A customer list lives on your monday.com board. Maybe it is a pipeline of leads, a list of past clients, or a board of orders waiting for pickup. The moment you need to message a defined slice of it, say everyone whose status is "Ready for pickup" or every client due for a service, the work usually leaves monday.com. Someone exports a CSV, pastes numbers into another tool and hopes the filter was right.
DataFlows SMS for monday.com keeps that job on the board. Its Bulk SMS Campaigns feature lets you choose a board, filter it with a condition builder, preview exactly who will get what, and send. This guide walks through each step, explains how delivery is paced, and shows what the campaign status page tells you afterwards.
What Is monday.com Bulk SMS?
monday.com bulk SMS is a way of sending one text message to many people at once, where the recipients are chosen directly from items on a monday.com board rather than from an exported spreadsheet. The board stays the single source of truth: each item holds a contact's phone number and the columns that describe them, such as status, dropdown, numbers or checkbox values. A campaign selects a board, applies filter conditions to decide which items qualify, and sends your message to the phone number on each matching item. Before anything is sent, you see the recipient count and the message preview, so mistakes are caught while they are still cheap to fix. Delivery then runs in controlled waves that respect your quiet hours and sending limits, and a campaign page reports how many messages were sent, how many failed and, if you turned link tracking on, how many clicks came in.
Why It Matters for Australian Businesses
Many Australian teams already run their client work in monday.com: trades and service businesses tracking jobs, agencies tracking projects, clinics and studios tracking bookings, retailers tracking orders. SMS is the channel customers actually read, and a text about a pickup, a delay or a limited offer gets seen far faster than an email sitting in an inbox.
The risk with bulk messaging is not sending too little. It is sending to the wrong people, at the wrong hour, or to someone who asked you to stop. Australian businesses also have obligations around consent and unsubscribing under the Spam Act 2003, so the tool you use should make opt-outs automatic rather than something staff have to remember.
Keeping the audience selection inside monday.com removes the export step, which is where most targeting errors creep in. It also means the people who know the customers, your project managers and account owners, can run a campaign themselves without waiting for someone technical.
Key Benefits
- No exports or copy-paste. The audience is read straight from your board, so the list is as current as the board itself.
- Precise targeting. The condition builder lets you combine Status, Dropdown, Numbers and Checkbox conditions with ALL or ANY logic, so you message only the items that genuinely match.
- A preview before you commit. You see the recipient count and the message before sending, which is your last chance to catch a filter that is too broad.
- Paced delivery. Messages go out in bounded waves instead of one uncontrolled burst, and they respect your quiet hours and account rate limit.
- Built-in opt-out handling. STOP and UNSUBSCRIBE replies are handled platform-wide, and opted-out numbers are blocked from every future send.
- Visible results. The campaign page shows sent and failed counts, plus click counts when link tracking is enabled.
- Pay-as-you-go pricing. DataFlows has no monthly or annual fees. You buy SMS credits and top up when you need to, so a quiet month costs you nothing extra.
Step-by-Step: Send a Bulk Campaign From a Board
Step 1: Connect monday.com to DataFlows
DataFlows SMS connects to monday.com over OAuth, so there is no API token to copy. Use the DataFlows install link to add it to your monday.com account, approve the permissions it asks for (reading board data, writing back to configured columns, posting Updates and creating webhooks), and select the boards you want to use. One installation can cover several boards, and you can add more later. Every feature is scoped per board. You can find the full setup notes on the monday.com integration page, and the monday.com SMS integration guide covers the connection in more detail.
A quick note on availability: DataFlows SMS is installed with its own install link rather than from the monday.com app marketplace.
Step 2: Choose the board
Start a new Bulk SMS campaign and pick the board that holds your audience. Make sure the board has a column containing each contact's mobile number in a consistent format, because that is where the campaign will send. If you keep different audiences on different boards, create one campaign per board.
Step 3: Filter with the condition builder
This is where the campaign becomes targeted. The filter uses the same condition builder as DataFlows conditional SMS rules, so if you have set up a rule that fires when a status changes, the interface will feel familiar. Conditions can use Status, Dropdown, Numbers or Checkbox columns, and you combine them with ALL (every condition must match) or ANY (at least one must match).
Some practical examples:
- Order pickups. Status is "Ready for pickup" AND Checkbox "Customer notified" is unticked.
- Overdue follow-ups. Dropdown is "Overdue" OR Status is "Awaiting reply".
- Segmented offers. Dropdown "Service type" is "Annual service" AND Numbers "Months since last visit" is above 11.
Think of the filter as a sentence you could say out loud to a colleague. If you cannot describe the audience in one line, the filter is probably too complicated and worth splitting into two campaigns.
Step 4: Write the message and choose the sender
Write a short, clear message that says who you are, why you are texting and what the customer should do. Pick the Sender ID or connected number the message will come from, so recipients recognise it. If you want to know who clicks a link, turn on "Track link clicks" and choose a Text column. Links are shortened and tracked, and the column on your board shows a running click count.
Keep the message to one clear action. A text that asks for three things usually gets none of them done.
Step 5: Preview the recipients and the message
Before sending, the campaign shows you the recipient count and a preview of the message. Treat this step as a checkpoint, not a formality. Ask yourself whether the number looks right. If you expected around 80 people and the preview says 800, the filter is wrong, and you have just saved yourself an awkward afternoon.
Step 6: Send and let the waves run
When you confirm, delivery starts in bounded waves rather than all at once. Two account guardrails shape how those waves behave:
- Quiet Hours. You define a sending window. Anything that would fall outside it waits until the window reopens, so a campaign started late in the evening does not wake anyone up.
- Rate Limiting. You can cap sending per hour or per day across the whole account, which keeps one large campaign from using up capacity your other messages need.
Because these limits apply account-wide, a campaign cannot accidentally bypass the rules you set for reminders and conditional messages.
Step 7: Read the campaign status page
While the campaign runs, and afterwards, the campaign page shows the sent count, the failed count and, if you enabled link tracking, the click count. Failed messages are worth a look: they usually point to a missing or badly formatted phone number on the board, which you can fix at the source so the next campaign is cleaner.
How DataFlows Helps
DataFlows is an Australian SMS platform built for businesses that want reliable messaging without enterprise complexity. For monday.com teams, it adds several things around the bulk campaign itself:
- Bulk SMS Campaigns for audience-based sends, as described above.
- Send SMS from any item. The "Send SMS via DataFlows" automation block attaches to any trigger, such as a status change or a new item. See how to send SMS from a monday.com automation.
- Reminder rules that watch a date column and text a set offset before it. See monday.com SMS reminders from a date column.
- Conditional SMS rules that fire when a column changes. New rules never text everything that already matches: the first pass sets a baseline, and only items that start matching afterwards send. See conditional SMS on a status change.
- Reply handling. Replies to DataFlows messages are classified by intent (confirm, cancel, reschedule, question, complaint) with a confidence score, and rules can update a status column, create a task or notify a teammate.
- Account guardrails. Quiet Hours, rate limiting, automatic opt-outs, and Response and Opt-Out Reports showing reply times and opt-out activity by board.
Pricing stays simple. There are no monthly or annual fees, and you pay for the SMS credits you use. If you want to estimate a campaign, the SMS pricing guide for Australia explains how per-message costs work, and the business SMS cost calculator helps you plan.
Best Practices
- Start with a small test. Add a test item with your own number, filter to it, and send yourself the message first.
- Keep your phone column clean. Use one consistent format for every number, and fix failed sends on the board straight away.
- Name yourself in the message. Recipients should know who is texting without having to guess.
- Send at sensible hours. Set Quiet Hours to match your customers' day, not yours.
- One goal per campaign. A single call to action gets better results than a message trying to do several jobs.
- Track the link, not just the send. If the message includes a link, turn on click tracking so you learn which campaigns actually prompt action.
- Respect opt-outs. Never work around a STOP reply. DataFlows blocks opted-out numbers from future sends, and your process should treat that as the rule rather than an obstacle.
- Review the reports. Check Response and Opt-Out Reports by board to see which audiences react well and which ones tune out.
Conclusion
Bulk SMS from monday.com turns your boards into audiences you can reach in minutes: choose the board, filter it, preview the result and send in controlled waves, then watch sent, failed and click counts on the campaign page. The data stays where your team already works, and the guardrails keep campaigns inside the limits you set.
Ready to try it? Sign up at dataflows.com.au, buy a few SMS credits, install DataFlows SMS on your monday.com account and run your first campaign against a small test board. If you get stuck, the team is at [email protected].