About contacts
A contact is someone – or something – that messages are sent to from the Whispir platform. This can be your company’s staff members, stakeholders, customers, service providers, systems or even assets such as fleet management devices, signage, PA systems and sirens.
Every Whispir contact has a contact profile, which contains information that identifies them as a valid message recipient. It also contains contact information (such as a mobile phone number and email address) to be able to send them messages via the relevant channels (SMS, email and so on).
Some basics
- Contacts can be created by any user with sufficient permissions.
- Contacts are displayed on a workspace’s Contact List page, where their details can be viewed and updated. They appear on the list without any background shading (to differentiate them from active contacts and users).
- A contact must exist on a workspace’s contact list (or be made available via a shared distribution list) in order to receive messages from that workspace.
- Contacts initially belong to the workspace in which they were created, but they can be moved, copied or mapped to other workspaces as required.
- Contacts can’t log in to Whispir or your company’s Whispir contact portal.
What’s the difference between a contact and a user?
In Whispir a contact is not the same as a user (someone who has a Whispir account, which lets them log in to Whispir and create and send messages). You can only send messages to contacts (and active contacts), not to users. So if you have users who also need to be sent typical Whispir messages (as distinct from system messages such as message delivery reports and password reset messages) you have to create a separate contact profile for them.
While every workspace’s Contact List page can show all users who have access to that workspace, those users aren’t available for selecting when you’re adding recipients to a new message, and their details can’t be edited here. (User accounts are managed by company administrators on the Manage Users page.)
About active contacts
Contacts can be invited to become active contacts. Active contacts can log in to your company’s contact portal but they can’t log in to Whispir. See About the Whispir contact portals.
On the Contact List page active contacts are shaded green to distinguish them from contacts (no shading) and users (shaded blue).
About ad hoc contacts
Ah hoc contacts are contacts whose details are not held in Whispir. Their contact details can be entered directly into the To field on a new message or imported into a message via the bulk messaging feature, or they can be sent messages via Whispir's API capability.
Related links
- What are users, contacts and active contacts?
- Create a new contact in a workspace
- View or edit contact details
- Copy, move or map contacts
- Import contacts
- Export contacts
- Delete contacts
- Review a contact’s workspaces and distribution lists
- Create a distribution list from the Contact List
- Send update reminders to contacts and active contacts
- Invite and manage active contacts
- Approve pending distribution list subscription requests
- Run the Contact report
- Run the Contacts & Users within Distribution Lists report