Turning text messages into authentic connections

Founded by Bernie Sanders’ digital team alumni, GetThru launched primarily in the civic engagement space in 2016. Since then, it has grown into a widely used platform across higher education and nonprofits, which now make up two-thirds of its users, including universities, K-12 schools, large nonprofit networks, advocacy organizations, and unions. 

“At GetThru, we look to serve customers who want to make authentic connections with their constituents, with their stakeholders.”
—Paul Klenk, Interim CEO/CFO

This philosophy sets GetThru apart from traditional communication tools, which focus on one-way mass messaging. “Many other platforms are really blast platforms looking to send out a large number of messages and not worry about the replies or not even accept replies,” said Klenk. Whether it’s fundraising, mobilizing action, or contacting city councils or Congress, GetThru’s approach allows large-scale conversations to remain two-way and impactful—or, in other words, “more than just a blast message.”

Moreover, GetThru’s commitment to values-aligned partnerships, backed by team members with first-hand experience in nonprofit advocacy and fundraising teams, ensures they understand and address the needs of their client base.

Meeting the demands of peak messaging periods

According to Klenk, “The biggest success metric for us is that our messages are going through for our customers. And we were able to continue with very high delivery rates, mostly because of a strong partnership with Bandwidth, enabling us to do that.”

Bandwidth has also been helping GetThru throughout the year to prepare for the heavy messaging seasons, including hosting customer roundtables, offering guidance on managing high message volumes across carriers, and providing them key tools like health metrics and incident reports. As Klenk notes, “We might have 100,000 messages that are going out for a particular customer, and those need to be apportioned carefully” to respect carrier limits while meeting customer needs. 

“Whatever’s happening, we are working on the technical side closely with the support team at Bandwidth to ensure that our messages go out.”
—Paul Klenk, Interim CEO/CFO

Keeping 10DLC clean and deliverable

GetThru has always prioritized clean messaging traffic, believing it’s important for the ecosystem—a principle that guided their swift adoption of 10DLC in 2021.

“10DLC registration has been something that we’ve built our tool from the beginning to respect and to essentially not allow unregistered traffic on our system,” Klenk said. Behind the scenes, he shared that “10DLC registration has been an ever-evolving process, and it’s been a very difficult thing.” GetThru reviews every registration before submission to The Campaign Registry (TCR) to help increase vetting scores. This careful attention paid off when one client needed particularly high throughput in a short time span (a task that “would have gone much more slowly” if GetThru hadn’t put in the extra effort.)

Bandwidth’s messaging experts help GetThru manage the requirements for this kind of messaging—offering essential tools such as registration checklists and providing dedicated support. “One of the Bandwidth employees reached out to me and answered my question on Christmas Eve, trying to figure out how we could get this customer through. And I really appreciated it, ” Klenk added.

GetThru also helps smaller organizations understand important requirements, like privacy policies. They explain what’s needed so stakeholders know how their phone numbers will be used and feel more confident in the onboarding process.

Being future-ready with Bandwidth

“The texting space is much more fully formed for political now than it was four years ago or certainly eight years ago when we started.” said Klenk. This messaging saturation pushes GetThru to innovate. In addition to basic SMS, MMS capabilities have proven successful—accounting for roughly 50% of messages sent during peak election season.

GetThru isn’t just planning for the next election cycle. 

“For us, we want every year to be one where we’re growing our core business around customers that we can develop deep relationships with and help them develop relationships with their constituents, their stakeholders, their users, their customers, their members,” Klenk said.

GetThru also created new customer advisory boards to shape future product updates, while Bandwidth provides them the expertise and support needed to scale across borders.

Expanding into new countries isn’t without challenges, though—each comes with its own legal and pricing structures for messaging. But GetThru’s close collaboration with Bandwidth has helped simplify compliance, whether rolling out new Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements in the UK or looking into toll-free numbers in Canada.

“Bandwidth is a strong part of our future plans.”
—Paul Klenk, Interim CEO/CFO

As GetThru continues to grow, Bandwidth remains a key partner in their strategy. “We look forward to being part of the team working with Bandwidth for the foreseeable future, to create connections that are really mission critical for the organizations we work with while sending the maximum number of messages through as quickly as possible. And so that’s been our goal all along,” Klenk concluded.