Many nonprofits and campaigns draft their messages in Excel spreadsheets or Google Docs. When it comes time to send a message, copying text from these tools can sometimes include errant unicode text, which carriers treat as “special characters”. Text messages with special characters can increase the overall segment count, which impacts the cost per message.

Strive Messaging’s helpful new feature streamlines finding and replacing these special characters. Strive will display a warning if your message contains special characters, and will highlight them in red. Strive’s compose window will always default to GSM-7 encoded text (non special) so special characters can be easily replaced.

To get started:‍

1. Paste in your message copy. If your message text contains special characters a warning will display in the segment calculator.
2. Click Show and Replace next to the special characters warning
3. Replace the special characters
4. When you are ready to confirm your send, Strive will display a total estimated segments for your broadcast in the confirmation table

Tip: Carriers charge by segment for SMS messages. To help ensure your cost per message is low, remove unwanted special characters. Special characters such as m-dashes (–) can easily be replaced by GSM-7 characters like n-dashes (-).

Minimize cost per message and maximize your ROI with this powerful Strive Messaging feature. Read more about the segment calculator in our help docs.