes things really hard to debug. Also use the contents of the file to generate the hash not a timestamp… ever so slight variations between server timestamps is something you’d rather not have to think about.

Caching Headers

Use the appropriate caching headers. Set Cache-Control to public and give it a really long max-age (like 1 year). Because we use hashes in the URLs of our assets we never have to worry about a stale cache.

Processing

Finally set up your library in such a way that you can add processing steps to the outputs of js and css packages. This way you can do things like minify your javascript (strip comments and whitespace), but it also gives you the ability to do more sophisticated types of processing (for example it allows you to use SASS or CoffeeScript).

6 Easy Marketing Tips for Black Friday

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:40:00 -0800

With Black Friday just three days away, retailers around the country are ramping up marketing efforts for the imminent swarms of coupon-clutching customers. Unfortunately, email marketing isn’t sufficient anymore. Our advice to retailers: Setup an SMS marketing campaign now.

Every year stores are opening earlier, and staying open later to fully cash in on the holiday rush. Last year, Forbes wrote of the record breaking Black Friday Weekend with online and instore sales totalling $52.4 billion. As you can imagine, this presents an enormous opportunity for businesses and customers alike.

Don’t you wish there was a way to directly inform individual customers about how much inventory is left of a product you already know they want, what similar deals might interest them, and how they can get it more quickly than everyone else?

At SendHub, we believe that there’s a more effective way to distribute these deals— and it’s not blasting your customers with emails. Opt-in text messages (unlike this case!) let you, the retailer or marketer, send targeted text message deals, exclusives, inventory updates and more to customers who actually want to receive them.

Texting Tips for Retailers:

1. Offer Text alerts: If you have yet to do this, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Give customers quick sales announcements or exclusive “text only” deals to spur the buying spree of Black Friday. SendHub offers various options to best suit your needs.

2. Identify Yourself: Your messages will come in with those of friends and family. Make it clear who is messaging them from the start. “Hi- SendHub here! Exclusive offer on all plans through Monday! Text DEALS to 650-555-5555 for details.”

3. Give Opt-In Customers Even MORE: These customers are telling you that they love your brand— so much so that they’re willing to give you direct access to their pocket. Sweeten up the regular in-store 20% off deal with an extra 5-10% or free [insert low cost, customer-keeping product].

4. Keep & Use Customer Information Wisely! The information you collect can be reused throughout the holiday season and into the future. However, don’t lose your customers by abusing their information with too many texts. This is an opportunity to thank your customer for letting you text them deals and alerts.

5. Write Brief and Focused Messages: There’s no room for fluff in these messages. Leave out the extraneous deals and tell them what the deal is and how they can claim it.

6. Text-to-Join: Leverage this high traffic time to get as many people on your text/mailing list as possible. After Thanksgiving and Black Friday is Christmas where the buying continues. Make joining your mailing list as easy as possible by saying “Text SIGNUP to 650-555-5555 to get deals through christmas!”

Thanks for reading!

Peter Walters & The SendHub Team

How Papa John's Could Have Saved $250MM

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:46:32 -0800

U.S. Pizza chain, Papa John’s is in trouble— we’re talking serious marinara sauce. Today, trouble is a $250 million class-action lawsuit for sending 500,000 unwanted text messages to their customers through a mass text messaging service. Yikes!

What could Papa John’s have done to prevent this?

Express written consent before sending a message to customers. Just because your company collected a cell phone number, doesn’t mean it’s cool to start blasting them with marketing messages. The customer must know that you intend to send them messages when collecting their information. Your customers are your lifeblood— remember to respect them.

Use text-to-join. Create a simple keyword, like ‘pizza’, that customers can text to opt-into marketing messages and deals. Maybe even offer them some discount credit for opting in. Nothing says “done with your service” like 15 unwanted text message in the middle of the night.

Have a simple way to unsubscribe. Similarly, nothing says unsubscribe like “Stop”. A user should be able to unsubscribe via a simple text message. If you let your customers know that they are in control, they will be much more likely to listen to what you have to say.

At SendHub we pride ourselves on protecting our consumer’s privacy. We make it clear to advertisers importing contacts that sending unsolicited messages is strictly against our terms of use, and illegal according to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This shows in our stats. Collectively, SendHub users have an average block/unsubscribe rate of 0.004%. We are proud of this, especially considering that 97% of text messages are read, and 83% are read in the first hour.

After a lawsuit this large, it’s unlikely that companies like Papa John’s will ever haphazardly spam their users with sms messages again. 250 million pepperonis is no small price even for a company that size. However, if they decide in the future that they want to tastefully message (or pepper!) their users, well, lets just say we’ll be waiting for their text. ;-)

Head over to SendHub to sign up and deliver pizza deals the right way.

Peter & The SendHub Team

Why can’t I vote online or from my cell phone?

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 09:53:08 -0800

Voting, Computers and the Future of Cybersecurity, November 9, 2012

Our Current Voting System is Broken.

Voting can be tedious. Between the “shade in the bubble” process, physical presence, and now, unforeseen natural disasters, actually getting out the vote can be difficult. Voting for a president is one of our greatest rights as American citizens. Today literally millions of us are excluded for the voting process for various reasons— some of course by choice. And while it is time for a change, the technology (or more accurately, the security) is not there yet.

If our intention is to enable more Americans to participate in elections, then the process needs to be quick, convenient and digitized. If we can do our banking online (even from our cell phones), store gigabytes of personal data online, and even conduct multibillion dollar deals online, why are we still voting in person or by using the postal service? The system is antiquated. Computer scientists, cybersecurity specialists, entrepreneurs and innovators need to continue to work together to improve computer and internet security, because we’re definitely not there yet.

Email Voting Begins…

This year we were faced with a natural disaster that prevented hundreds of thousand of people from getting to the polls. The Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, made the decision to allow registered voters displaced by Hurricane Sandy to vote electronically— i.e. by email. In a November 3rd statement from the New Jersey State government website, Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno is quoted saying:

“This has been an extraordinary storm that has created unthinkable destruction across our state and we know many people have questions about how and where to cast their vote in Tuesday’s election. To help alleviate pressure on polling places, we encourage voters to either use electronic voting or the extended hours at county offices to cast their vote…”

Amazing, right?!

Not quite. Here’s the process:

While on the surface this seems like a tremendous step forward in voting technology, the process is not so simple.

“To vote electronically, displaced voters may submit a mail-in ballot application either by e-mail or fax to their county clerk. Once an application is approved, the clerk will electronically send a ballot to the voter by either fax or e-mail in accordance to the voter’s preference. Voters must return their electronic ballot – by fax or email – no later than November 6, 2012, at 8 p.m.”

…oh, and they forgot to mention the “Waiver of Secrecy” form which also needed to be returned by 8pm on Election day. More recent updates also necessitate that the online voter also send a physical ballot in for verification by Friday…after the election is over…

The voter needs a bunch of things at her disposal in order for this to work: a computer or fax machine, mailbox (or transportation to a public one), printer and quite a bit of time. Not easy if your house is gone, you have kids to take care of and you don’t have a computer or fax machine. While the effort was definitely a step in the right direction—and a decent test for the possibility of E-voting in the future, it was rushed and not sufficient. Countless Americans may have still been blocked from fulfilling their constitutional right to vote.

Why Email, Text or Online Voting Won’t Happen For a Long Time

The problem is that of security…hackers. Minor vulnerabilities in various stages of internet and computer security have major consequences on our ability to protect sensitive data and secure the online voting process (whether through a website, email or text message). Virtually any computer, company or server is vulnerable to cyber attack. Most big, “secure” companies (including banks, government even cybersecurity agencies!) have, or likely soon will be hacked. This is a serious issue. Even the Pentagon is not immune. Online spies have hacked top secret information from the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter Project, and even implanted bugs in American drones.

Professor J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, writes in the Freedom To Tinker Blog about Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System Pilot in 2010:

“The specific vulnerability that we exploited is simple to fix, but it will be vastly more difficult to make the system secure. We’ve found a number of other problems in the system, and everything we’ve seen suggests that the design is brittle: one small mistake can completely compromise its security.”

A forum on E-Voting was held at Princeton University where panelists discussed the risks and opportunities associated with e-voting for more than three hours. The primary concern for all parties was security. The consensus? We’re definitely not there yet.

How to Address The Security Problem

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” ~ Albert Einstein

Unfortunately, we need to reinvent the computer. Peter G. Neumann, a renowned 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, reasons that the only viable solution to the computer security crisis is to study all previous research, hand pick the best ideas and systems, and then rebuild something completely new from the ground up.

Is the reinvention of the computer, programing and the internet as we know it going to happen in this lifetime? Probably not. Is it possible? We should hope so.

Right now we need:

To promote open sharing of cyber vulnerabilities and emerging protective measures for our computers and servers.
Provide authority to the National Cybersecurity Center to identify and mitigate cyber weaknesses specifically when attacks could result in gross loss of information, money or life.
Build public-private partnerships and address these issues together
To ensure that our own personal computers are as secure as possible. The folks at MIT have some good tips, or How to Device Passwords That Drive Hackers Away.

In the long term we need:

New programming languages
New security measures
New innovative systems separating servers from computers from the internet
Shape-shifting code
Bold, scientific creativity
More brilliant programmers working relentlessly on security
Vigilance; Security is an on-going battle between computer engineers and those looking to capitalize on weak systems.

The Consequences

The consequences of maintaining both our antiquated system of in-person voting, and our current method of writing code using computers, and casually throwing personal data across the internet are serious. Security is at the heart of these issues— your security! This is your finances, personal information and data, emails, pictures, work documents and so much more at risk. Voting is just one more example of an outdated and broken system. The real issue is one of computer and internet security.

Thanks for reading!

Peter Walters & The SendHub Team

8 Ways to Easily Enhance Your Customer Service

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 17:03:00 -0700

In the social media age, where reviews and opinions are abundant, good customer service (CS) is essential for every company. Southwest Airlines, FedEx, Amazon.com, Bonobos and Zappos as examples of companies that treat customer service as an opportunity—a strategic business investment. These companies all have strong commitments to ensuring a simple and seamless buying process— and if problems do arise they work fast to fix them. These are just a few of the companies that made MSN’s 2012 Customer Service Hall of Fame List. Keep in mind that quality customer service is one of the most important ingredients to a sustainable and quality business strategy.

Here are 8 tips that can make a frustrated customer leave your website feeling happy, helped, and even inclined to share your company with their community.

1) Make customer service a priority for your company. It’s easy to give customer service a backseat when growth and expansion are your primary goals, however countless studies show that good customer service adds tremendous value to your business.

“If you focus on doing what is right by the customer, your chances of success skyrocket. Bringing happiness to everyday transactions is what drives brand loyalty and encourages customers to spread the word to friends and family.” -Jay M, Customer Support, Zappos

2) Be Friendly. It seems like a simple thing, but when a customer is frustrated and needs help, they want to talk to a person— not a bot. Ask how their day is going, and if there is an appropriate opportunity, try to get to know somebody! Drop the script and just be your friendly, helpful self.

3) Empathize. Often times your customers are angry when they visit your site for support. Recognize this, forget all the other people that have been yelling at you all day, and start fresh. You are the voice for your company. That’s a huge responsibility, and your response can mean the difference between a lost customer and a sale/upgrade. Feel their frustration, and make your goal to solve their problem, and have them leave feeling satisfied. Anything less should be unacceptable.

4) Adapt. Customers will be angry, frustrated, confused, happy, chatty, and sometimes just plain rude. Try to recognize these moods early on in your conversation and adapt your tone to fit. If a customer is struggling to register, you could say “You’re not registering properly. Please try again.” or “I see you’re having some problems registering—sorry for the inconvenience. Let’s see what’s going on so we can get you started.” Two approaches: one of which is cold and pretty unhelpful, the other friendly, warm and focused on the customer and solving their problem. As Mark Schaefer writes: “I realized that the customer is NOT always right. But the customer is always the customer. I was the one who had to adapt to survive and compete.”

5) Keep a record to keep improving. Keeping track of all questions, their frequency, and the answers you give will help you make your product better. Desk.com is a fantastic resource to use so nothing falls through the cracks and you can prioritize issues. If you get 20 questions a day asking where the Purchase button is on your website, you would be wise to reevaluate the placement of that button. If customers are constantly asking you what your company does, you know it’s probably time to redesign your homepage.

6) Don’t keep your customers waiting, even if you don’t have an answer yet. The more available you can be, and the more quickly you can answer the phone/email/chat, the better. We all have painful stories of waiting on hold for hours listening to elevator “music.” Don’t make your customers wait. Even if you respond saying that you don’t have an answer yet, it will mean a lot to the customer. For example:

“Hey Sarah,

I just wanted to check in and let you know that we’re still working on this and we’ll let you know ASAP when we have a solution. Thanks for your patience and for being a great customer!”

Better than radio silence for a number of hours or days, right? Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If they are on hold, and you’re waiting for a manager to get back to you with an answer, get back on the line and tell them what’s going on.

7) Empower your customer service team. Bonobos has the best customer service I have personally ever experienced. The customer service “Ninjas” don’t need to pass my requests on to their supervisors. They can give me discounted products, refunds and solve my issues on their own. If you have a business, let your CS staff make decisions using their judgement on all matters that can be solved for under $50 (you pick the cap). This way, you avoid the little questions and issues, your CS team feels empowered, and your customers problems can be solved quickly and without issue.

“We just want to be as easy as possible to deal with, period. We want to be fast, we don’t want to keep you waiting for a day to get a response from us. We also want to be really personable. In terms of being easy, we want to use the easiest policies that we can to make it easy to do business with us.” -John Rote, VP of Experience, Bonobos

8) 100% Customer satisfaction guaranteed. Make visiting your website and purchasing products from you as easy and enjoyable as possible. Give free shipping, free returns, get rid of the standard ‘30 days return’ policy and put your customers first. Always. Even if they wear your pants for a few months and decide they don’t, in fact, fit that well, take them back— no questions asked— and refund them fully. It won’t cost your company much, but I guarantee your customer will be back again, and will likely become a brand ambassador for you without asking.

While we could go on, these 8 tips will add a lot. If implementing these changes is expensive or time consuming, ask yourself whether customer service is going to be a necessary operational expense or a business investment for your company. We think the latter. If you want to know how the best does it, have your customer service team read Delivering Happiness, which explains how Zappos got to be the best in the business.

Now get your customer service team off script, empower them to make the decisions that will leave your customers happy, and remember that customer service is an opportunity, not just a necessity.

Thanks for tuning in!

By Peter Walters & The SendHub Team

How Do You Get Students to Read Your Emails?

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:07:00 -0700

The short answer: Stop sending them.

One of the biggest frustrations for educators, coaches and administrators in K-12 and higher education is students not opening emails. This problem is not new, and is only getting worse. Fortunately, some in the education community are exploring new “tricks” and adopting new messaging solutions.

If you want students to read your messages, send them a text.

Monterrio Jones, Direct Loan Coordinator at Voorhees College, is one of many administrators using text messaging to communicate with students more effectively. Below are a few examples of how Jones and others have used texting to simplify communications with students.

Scheduling Meetings: At Voorhees, for example, students can text the keyword ‘Appointment’ to the Office of Financial Aid’s SendHub number and are added to the “Appointments” group. The administrator can simply respond directly to the student with an available time. Jones mentioned that before using SendHub he consistently had 45 students packed in the lobby waiting to meet with an advisor. Now, after just two months of using SendHub? Only 3 students, and meetings can be confirmed instantly from any cell phone.

Academic Calendar Reminders: Lots of students want to attend campus events, but when the school sends copious emails everyday with the entire week’s activities, schedule changes, and safety reminders, remembering to actually go to these events can be tough. Using SendHub’s Scheduled Message feature, setting up and sending reminders to students is effortless. Just schedule a reminder about one specific event to be sent to all students (or interested groups) 30 minutes before it starts. No more hoping that they will check their email in time. As long as you have their phone number, you can assume students will get your message.

Delays & School Closings: Many students travel long distances to get to school. On days where the weather is inclement, reaching students, faculty and staff quickly is essential. Now administrators can send a message to students (and their parents) with transportation schedule updates, whether classes are cancelled, or if the school will be closed for the day.

Parents: Parents can be just as difficult to reach as students. Now teachers and administrators can send quick, targeted messages to parents about anything— from important notices about lice going around school, to reminders about upcoming parent-teacher meetings. SendHub helps bridge the virtual gap between a school, parents and students.

For more information on how to ensure that students and parents receive your messages, or to get a SendHub number for free in under a minute, visit www.sendhub.com.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett & The SendHub Team

Spotlight: Avi Herschman, High School Hockey Coach and Co-founder of Givespark

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:49:00 -0700

Meet Avi, a social entrepreneur and men’s hockey coach at Rambam Mesivta High School in West Hempstead, New York.

Avi first learned about SendHub through Hacker News and TechCrunch, two of the most trafficked sites for tech news and hacker gossip. Avi was looking for a more effective way to contact his players.

“SendHub allows me to stay in close contact with my players outside of school”

Unless you work in a high school or have a teen around the house, you may not have noticed that students really don’t check email very often. I know— it might be hard to believe, but it’s true. All those middle school screen names turned email addresses (remember, ‘luv2smooch5255,’ ‘gurlpower4eva,’ or ‘ih8thepolice420’) are history.

Avi needed a way to reach his players consistently, often with short notice, while at the same time keeping his personal cell phone number private. Avi mentioned that he mostly uses SendHub to “text players reminders about games and practices.” Avi continued, “and the fact that I can text different groups of players is also extremely useful.”

Like Avi, coaches at almost every level of sport look to SendHub for a simple and effective solution for communicating with parents and players who are often unresponsive to email. SendHub offers the perfect web and mobile platform for sending practice reminders, schedule changes, and motivational quotes directly to any cell phone— a device most people never leave home without.

Sorting personal contacts into meaningful large and small groups is becoming increasingly prevalent across other popular messaging platforms (i.e. Google+, Facebook, etc.). Team SendHub is working hard to provide the best contact management experience, while keeping everything simple and accessible on any device.

Avi, for example, can send one message to the offense and goalies reminding them that they have shooting practice, and a separate message to parents with a reminder about the upcoming game. Now communicating with any one group on his team is incredibly easy.

Outside of his coaching job and time with friends and family, Avi is the Co-founder of Givespark (also a Y-Combinator graduate along with SendHub.), and works in business development and operations. Givespark is a platform that allows celebrities to engage their fans on a personal level while also supporting social causes. They’re just getting started, so check out their website for more information!

Favorite Tech Gadget - My Computer

Favorite thing about SendHub - Its Simplicity!

Favorite events to attend - Hockey games, of course!

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Avi! Best of luck to your team this season!

If you or your team want to be our spotlight feature for the week (we love giving shout outs!) send us a text or email and tell us how YOU use SendHub :)

Garrett & The SendHub Team

Introducing Shared Groups!

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:18:00 -0700

Our engineers are tired….

…even the dog is tired!

We (yes, Kovacs the Afghan Hound, too) have been working tirelessly these past few weeks on an exciting new feature that we can FINALLY tell you about.

Shared Groups! SendHub Users now have a fast and simple way to share a group of contacts with their team. It’s just like Shared Folders in Dropbox, but for groups of contacts that you can message instantly. Share contacts across your organization, then when you make a change it’s instantly available to everyone. Voila!

Below is a short explanation of why we launched this feature, how it’s going to help you, and a step by step guide to sharing a group with your colleagues or friends.

First, the why:

We make it incredibly easy to share client and colleague contact information across organizations - changes appear everywhere, with simple permissions.
This feature makes it incredibly convenient for everyone on a team to send messages to your groups.
Contact sharing was one of our most highly requested features.

Here are a few examples of how customers will benefit:

Businesses: A business with sales staff across the country reduces workload by automatically pushing customer information changes to all team members. Contact updates can happen while in the field, centralizing all customer data at headquarters, or the reverse.

Organizations: A fire department needs a simple way to share contacts between the chief, officers and other company members so anyone can send a message to the team or a particular group in the department.

Schools: A school office can now easily create contact groups for each class of students and parents, and then distribute them to the appropriate teachers.

So HOW do you share a group?

1) On the mobile app, begin by selecting the group that you wish to share. Right now, we’re going to be sharing the Customers group.

2) Once inside, tap Share Group.

3) Enter the Contact Name, Cell Phone Number or Email Address of the contacts that you would like to share the group with. Next, decide whether you would like to enable Sharers to Edit the Group, and whether you would like to include yourself in the group.

4) If you share a group to an email address, the invitation will look like this. If you share a group with a cell phone number, a similar message will appear. Simply click the link to join the Shared Group.

5) You can choose whether to Accept or Decline this group invitation.

And that’s it. Now all you need to do is decide who to share with first! Enjoy!

Garrett & The SendHub TEAM

Casual Friday: Meet Java Superman, Caleb Doxsey

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 05:50:00 -0700

Name: Caleb Doxsey, the newest member of the SendHub Team!

Hometown: Spanish Fort, Alabama

Unofficial Title: Team Minstrel!

Fun Fact: When I was a kid I was an avid juggler. Juggling, like riding a bike, is a skill you don’t ever really forget so I still juggle from time to time.

Best Prank Call you’ve ever pulled off: I can’t think of a time I ever prank called anyone, but we used to leave rubber spiders around the house to scare my Mom.

What’s your biggest texting pet peeve: All the advertising texts my cell phone provider sends me.

That’s it for another Casual Friday team member highlight. Keep checking in to meet the rest of our team!

Spotlight: Donald & Ann, Student Leaders for CNU Students for Obama

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 05:55:00 -0700

Today’s user spotlight is of Donald Hair and Ann Joyce, the Student Leaders for the Christopher Newport University Students for Obama Group!

Donald and Ann are, as you might suspect, avid Obama supporters (“political junkies,” in their own words) and both enjoy travel, sports, and running.

“We first heard about SendHub through a quick Google Search because we were trying to find creative ways to market to our student body. We found SendHub and have not looked back” This is AWESOME for us to hear for two reasons:

1.) Google did its job and connected students looking to market their organization on campus by sending one message to lots of people, to our company that offers that exact functionality, along with much more.
2.) They haven’t looked back! Here at SendHub we strive for speed, efficiency and simplicity— a one stop shop for all of your group communication needs.

When asked how else SendHub might be used on Campus, Donald responded that “SendHub is an awesome way to market your Student Body organization because it encourages a more involved atmosphere”. With our simple Text-To-Join feature, students can simply text the groups keyword to the SendHub number and, voila, they are now members of the CNU Students for Obama SendHub group, and can receive updates “at any given moment around new activities on campus and in the community. It allows us to hit 80+ members at any given moment within 3 seconds! :)”

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Donald and Ann— and for using SendHub at CNU!

Favorite tech gadget: iPhone.
Favorite Part about SendHub: The reliability, and consistency.
Favorite Event to attend: Student Events on Campus, and Concerts!

And that’s it for another edition of the SendHub User Spotlight! Please e-mail peter@sendhub.com if you or your organization would like to be featured on our blog.

Thanks for reading!
-Garrett & The SendHub Team

Spotlight: Kevin Cline, Director of the Christian Student Center at Louisiana Tech

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:55:53 -0700

After receiving this post on our Facebook wall, we had to reach out to Kevin!

Hearing from users like this is the type of thing that brings a smile to the face of everyone in our office— it’s our bread and butter and keeps us working hard everyday. But back to Kevin.

Kevin first heard about SendHub from his cousin, who is a youth minister in Georgia and uses SendHub to communicate with his ministry and loves the service. According to Kevin, “It used to be such a pain to send out different texts to different people, especially our intramural teams…now, it is so easy and fast to contact and know that EVERYBODY on a team or group got the message.” Kevin also loves our integration with both Facebook and Twitter where he can “send one message out via text, and those who do not want to get the news via text can get it on our other avenues of communication without me having to copy and paste all the time!!! HOW AWESOME IS THAT???” It’s incredibly awesome, Kevin.

Here at SendHub our goal is to simplify communication.

But how is Kevin sending messages via SendHub you ask (we know— you were JUST about to ask)? “I really use both [iPhone app and website]. I like that I can send notices and schedule them for different times and dates online.”

People just like Kevin (though, so far, few are as enthusiastic) are using SendHub all over the country for similar purposes. Firehouses, sports teams, restaurants, shipping companies, college clubs and more all use SendHub to streamline, focus and simplify communication with their communities. If you’re interested in trying out SendHub for your group, visit our website for details!

And a little bit more about Kevin:

•Favorite Tech Gadget:
IPHONE!!! Only way I stay sane. LOL.

•Favorite part about SendHub:
The ease of use. I can use it anytime, anywhere, and it was easy to learn. Furthermore,
the staff is EXCELLENT. The anytime chat box on the website makes it easy to get
quick answers to any questions

•Favorite event to attend:
Devotionals, concerts, and FOOTBALL!!! Love tailgating before games, especially in
Louisiana. Jambalaya, Red Beans and Rice, Burgers, Hot Dogs, Blackened Chicken
Boudain, Sausage and Shrimp and Catfish, All Sprinkled with Tony Chachere’s!!!!
AMAZING!!!

•Best prank/prank call you’ve ever pulled:
I don’t call people to prank them. I prank people that call me. I love answering the
phone in many different ways— i.e.
- “Road-kill grill: You kill em we grill em..”
- “SANTA’S WORKSHOP: ELMER SPEAKING!”
- “Hulk’s deli. You order, we smash.”

And that’s it for another edition of the SendHub User Spotlight! Please e-mail peter@sendhub.com if you would like to be featured.

Thanks for reading!

-Garrett & The SendHub Team

SendHub Visits Facebook for "HackEd"...so how did we fare?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:36:00 -0700

Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put on a hackathon yesterday right here in Menlo Park. SendHub was fortunate enough to be invited to participate. Sweet, right? Since our team is located down the street from Facebook’s campus, it was a short trip to join the party.

But how did we do….

We dominated, of course!

“HackEd” was part launch party and part hackathon. The Gates Foundation announced a new initiative called College Knowledge Challenge, which will use a $2.5 million dollar fund (I think they found the spare change in Bill and Melinda’s sofa…..) to encourage the development of products that help increase college access and completion. So, all you education enthusiasts out there, start building and disrupting……no excuses!

Good news first; our team was one of three winners! The following are the categories we had to choose between and focus on building a solution to address:

Academic Support: Building social capital and an academically supportive peer group.
Financial Aid: Navigating the college admissions, financial aid, and matching processes.
Academic Pathways: Seeing themselves as college graduates and developing personal pathways to graduation.

Our team was comprised of Nihal ElRayess with Teach for America, Anna Waring with Foundation for a College Education and Marc Weil of Cloudmine. In just under 6 hours (crazy, right?) we built an application that enables academic coaches/counselors to communicate important information - like application deadlines with links embedded - via text to students or parents. When important milestones are reached, messages or badges are posted to the student’s Facebook wall so her friends and support network can celebrate the accomplishment.

I promise, I did not propose this idea…..honest. Both Nihal and Anna emphasized the need for such a communication tool that has the ability to reach even the most disadvantaged homes… so we made it happen! But, since we had such limited time to build everything, SendHub’s API was a critical backend piece that enabled us to deploy a functional prototype within just a few hours.

We gave our pitch for the problem we were solving and enabled both the audience and judges to participate using SendHub’s text to join feature. Clearly, things went well.

Every student, regardless of the zip code they live in, deserves a chance at self-actualization and social mobility. SendHub is excited to be part of a large community committed to making this happen.

Thanks for reading!

-Garrett & The SendHub Team

Spotlight: Shira Malone, 2nd Grade Teacher at The Orchard School

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:32:20 -0700

We launched SendHub in order to empower educators to communicate more effectively with students and parents. Teachers can text everyone, without having to give out their personal number, which is especially helpful in disadvantaged communities, where access to computers and email are limited, but nearly everyone has a cell phone.

Enter Shira Malone. Mrs. Malone teaches second grade at The Orchard School in Indianapolis, Indiana. Shira has a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education and loves to drive down to Bloomington with her husband to watch IU Hoosiers basketball games.

Shira first found out about SendHub through a simple Google search of educational tools for teachers. Wanting to more easily communicate with the parents of her students, Shira tried six (yep, SIX!) different messaging programs until she landed on SendHub as the winner. “It was by far the best,” Shira mentioned, adding that it gives her the opportunity to share information with parents in a “secure and private manner.” Though SendHub, Shira can contact parents directly (either individually or the entire group) with class updates, reminders about school activities, projects and upcoming events. Unlike regular text messaging, Shira appreciates that when parents reply, responses go directly back to her only, and not the entire group of parents. Another feature that Shira mentioned was helpful was the ability to either send messages from either her desk at the computer or on-the-go from her iPhone.

Favorite Tech Gadget: iPhone

Favorite Part About SendHub: I can text parents, but they can’t call me on my personal cell phone number.

Favorite Event to Attend: Friday evening date nights at home with my husband (with take out and a movie rental). I’m boring, I know…

You can follow Shira on Twitter @shira_rachelle. We hope you enjoyed our Spotlight, and if you (or your company) want to be featured, send us a txt or email and tell us how YOU use SendHub :)

Garrett & the SendHub Team

Spotlight: Perry Wasserbauer, Phi Gamma Delta at the University of Connecticut

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:19:00 -0700

If you grew up with at least one brother, you can probably recall your house being pretty crazy at times. Well, imagine having ninety brothers and throwing everyone together on the campus of the University of Connecticut. There’s likely to be a few stories you never write home about.

Perry Wasserbauer is the recording secretary for Phi Gamma Delta. He gave up on using email to reach the brothers of Fiji a long time ago and managing everything on his personal phone just became too much of a hassle. SendHub is now the tool he uses to keep all the brothers connected. “Instead of people trying to keep track of their calendars, which is a big issue for most of these guys, we are able to send out a text that hits everyone immediately”, says Perry. “I am able to schedule the messages usually, which has made things a lot more convenient for me.”

In order to keep their chapter meetings short, they have each committee submit their report via text, which they then add to the minutes. “We hate long meetings, so getting everyone to text in their report shaves off a bunch time,” he said. “It’s easy for me to go online and cut & paste the messages into a document that has all the meeting details for the week.”

College is the best 4, 5 or 6 years of your life, so why waste one second, right? By the looks of things, Perry and the men of Phi Gamma Delta will have a lot of epic memories that will last a lifetime.

Fav tech gadget: Google Nexus phone

Fav part of SendHub: Schedule messages make my life a lot easier. I also like being able to message from my phone, even though you don’t have an android app yet.

Fav type of event: UCONN football game

Casual Friday: Meet Engineering Ninja, Kevin Calloway

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:27:00 -0700

Name: Kevin Calloway

Hometown: Lynwood, IL

Unofficial job: Director of Cilantro Detection

Fun Fact: I have twice the amount of nerves in my gums as the average human. When I got x-rays for my wisdom teeth removal, the surgeon rushed into the room, excited to share his “discovery”. I’d like to say that I experience sensations that you can only imagine, but in reality, cavities just hurt more.

Best prank call you’ve pulled off: I’ve never done a prank call, but in college I changed the auto-replace dictionary on a friend’s computer so that words like his name, “the”, etc would auto-replace with colorful words!

What’s your biggest texting pet peeve? When people want to have deep conversations that could be addressed faster in a phone conversation, I’m not a happy camper.

Spotlight: Jeremy Stine, Stine Home and Yard

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 12:19:04 -0700

If you mention Stine in Louisiana, everyone knows you are talking about the home improvement store. With 12 locations and more than 800 associates, this family owned business competes in the major leagues, against giants like Home Depot and Loews.

Stine is the weekend playground for avid ‘DIY’ (do it yourself) warriors in Louisiana. But a large percentage of their business focuses on professional construction contractors. As the technology guy, Jeremy Stine has to make sure they are reaching this important customer base. “We wanted a better way to reach our contractors. A lot of them are old school and don’t have smart phones or their on the job site a lot, so they are not checking email”, says Jeremy. “They asked us to text them. Now we send special discounts and all types of offers directly to their phones.”

Stine is also focusing more on hunters and they rely heavily on print advertising to promote their products. In a recent edition of their store catalogue, which is distributed to four hundred thousand homes, they offered a prize for completing a new call to action, “Text BUCKS to 337-409-0477”. Because SendHub offers the flexibility to create multiple groups and keywords, they also placed advertisements in two other widely circulated hunting magazines, assigning a different keyword to each ad. Jeremy noted that this strategy, “allowed us to test three magazines and measure the exposure of the print advertisements and how much reader engagement we got. We were happy to see that our catalogue drove the most opt-ins”.

Unless you slept through geography class, you know that Louisiana is often in the path of hurricanes that come through the Gulf of Mexico. A few weeks ago, SendHub also proved to be a useful tool as Jeremy prepared for the arrival of Isaac. “We have a 50 page emergency procedure guide for this stuff, but it was going to be way more efficient to text message our associates”, he said. “Not all of our associates have active email accounts, but we know the majority have cell phones. Fortunately, our area wasn’t directly impacted, so we only had to use it a few times, but it’s good to have this option.”

Fav tech gadget: Never leaves home without his iPhone. But, he prefers hacker news to hardware.

Fav part of SendHub: iPhone app and the ability to control everything on the go.

Fav event to attend: New Orleans Saints game

Worst Prank Call: Apparetnly, Cajuns like to prank call Onstar.

To learn more about Stine, you can check out their website or find them on facebook. We hope you enjoyed our Spotlight, and if you (or your company) want to be featured, send us a txt or email and tell us how YOU use SendHub :)

Garrett & the SendHub Team