Create a way for texters to request assignments

[alyjk]

I would like to see a way for texters to natively request a new assignment, of a number they choose. Right now they need to reach out to Spoke admins to get an assignment, and that requires another location for those conversations to happen (email/Slack/our campaign uses WhatsApp). It's confusing for many folks and I'd love to have those requests put in within Spoke in a way that the admins can easily respond to. A chat feature that allows texters to communicate with any supervolunteer or admin could also serve this purpose. Is anyone interested/willing to take this on? If someone could deliver by Tuesday I can pay for the feature development.

[bchrobot]

One quick and dirty solution would be to use LiveChat. They have a React library so the chat could be embedded in the Texter Dashboard page pretty easily.

[DinahSanders]

Note that this feature needs to be optional and invisible to teams which don't use it. Ours uses Slack not only for assignment requests but support, guiding new texters in appropriate responses to replies, and as a community space for our volunteering.

Our experience is that there's probably more value in moving to a model where a texter gets assigned to a campaign, but can then send as many or few as they can until the campaign runs out of contacts (as opposed to an admin continually having to assign them another chunk of 500 or 1000 texts to send).

(Note that in the "all you can eat" model if you have concerns about a texter (e.g. someone new you want to monitor for a bit before you let them handle thousands of interactions), you would need to assign them to a campaign with only as many contacts as the small sized chunk you would have assigned them under the old "request in chunks" model.)

[arena]

The way I read the initial issue there is a stated need and a suggested solution that feels like two features... I was about to add a simple feature that is simply a request form (much like the one on Spoke Rewired) on the texter dashboard.

Adding a chat feature seems like a separate feature.

@alyjk would you mind if we kept this issue going as the feature request but simplified to just a request form?

[ibrand]

RFC #1533 would create space for requesting texts as part of dynamic assignment!

[Frydafly]

@ibrand @alyjk -- checking in, can this be closed?