Overview

US carriers have requirements for SMS A2P (application-to-person) messaging using 10-digit geographic numbers, also known as 10 DLC. This standard provides many benefits to our users, including supporting higher messaging speeds and better deliverability.

Requirements

Users relying on the Vonage SMS API to send traffic from a +1 Country Code 10-Digit Long Code into US networks need to register a brand and campaign in order to get approval for sending 10 DLC messages.

• The guide below outlines what you need to know about brand registration for 10 DLC messages. For help on classifying your use case campaigns, you can access this separate guide.
• Users can only send messages with the same use case that have been registered with their campaign.
• Resellers of Vonage SMS services will, in most cases, need to register their users' brands and campaigns for them.
• US numbers cannot be shared across brands, which includes both geographic numbers and US Shared Short Codes.
• SMS + Voice enabled numbers will only be affected if outbound messages are sent, at which point it will be throttled and pass-through fees will be applied. SMS Inbound and Voice capabilities will remain the same.

10 DLC Brand Registration Guide

A brand is the legal entity of the business. For example:

• “ABC Sodas” would submit just one brand, “ABC Sodas,” and this would be sufficient for all their other consumer brands such as “Cherry Soda” and “Root Beer Soda.”
• Vonage Business Cloud would submit one brand as it is SaaS solution, through which other businesses communicate. Another example would be Shopify.

Registering a Single Brand vs Registering Multiple Brands

A large SaaS platform with a few large customers might consider separately registering those large customers as their own brands. For the majority of smaller customers, they can be under one brand. This means that if there are any spam or reputation issues, they can be isolated to those individual brands.

If you are an SMS Aggregator with no brand value added on top and simply pass through the message, you would need to apply as a reseller and each of the businesses you serve would need to apply as their own brand.

Summary

• If you operate as one legal entity and only send content as that legal entity, submit one brand.
• If you are operating as a SaaS business with value added, submit one brand.
• If you are operating as an SMS aggregator, submit individual brands for the legal entities that you represent.

Brand Registration Form

Access the Brands and Campaigns page and click on Register new brand.

After filling in the form click on the Review details button to review the info.

After making sure all the submitted info is correct click on Register and pay.

Below are the data values you will need when you register a Brand for 10 DLC.

Considerations

How to Define Your Business Type

Some campaigns are limited to specific company types. For example, for a registered campaign type that is a Charity use case, it is unlikely that the campaign will be approved for any business entity type other than a registered charity.

Business Types

• Publicly traded company
• Private for-profit company
• Not-for-profit company
• Sole Proprietors

Reseller Businesses

Vonage SMS Resellers are those who resell the Vonage SMS API.

Understanding if a Brand is a reseller or partner is critical. It determines if you need to register a single brand and campaign or multiple brands and campaigns for your 10 DLC program. This impacts the program cost, and will also impact the time to set-up and get brands and campaigns registered.

Single Account, Multiple Brands

This is referring to a single parent business that provides software which allows multiple businesses (their brand customers) to send SMS within their own branding and content. Orchestration of the different brand customers is managed within their single parent account. This use case requires all brands to send messages via the same 10DLC number in a single campaign.

Attributes

• Parent business who resells SMS services
• Each brand has different use cases
• Each brand has its own content and branding

Parent and Sub-Accounts

This model is more like a Partner model where a parent business account directly manages each of their own brand customers. Their customers are managed through separate sub-accounts since numbers, billing, and configuration is set up according to each customer's needs.

You can share brands across multiple accounts. Just let us know which account you want to share the brand with and we can set that up for you. This is useful for example if you create the brand under your parent account and want to share it with sub-accounts as well.

Attributes

• Multiple sub-accounts one per customer or child business

Tax and Stock Information

If your business is a publicly traded company, the Stock Symbol is mandatory, and for all companies other than individuals an EIN is required.

Brand Status

After the registration your brand will receive a status:

• Verified status means the information you provided was verified via official records by TCR. When your brand is verified, you can create campaigns for Low Volume mixed use case.
• Unverified means that the official records could not confirm the information provided for this brand. Follow the guide here regarding the steps you need to follow in order to get the brand Verified.
• Vetted Verified status means that your brand successful passed external vetting and is now able to create all standard campaign use cases and some special use cases. Note that a political vetting is required for Political campaigns, and some additional approvals may be required for some special campaigns.
• Self Declared status is only relevant to Sole Proprietor brands. A Sole Proprietor campaign can be created without further checks.

Additional Information

The country code to use is that of the ISO standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2. Please note that US territories such as Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands have their own country code (PR and VI respectively).

Note that Sole Proprietor brands are more likely to be under additional scrutiny by the carriers & TCR. 

We reserve the rights to suspend or terminate brands and campaigns that do not comply with the 10DLC regulations, often at the request of the carriers & The Campaign Registry.