Consent — who gets texted

A CONTACT WITH NO CONSENT RECORDED WILL BE TEXTED

Unless you change it, Gorilla Dash treats "we have never asked this person" as permission to send. Only an explicit no excludes somebody. That means importing a spreadsheet of contacts and sending a campaign texts every one of them, whether or not they ever agreed to hear from you. Read this guide before your first send, including the section on Only texting people who agreed.

The three states

State	Meaning	Will they be texted?
Opted in	They said yes.	Yes
Opted out	They said no, or replied STOP.	No
Not set	Nobody has ever asked.	Yes, unless your organisation only texts people who agreed (below).

Whether that is acceptable depends on where you are and how you got the number. In many places texting somebody who never agreed is against the law regardless of what the software allows. Gorilla Dash will not stop you; your regulator might.

Only texting people who agreed

If you would rather not text anybody who has never been asked, an organisation administrator can change the default for the whole organisation. When the setting is on, marketing texts go only to people whose consent is recorded as Opted in, and anybody whose consent is Not set is skipped. To switch it on:

Select Settings, then Communications Settings, and open the SMS tab.
Find the SMS consent section.
Turn on Only text people who have agreed to receive SMS.
Read the confirmation and choose Turn on.

The setting covers marketing texts: SMS campaigns from the organisation and from every tribe (a tribe is one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation), and marketing automations and CRM sequences that send marketing. People who opted in on an enquiry form or survey, or whose SMS setting was switched on by your team, still receive them. Transactional messages, such as order confirmations and appointment reminders, are not affected.

WHEN IT TAKES EFFECT

Turning the setting on applies to every text that has not been sent yet. That includes a campaign already pushed to your tribes and waiting for each tribe's scheduled time: when it sends, anybody whose consent is Not set is skipped. You can turn the setting off again in the same place, and people who were never asked will be included in campaigns built after that. A campaign that was already pushed while the setting was on may not reach them, so check its recipients before relying on it. On a marketing automation, a skipped step shows Contact has no recorded SMS consent.

Where consent comes from

Enquiry forms — when the form shows SMS consent wording, the answer is recorded.
Customer surveys — a consent question on a survey writes a record.
By hand — toggling SMS on a contact, which records who changed it and when.
A STOP reply — recorded as an opt-out automatically.
The carrier — if a network reports somebody already unsubscribed, that is recorded too.

Every change is logged on the contact's timeline as SMS consent: opted in or opted out, with the method. You can see the full history on the contact, and on the Consent tab of a phone number.

Asking properly on your forms

Your enquiry forms can show SMS consent wording, with a checkbox or a yes / no choice, and record the answer. Turning that on is the single most useful thing you can do — it turns "we assume they don't mind" into a recorded yes you can point at.

Select Settings, then Communications Settings, and open the SMS tab.
In the SMS Legal Message section, turn on Enable SMS Legal Message.
Choose an SMS Consent Mode, enter the wording in SMS Legal Message, fill in the labels the mode asks for, and select Save.

SMS Legal Message is a text editor rather than a plain box. To link to your privacy policy or terms, select the words that should become the link, choose the link button in the toolbar, and paste the page address. Bold, italics, underlining and links are kept when you save; headings, images and other formatting are removed, because the wording sits beside a form field on your website.

NEW ORGANISATIONS START WITH WORDING

A new organisation is created with this setting already switched on, in Opt-in mode, with standard consent wording that names your organisation. Read it before your website goes live: add links to your privacy policy and terms, and remove the promotional offers sentence if you will not send promotions. If your organisation is renamed, the wording keeps the old name until you edit it.

Every tribe uses this wording unless it has its own. To give a tribe different wording, select Tribes, open the tribe, choose Settings and open the Privacy tab, then choose Set this tribe's own SMS consent wording. The tribe's SMS Legal Message is the same kind of text editor, with the same bold, italic, underline and link buttons, and the same formatting is kept when the tribe is saved. Wording a tribe typed before the editor arrived opens with its line breaks in place. Choosing Use the organisation settings there puts the tribe back on the organisation's wording. A tribe that had switched on its own wording before the organisation setting existed keeps it until you change it.

How STOP works

Every campaign message has an opt-out line appended automatically. When somebody replies with STOP — or STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT — they are opted out immediately, and their recent campaign records are updated to show it.

ONLY THE WORD ON ITS OWN COUNTS

"STOP please" or "please stop texting me" is not recognised — intent is not guessed from prose. Those replies are silently discarded and nobody sees them, so the person keeps receiving your campaigns. If a customer complains they asked to stop and it kept coming, this is why: opt them out by hand on their contact record.

A STOP from a number that does not match a contact in your organisation is dropped entirely. And a STOP opts somebody out — it does not add them to your blocked numbers list, which is a separate thing.