Building a Scalable Serverless SMS Messaging Solution on AWS Pinpoint

Introduction

A unique challenge for larger digital-first non-profit organizations is that they have to survive by having the agility of the commercial sector oftentimes without enough human and financial capital.

Because of these capital constraints, digital-first non-profits have to be data-driven and discerning when they evaluate new technologies. They must focus on quick-win and low-impact evaluation exercises to determine the value of new technologies that match their scale and mission.

Customer Challenge

Our issue advocacy non-profit customer needed to try out SMS messaging as a new communication channel without a heavy investment, but also with the ability to immediately progress to a full-scale solution if the testing was successful. To make things a bit more challenging, there were multiple critical requirements that necessitated a custom application approach:

• The solution needed to integrate and sync SMS opt-in status and segmentation data across multiple CRMs (Hubspot and Bloomerang) and other systems like payment processors (Stripe).
• The solution needed to have a robust segmentation capability to enable data-driven audience segmentation.
• The solution needed to be cost-efficient by avoiding substantial on-going costs even when not in use (i.e. avoid SaaS platform monthly pricing).
• The solution needed to support multiple SMS messaging use cases in the same system, including personalized automatic transactional messages and various types of personalized promotional messages.

The Solution

To deliver on all of these needs our solution architects and serverless development team collaborated with the customer to deliver a highly integrated and highly scalable serverless solution. They delivered a custom SMS marketing solution via Amazon Pinpoint that syncs user and user event attribute data and opt-in status across multiple CRMs, allows multiple ways to sign up for SMS messages (web forms, in-bound keyword-specific SMS), and allows deep and customizable segmentation for highly relevant SMS campaigns.

As we built out the solution and piloted it with smaller campaigns using 10DLC longcode phone numbers and 10DLC campaigns in the US, we successfully secured a dedicated shorcode via AWS shortcode leasing to ensure the application had the scalability and deliverability capabilities needed to use the serverless application in production.

AWS Services Used The solution was built using AWS serverless technologies including Pinpoint, Step Functions, Lambda, DynamoDB, SNS, Kinesis, and more.

Customer Success

During the first live multi-channel fundraising campaign utilizing SMS alongside email and social media advertising, the serverless application helped our customer caputure online donations. The money raised specifically from the SMS campaign paid for the custom development costs required to build the MVP solution.

Some other key success metrics are as follows:

• Delivered a 75% cost savings compared to sending the same messages on another SaaS SMS messaging platform with fewer capabilities.
• Delivered one solution for multiple use cases and teams within the organization, thanks to the ability to build microservices flows using AWS Step Functions and Lambda.
• Enabled the organization to grow the SMS channel rapidly with inbound keyword-based campaigns