Action Network gets a year of toll-free approvals in one month with Telnyx

The mobile messaging industry was built around commerce. Order confirmations, delivery updates, appointment reminders: nearly every paved path leads back to a shopping cart. For a platform whose customers text supporters about petition drives and fundraising pushes, those paths kept leading nowhere.

"The dominant use case in the mobile industry is commercial business messages: e-commerce, event reminders, that kind of thing," said Jason Rosenbaum, Director of Technology at Action Network. "Being in the nonprofit, advocacy, and political space, we use messaging differently, and we felt lost with our previous provider."

Messaging built for movements

Action Network runs a B2B SaaS marketing tech platform for nonprofits, advocacy groups, and political organizations. Its customers publish action pages, such as petitions supporters can sign or fundraising pages where they can donate, manage mass email lists built from the data those pages collect, and grow A2P mobile lists from supporters who share a phone number and opt in.

From there, organizers send mass SMS and MMS messages asking supporters to take action, collect and store replies, trigger branching automated conversations, and hold one-to-one exchanges. Telnyx delivers those messages, handles delivery tracking and errors, facilitates the two-way conversations, and manages the compliance and setup behind the high-volume number types that carry them.

Lost on the paved path

That workload had become a grind with Action Network's previous provider. "They had paved paths for business use cases, but any time we needed to do something a bit different, it took forever to figure out, if it was possible at all," Rosenbaum said. "We were paying a small fortune for extended support services and still had constant compliance and operational issues." The provider's cost per message sat near the top of the market, too.

Action Network holds changes to core infrastructure to a demanding standard. "When we contemplate migrations of core services like this, we try to aim for a 10x improvement along at least one axis we care about, and parity along all the others," Rosenbaum explained.

The team interviewed Telnyx, spoke with references, and tried out the functionality and the API in a sandbox. "We felt that Telnyx's personalized approach had the potential to be 10x better at supporting our use case, along with parity on features and much better pricing," he said.

A proof of concept before the plunge

"A lot of the work was done before we made a final decision," Rosenbaum said. After the sandbox phase, the team built a full proof of concept: a complete integration with the Action Network application, just not in production. The build required significant engineering work and close collaboration with the Telnyx team. "Inevitably, details worked a bit differently from our previous provider, so this kind of support was crucial to getting things working," he said.

Next came a production trial with a handful of real customers, deliberately exercising the compliance and operational work that had been so painful before: purchasing and verifying toll-free numbers and migrating short codes.

Once the trial wrapped up positively and contract terms were set, Action Network notified customers and moved its traffic over a focused six-week sprint. New toll-free numbers were purchased and verified, short code applications were written and refined, and codes were migrated in bulk, with tight coordination between Action Network, Telnyx, and the carriers keeping downtime to a minimum.

The 10x arrives in month one

The improvement Action Network was hoping for showed up almost immediately. "In the first month with Telnyx we were able to get more toll-free applications approved for our customers than we were able to get approved in a year with our previous provider," Rosenbaum said.

He credited the Telnyx team directly, which worked closely with Action Network to put a smooth compliance process in place. "This translated directly into our customers being able to get started with our service quickly, which is something they always want, rather than having to wait weeks or months for an approved number," he said. "And our customers appreciate the approximately 30% reduction in cost too."

Room for use cases that don't fit the template

For organizations whose messaging looks different from the industry default, Rosenbaum pointed to flexibility as the deciding factor. "Telnyx has the flexibility and expertise to work with enterprises with varying needs and use cases, ably navigating changing compliance regimes from carriers with business outcomes firmly in mind," he said.

"We were struggling with a previous provider who did not understand our use case and was not flexible enough to change their processes to accommodate," he added. "We no longer have that problem with Telnyx."