Did you know that Twilio.org offers credits and discounts for nonprofits and social enterprises? Learn more today.

The crew at Twilio.org have noticed that nonprofits and social enterprises are growing ever more serious about data collection, measurement, and engagement with beneficiaries and donors. One of the most common tools we see organizations employing in those pursuits is Salesforce. With support from Salesforce.org, it’s no surprise that over 32,000 nonprofit organizations are using Salesforce to power mission-critical workflows.

We decided it’s high time that Twilio provided first-class support for the administrators and developers building on the Salesforce platform. Today, we’d like to invite you to sign up for access to a preview release of Twilio for Salesforce, a managed package for Twilio DOers in the Salesforce community.

Go here to sign up for early access to the preview, and read on to learn more ...

Do you work for a nonprofit or social enterprise? Sign up with Twilio.org for free API credits and discount pricing to increase your impact through effective communication.

SMS messages are opened 98% of the time within minutes of being received. When you need to reach your constituents quickly and consistently, there’s no better medium than SMS.

Imagine having a magic phone number your organization’s members, volunteers, or donors could text in to, signing up for timely SMS updates from organizers. Imagine being an organizer with the ability to reach all your subscribers, at once, from anywhere via SMS. Could that help your organization move faster or engage with your community more effectively?

If you’ve got five minutes, you can set up such a phone number and find out. Follow along with the video tutorial below to learn how to deploy one of these phone numbers, without ...

Do you or a developer you know code for a nonprofit or social enterprise? Twilio.org can help with API credit and discount pricing to increase your impact.

When you use Twilio at scale, like our Twilio.org buddies DoSomething and Mobile Commons, webhooks can generate a significant amount of traffic to your web application. Each inbound message and status callback generate an HTTP request to your app. These requests add up quickly if you’re sending thousands or millions of messages, and can lead to traffic your application can’t easily support.

Many advanced Twilio users quickly offload incoming webhook requests to a queue like SQS, so that they can process these incoming requests more efficiently with background workers. With the new Functions feature, you can offload this queueing task to Twilio and only worry about the workers that clear out the queue. This can also be handy if ...

As developers, we know there are two truths in making great software on this Internet:

1. The answer is out there somewhere.
2. We need it now.

Today, we’re launching a new documentation format called Guides aimed squarely at those two truths. Guides are digestible instruction for Twilio APIs on how to do common things with the haste demanded by the modern programmer. Along with this new content, you might also notice a few design upgrades in service of putting code first in your documentation.

New Docs In Tasty Task Sized Morsels

Want to track a conversation between two phone numbers in Ruby? Or gather DTMF tones in PHP? Or confirm the delivery of a message in C#?

Guides gives you the info to complete a single task with content crafted for speedy consumption.

Fast Lane to the Goods: Introducing CodeRail

Along with new content, we’ve also rolled out a ...

As a developer, you quickly learn that your ability to excel (or maybe function at all) is strongly correlated with your Google-fu.

Personally, when working across multiple programming languages and platforms, the exact incantation I need to display a UIAlertController or store an HTTP response in a cache is not found in the 32 kilobytes of RAM between my ears. So I turn to Google to fill in the gaps. And Google, in turn, turns to Stack Overflow. Chances are good that the right Stack Overflow answer will reward me with a chunk of code or a pointer I require to continue with my task.

That’s why I was so excited to learn about Stack Overflow Documentation. The focus of this new member of the Stack Overflow family is providing code examples and written guides that demonstrate how to get things done with the tools and programming languages you ...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? A million? More? That’s the question we’ll look for developers like you to answer with Twilio Video, which we’ve released in a limited beta at Signal. Twilio Video makes it easy for you to connect your users by capturing every wave, groan, and belly laugh in a high-quality, peer-to-peer video conversation built on top of standard technologies like WebRTC.

But Twilio Video is about much more than providing the server-side infrastructure you’d need and drastically reducing the amount of code to write video applications with WebRTC. Twilio’s new SDKs enable cross-platform video ...

At Twilio we are constantly impressed and inspired by the work you and your fellow developers do to change the way people communicate forever. Now, we’d like to ask you to join us in San Francisco on May 19th and 20th to share your perspective, and learn from your equally incredible colleagues.

We recently opened up the Call For Presenters for Signal 2015. We’re already hard at work hand-crafting a conference we would love to attend as developers, but we can’t do it without you!

Changing communication forever is tricky work, and it takes a wide variety of tools, techniques, and technologies to pull it off. From WebRTC to WebSockets and PSTN to PHP, we’d love to hear about your approach to building apps that help people communicate more effectively. Every developer we meet seems to have an amazing story to share, and we hope to ...

For a while now, I have been told by my nine year old son Emmett (right, dueling Darth Vader) that his social life was suffering because all of his friends at school are playing Minecraft but he wasn’t. While I was unmoved by Emmett’s peer pressure arguments, I had heard through other sources that Minecraft ends up being a pretty fun and creative game for kids. Further, that it can serve as a catalyst for kids to write their first line of code.

So I decided to download the trial and set up a multiplayer server to play with Emmett and seven year old sister Grace (right, hugging apples). Three hours after logging in, none of us had moved, except to turn our heads and shout ridiculous commands and advice to one another. It turns out that multiplayer Minecraft with a few of your favorite small people can ...

For the last century, humanity has maintained that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. While photos may have changed a lot, morphing from paper to pixels, that old adage is truer than ever in the digital age. Whether happy or heartbreaking, the millions of pictures we take every day help us tell our stories like no other medium can.

The team at Twilio has been working very hard to bring the power of pictures to our messaging platform. And today, were are thrilled to announce that Picture Messaging has arrived for all US and Canadian numbers, giving you the power to speak a thousand words in a single message.

With this new messaging capability, your apps can send concert tickets directly to a user’s mobile phone, accept photos to accompany an insurance claim, or just share that incredible animated GIF you saw on Tumblr with your friends. Words ...