Lina for campaigns and committees

How texting works, and what it needs from you

You provide the knowledge, the staff contacts that hear about requests, and the people you text. Texting needs a plan with your own Lina phone number, and it is offered only on Pro or Complete. A text of up to 160 plain characters is one part, or up to 70 when it has an emoji (which counts as two) or a special character such as a curly quote; a longer text is split into several parts. Your organization’s name starts every text and counts too, and Preview on the Texts screen shows the parts and the cost before you send. You buy text credits ahead of time in your Command Center (Settings → Account → Plan & billing), and each part uses one, so there is never a surprise bill. Texts go out from your own Lina number once its carrier registration is approved. A political committee needs extra steps on our side as well as yours, so ask us about timing before you count on texting; the phone line and website chat do not wait on it.

Bulk texts go only to numbers with a record that the person agreed to get them, and a person who replies STOP is not texted again. Eljae answers the calls that people make to your phone line.

How the phone bank works, and what it never does

You provide the call list and the people who make the calls. Upload the list as a CSV with a phone column, write the script your callers see, and make one link for each caller. A caller opens their link on their own phone and sees one person at a time with the script; the link is their sign-in, so they never get a Command Center login. They press Call next, and Lina rings the caller from your organization’s own Lina phone number and says “Press 1 to be connected to” the person’s first name. Only when the caller presses 1 does Lina dial the person, who sees your organization’s number and never the caller’s. When the call ends the caller taps what happened. A finished person lands on their record in People; if the caller taps no answer, busy, voicemail or call back later, the person goes back on the list for another try, and after three tries lands in People as unreached. Each list has a results file you can download. A caller can also be set to dial from their own phone: they get the number as a tap-to-dial link, Lina places no call, and no credits are used.

The phone bank is part of the Campaign edition. Lina’s calls go out from your own Lina number, and the phone bank is offered only on Pro or Complete. A call costs 6¢ a minute while the person is connected (a started minute counts in full, and a call the person’s voicemail picks up counts as connected) and 2¢ for an attempt nobody answered (the line rings out, is busy or fails, or your caller hangs up before it is picked up). If a caller does not pick up their own phone, or does not press 1, there is no charge. Calls spend the same prepaid credits as texts, bought the same way; a call starts only when the balance covers a minute, and a conversation already under way is never cut off if the balance runs out.

It never makes a robocall: every call is one press by one of your callers, and nothing loops, schedules or dials a second person. The person you reach hears only your caller, never an AI voice and never a recording; the only synthesized voice is in the prompts your caller hears on their own phone. Lina starts a call only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the time zone of the person’s area code, and anyone who is marked do not call goes on your never-call list and is never given to a caller again. You can pause the whole phone bank, or end any caller’s link, at any time. Numbers need to be 10-digit North American numbers.