Migrating to 10 DLC for A2P Messaging

This guide is intended to help our customers migrate their SMS traffic to the sanctioned 10 DLC messaging route, in order to be compliant with the new A2P 10 DLC regulations in the United States.

Preparing for the Migration

First, you need to define what is the primary vertical of your business. You will need to register a brand to The Campaign Registry (organism responsible of recording all the 10DLC registrations). If your business operates a range for vertical, you should chose the primary vertical, which represent the majority of your activities. You can find our guide to create 10DLC brands here.

Once this has been established, perform an analysis of the different use cases you may need, in order to determine how many campaigns you will need to create and what use case to attribute each of them. If possible, review your current usage of our messaging products to understand the level of throughput you need for your campaigns. Please note that the throughput is calculated in function of the following three elements:

• The carrier delivering the message
• The vetting score assigned to the 10DLC brand
• The type of campaign

See here for information on 10 DLC throughput limits.

We recommend our customers to provision new numbers where possible (if you are not tied to your existing numbers). We recognise it may not be possible for some specific use cases.

Registering to 10DLC

Registering to 10DLC should be quick and easy for the majority of our customer when using our Vonage API dashboard.

However, we have noticed a few details that can delay the process, or in some cases block your progress. To try and reduce disruptions to a minimum, we advise all customers to proceed with the registration following those steps in order:

1. Register your 10DLC brand via our portal
2. Apply for external vetting for your brand*
3. Wait for the vetting to complete
4. Create your campaigns using the appropriate use case
5. Wait for the campaign to be approved by all the carriers*
6. Link your number(s) to the relevant campaigns
7. Check the numbers are linked to the campaigns. You are ready to go

* Based on observations and recommendations from The Campaign Registry:

• All campaign use cases except Low Volume Mixed, Sole Proprietor and Political require the brand to be vetted. For political campaigns, you may be require to undergo a political vetting
• Linking numbers to campaigns will not go through until the campaign has been approved by all carriers
• Numbers can be linked to only 1 campaign

Important

Snowshoeing is defined as the act of sending the same message across multiple numbers in order to circumvent throughput restrictions. This is no longer allowed with 10 DLC and serious fines can be imposed. To avoid fines, you should move to a new single 10 DLC number. If you would like to link more than 49 numbers (defined as number pooling) on a campaign, your campaign has to be approved for pooling before you migrate your numbers. For more information, check this article.

Assigning Numbers to 10DLC Campaigns

For a Single Number

Complete the following steps to enabling a number to the 10DLC route:

1. Sign in to your Vonage API account dashboard and go to the brands and campaigns section under SMS
2. Select the campaign to which you would like assign a number
3. Select the Numbers tab along the sub-navigation on the campaigns section and complete the number linking steps
4. Select the number to be assigned to that campaign, which will enable traffic to be sent across our approved 10DLC route
5. When using the SMS API, make sure to reference the correct 10DLC registered number

For Multiple Numbers

There are two options for assigning multiple numbers to campaigns:

1. Follow the same guidelines as assigning a single number to a campaign in the Dashboard
2. Leverage our 10DLC API
3. When using the SMS API, make sure to reference the correct 10DLC registered numbers

If you need assistance with migrating numbers for your 10DLC SMS API program, contact your account manager or submit a Support request.

Additional Information

If you have setup Number Pools on your account, you can use US numbers within your pools but you need to be very careful about the following:

• Any US or Canadian number needs to be compliant to the 10DLC regulation. This means the numbers need to be linked to a 10DLC campaign.
• If using multiple US or Canadian numbers in a pool, you must only use numbers that are registered to the same 10DLC Campaign.