A Twilio Form Connector helps you send and manage short messages programmatically. Our platform lets you quickly and easily send text messages when a Form entry is uploaded and/or a Task Connector's triggering condition occurs.
Before you add a Connector, you must have a Twilio account and ensure that you have a valid Twilio Connection set up in your organization.
Adding your Twilio Connection
The Form Connectors page can be accessed from your Form Designer, settings, or the Screens listing if you hover your mouse over the Form row to display the connect option.
Once you are on the Connectors page, setting up a Twilio Connector is easy:
- Click the ADD CONNECTOR button (top-right corner) to see a list of available Connectors.
- Click the Twilio option.
The screen will refresh and the Twilio connector will be seen. The following information from the account will then be needed to set up the connection:
- Account SID
- Auth Token
- Phone Number
The first two items can be found on your Twilio dashboard. Sign into Twilio and find this information on the dashboard:
Click the Copy icon on the far right of each field to quickly copy each item and then paste it into the two corresponding fields on the connector, along with the phone number used in the third field.
Adding a Twilio Connector to your Form
Once the connection for Twilio has been set up, navigate to the Connect page of the form on which you wish to use the Twilio connector and click "ADD CONNECTOR" in the upper-right corner. Then, just like with adding the Connection earlier, click the Twilio option from the list.
Once the connector has been added to the form, enter the following information into the fields:
- To Number(s): these numbers will be the recipients of the form output when the form connector fires. Multiple numbers should be separated with commas, and numbers should be formatted as 10-digit integers only (e.g., no "+" symbols or otherwise). See the link included in the tooltip (to the right of the field name) for more details.
- Message Body: this will be the content of the message sent by the connector. As with other connectors, you may include data name placeholders to include data captured by the form.
Please note that there is a 160-character limit for the message body. For this reason, we would recommend calculating the total limit, factoring in the characters included in the Twilio response, to ensure your message is short enough to fit without being truncated automatically. To do this, try sending a blank form submission to see how many characters are included without any content; e.g., 38 characters alone are used in the message "Sent from your Twilio trial account." Subtract this from 160 and plan your message accordingly, allocating some flexibility for varying string lengths depending on any user data captured. - To Form Field: choose a form field from this drop-down that has a phone number that will be the recipient of the text message. As with the "To Numbers" field, there can be one or multiple numbers.
Please note that for the connector to be successful, this number must be a complete phone number with country and area codes. For this reason, it's highly recommended to use custom validation to enforce the proper format for the message to be successfully sent and received. A RegEx expression like this in the Custom Validation property of a numeric or text field would be recommended:
REGEX(., '\d{11,12}$')
This will ensure that an 11- to 12-digit number is entered before the user is allowed to continue. Of course, this can be changed to fit the specific format of a phone number in a given country/region.