If you've ever created a fundraising campaign, you've probably faced one big (and essential) problem: how do I actually accept payments from supporters? With online and mobile giving growing, it's essential for nonprofits to be able to collect digital payments securely. Unfortunately, collecting payments online tends to be a complex process, requiring some combination of disparate systems, vendors, professional services, and cost. That's one of the problems Twilio Pay looks to solve, by handling this process for you and ensuring that every transaction occurs securely, so you can focus on engaging your donors.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to build a donation system using Twilio Studio and Pay.

Requirements

• A free Twilio account
• A Twilio …

If you have ever tried to keep over a hundred people organized for a Christmas party, you will already know how much of a nightmare it can be!

Tarik Zawia and Adam King from Twilio’s London office decided to add a little Twilio Magic to make this year's event a success.

Defining Christmas Party Organizational Challenges

Tarik Zawia - Account Executive - EMEA

Working for Twilio, I knew that communications could be used to help keep things on track. This winter, I decided to have some fun with Twilio to make our US Alumni Club annual London pub-crawl (co-hosted by Cornell, GW, and UChicago) a little more hi-tech than in previous years.

So, as with most (highly important and serious) engineering projects, we started with a problem to solve...

Problem Statement: Keeping over a hundred people in the right place at the right time for an organized pub …

Recently, one of my customers asked me to design a scheduling function for them. Here were their requirements:

• Both Studio Flows and Web Chat had to use the same function
• The Function needed to handle holidays, as well as days with irregular hours of operation
• The customer wanted to play a special message in the IVR during the holiday season. The scheduling function has to be versatile enough to know if it's holiday season or not
• The customer will eventually operate in 12 different time zones, the function had to be market and time-zone aware
• Functions v2 must be used, so they can include it in their CI/CD pipeline

JSON file for the schedule

Here is a JSON file that I came up with that will meet my customer's requirements:

SMS Chatbots provide a great way to engage with volunteers and deliver information about different initiatives you want to promote. They’re widely accessible (no Internet needed!) and with tools like Twilio Studio, designing the flow of interactions becomes a delightful experience.

As part of SIGNAL 2019, one of our main goals at Twilio.org was to increase awareness of some of the organizations and initiatives we have been supporting, while at the same time provide an instance for people interested in volunteering to get more information about different opportunities to get involved.

To achieve this, we built an app using Studio and linked it to a Short Code that allowed us to have SMS based interactions with the thousands of people in attendance during the 2nd-day keynote at Signal, as well as everyone that was following through the live stream.

This is the story of what we did, how we …

Twilio Studio is a great tool to build Interactive Voice Response systems (IVRs) to help businesses communicate with their customers.

In Studio, a Flow is executed from an incoming call or SMS to your Twilio number, or you could trigger an outbound flow via a REST API request. Once in a Flow, Studio offers various ways to control calls and message flows, including but not limited to:

• Saying or playing messages to a callee
• Gathering input from the callee such as digits or voice messages
• Making an HTTP request to a third party system

Studio is even able to record audio, which makes it super easy to build a voicemail app for a Twilio number. If, however, …

Many IVRs expect too much from customers - they lack customizability and require your customers to patiently learn how to use the IVR. What if you could replace this with a natural conversational IVR? What if you could add security and personalized customer data and deploy this using multiple channels? 

Well, you can! In this two-part blog post, we’re going to use Twilio APIs as “building blocks” to build an IVR for our pseudo-business, Signal Hardware. Here is the stack:

Layer 1 - Studio and Autopilot

In the first Layer of our IVR we’re using Twilio Studio and Autopilot to give us structure, flexibility and control of our workflow.

Studio is a virtual application builder. It allows you to rapidly create communication flows using pre-built widgets. Autopilot is our Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning platform. Where Studio creates our structure inside of a UI, Autopilot allows us to have …

My octogenarian dad still lives independently.

He does not enjoy his son calling him every night and interrupting his movie-watching. Some nights he's not even at home yet because he's chilling at the pub across the street. He also forgets to charge his cell phone on a regular basis.

These are all the things running through my mind when I want to check in with him and know everything is fine.

What are we going to build

As a software developer, I want my dad to have a button handy where he can "SINGLE click" to tell me "I'm fine, good night" with a text message. After a  "DOUBLE click" I want to receive a text message like "Call me when you have time." When dad gives the button a "LONG click" I want to receive a text message and a voice call with "I need your help now!".

(Sometimes …

If you care about ensuring the safety and comfort of your community, you must have a code of conduct. Writing a code of conduct document is a necessary first step, but it’s not enough. What happens when a violation occurs? You need processes for reporting and responding to code of conduct incidents. Ideally, there are multiple reporting channels so that people can communicate over text or in person. Some folks might not feel comfortable (or be able) to report code of conduct violations face to face.

Decisions Decisions

There are many possibilities for technology to enable text based code of conduct reporting. Laying out requirements will help us narrow down our choices.

• Accessible. Reporting technology should be accessible to as many event attendees as possible. Accessibility here means having access to devices that run the technology, as well as usability for folks with disabilities.
• Secure. Code of …

• Programmable Chat: Autopilot now directly supports Programmable Chat, allowing you to build chatbots for your website or mobile app, or deploy Assistants you’ve already built to Programmable Chat with just a few clicks — existing logic and configuration will work in Chat conversations with zero code changes.
• Autopilot Studio Widget: A new Studio Widget that allows you to directly add Autopilot Assistants to your Studio flows. It also makes handing off messaging interactions from your bot to an agent a lot simpler.

The popularity of chat as a customer support channel has exploded as customers are increasingly interacting with businesses using web and mobile apps and messaging channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The asynchronous and informal nature of chat has a lot of advantages for customers and businesses. It delivers a better experience to customers by making it easy to contact support. It allows businesses to …

Access to customer context is key to a great customer experience in voice and messaging flows. As it lets you customize your interactions specific to that customer and address their needs promptly.

In this blog post, we will walk through the steps involved in connecting to Salesforce CRM database with Twilio Studio. This means, that when a customer calls into your contact center, in realtime, we can ask the CRM for more details about the caller based on their phone number.  With this additional context, we can present an IVR tailored to their needs or use that information to intelligently route their call.

Before we get started, if you haven’t yet used Studio, I recommend taking a look at this getting started with Studio guide.

Flows in Studio are built with widgets which is a state or transition in our flow. In this post we will mainly use the …