Opt-Out Language: What's Automatic and What's On You

Texting compliance splits cleanly into two halves: the words inside your message, which are yours, and the machinery behind it, which is ours. Knowing exactly where that line sits is what keeps your campaign safe.

What's on you: the opt-out sentence

"Reply STOP to opt out" is not added automatically. You write it into every mass message yourself. The composer shows a warning when it's missing, but the warning is advisory — it will not block you from submitting.

Why does it matter so much? Carriers expect recurring campaign messages to tell recipients how to stop them. A message with no visible way out generates complaints, complaints damage your sender reputation, and a damaged reputation gets your texts filtered before they ever reach a phone. One short sentence protects the deliverability of everything you send afterward. Our review team checks for it too and may suggest an edit if it's missing — but the habit should be yours, starting with your first draft.

What's automatic

• Your configured "Paid for by..." disclaimer is appended to every send — don't add it to the message body yourself, or it will appear twice.
• STOP and HELP keyword replies are processed automatically. A voter who texts STOP is opted out immediately, with no action from you, and HELP replies get a proper response.
• Opt-outs apply across all of your lists, and opted-out contacts are excluded from every future send automatically. Someone who opted out of your GOTV list won't hear from your fundraising list either.

Why we chose this split

Your words stay yours; the compliance machinery stays ours. Message content is editorial — you should see exactly what the voter sees, control every character, and never have text silently injected mid-sentence into something you wrote. So the opt-out line lives in your draft, where you put it.

The bookkeeping side is the opposite: tracking who opted out, honoring it instantly, applying it across lists, and suppressing those numbers forever is exactly the kind of work that fails when humans do it by hand. So we automated it completely, with no way for a campaign to accidentally skip it.

The short version

Write "Reply STOP to opt out" into every message. We handle everything that happens after someone actually replies STOP. For where this fits in the composing flow, see Creating Message Templates and Merge Tags and Submitting a Text: The Six-Step Wizard in this category.