Guide menu

Texting Your Members

In one line: Send a text to a group of members, schedule one for later, reuse saved wording in English or Kiswahili, and always see how much message credit you have left.

Why this matters

The power is out and you are shut on Saturday. You have 240 members. On a paper book that is 240 phone calls, or a sign on the door half of them never see. In Kazafit it is one message and one button.

The money case is bigger than the convenience case. Expired Subscriptions is one of the groups you can text — people who liked your gym enough to pay once and then drifted. Texting 60 expired members costs you about 60 credits. If four of them come back on a monthly package, that is the cheapest revenue you will find all month.

Two texts can go out on their own once you have set them up. A member joins and gets a welcome message within seconds, so your gym looks organised from the first minute. A member's invoice is created and they get a confirmation on their phone, which quietly ends the "but I already paid last week" conversation — the proof is in their pocket, not in your handwriting.

You always know what it costs. Your dashboard shows your remaining SMS Balance, the Send Message screen shows what your message will cost, and Kazafit works out the total before anything leaves.

What you can do

  • Text a group of members in one go. Tick All Members, Active Members, Expired Subscriptions, Trainers, Male Members or Female Members, or several at once. A big number under "People who will get this" counts up as you tick. It adds each group up separately, so if two groups you tick overlap — say Active Members and Male Members — anyone in both is counted twice. Treat it as a top figure, not the exact number you will reach.
  • Schedule a message for a future date and time. Write the end-of-month renewal nudge while you are thinking about it and set it for the right morning. The date box refuses a day in the past.
  • Change who gets a queued message, or move its date and time. Second thoughts? Open it on the Scheduled screen and change the recipients, move the date or the time, or cancel it before it costs you credit and goodwill. The wording is locked once queued — to change the text, cancel the message and send a fresh one from Send Message.
  • Save wording you reuse, in English or Kiswahili. Give it a name, write the text, and tap the Auto-fill fields down the side to drop in the member's name, package, end date or what they still owe. Saved messages appear as one-tap options on Send Message.
  • Let the welcome text send itself. Register a member and Kazafit texts them your Member Welcome wording, in Kiswahili if that is their language and English otherwise. This needs messaging switched on and a Member Welcome message saved first — see How to get started.
  • Let the payment confirmation send itself. Create an invoice for a member and Kazafit sends your Payment Confirmation wording with the details filled in. It fires whenever an invoice is created — whether or not the invoice is marked paid, including an insurance invoice that is still waiting on the insurer — so word it to fit that. This needs messaging on and a Payment Confirmation message saved first.
  • See your message credit on your dashboard. The SMS Balance card sits with your other headline figures, so you can check what you can afford before writing anything.

How to get started

  1. Check messaging is switched on for your gym. Kazafit turns it on at our end. If the Messaging section is not in your sidebar, it is not on yet — ask us. Nothing here works until it is.
  2. Create your Member Welcome message. A new gym starts with no saved messages at all, so there is nothing ready-made to edit — you build them. Open Messaging > Templates (headed "Saved messages"), press New message, and under What is this message for? choose Member Welcome. Write the text using the buttons in the Auto-fill fields panel — tap {name} for their name, {package_subscribed} for their plan. The preview fills in with Asha Mwakyusa and a Monthly plan, so you read the message exactly as a member will get it. Press Save message.
  3. Create your Payment Confirmation the same way. Press New message again, choose Payment Confirmation, write it and save. Do not skip these two. If there is no saved Member Welcome or Payment Confirmation, the automatic texts have no wording to send and simply fail, with nothing on screen to tell you.
  4. If you serve Kiswahili-speaking members, save a second version of each with Language set to Kiswahili.
  5. To send your own message, go to Messaging > Send Message. Tick who gets it on the right, type your text (or tap a saved message to load its wording), press Preview to check it, then press Send now.
  6. To send it later, press Later under When to send, pick the Date to send and Time to send, then press Schedule message. It appears under Messaging > Scheduled.
Fill blanks only with the Auto-fill fields buttons. Kazafit fills in anything on that panel, plus {company_name}, {support_number} and {subscribed_start_date}, which also work even though they are not shown there. Anything else you type in curly brackets is sent exactly as typed, brackets and all — so {first_name} or {amount} would reach a member as those literal words. Use {name} and the panel buttons instead.

Good to know

  • Text only. No WhatsApp and no email to members anywhere in Kazafit. You may spot a "Sent by WhatsApp" label — nothing uses it. Members with no phone number cannot be reached.
  • Every 160 characters costs another credit, per member. A long message to 200 people is not 200 credits, it is 400 or 600. While you type, the Send Message screen shows an SMS Credits figure — but that is the cost for one member, so multiply it by the number of people to get the real total. Kazafit works out that full sum for you the moment you send.
  • If even one member has a missing or wrong phone number, the send reports as failed on screen — even though every other message went out fine and you were charged only for those. Clean up blank phone numbers before a big message.
  • If you cannot cover the whole message, Kazafit sends none of it — it never goes out half-finished, and you only pay for texts that actually leave. You cannot top up inside the app; ask us and we do it for you.
  • Kazafit checks your credit when a scheduled message goes out, not when you set it up. It also works out who gets it at that moment — so a member who joins on Thursday will get your Friday message, and one whose plan lapsed on Wednesday will not.
  • A paused message can miss its slot. You can pause a message that has not gone yet, change who gets it, or move its date and time — but not its wording. If you pause it past its scheduled time, it will not send when you resume it. Move the date and time forward as well.
  • The Scheduled screen is a log of everything Kazafit has sent or queued for you, not just your waiting list. It carries a row for every automatic welcome and payment text too, each named "SMS-" and a number. Most rows read Scheduled, Paused or Sent, but you will also see other words, and some show as "Unknown" — those are finished or failed automatic texts, nothing you need to act on. You can only pause or cancel a message that has not gone yet.
  • Always create scheduled messages from Send Message. The Scheduled screen only shows and edits messages you have already queued.
  • You cannot delete a saved message, only edit it into something else. There is no delete control on the Templates page.
  • You cannot look up whether one particular member's text arrived. The Scheduled screen tells you a message went out, but not who received it and who did not.
  • The automatic texts fail quietly. If messaging is off, the wording is not saved yet, or your credit has run out, the welcome and payment confirmation simply do not go, with no warning on screen.
  • Texting is a per-gym switch we control, not a plan feature. Whether your gym can text is something Kazafit turns on for you directly — it does not depend on which plan you are on. If you are unsure whether yours is on, ask us.
  • No automatic birthday messages and no automatic renewal reminders. If you want a monthly renewal nudge, you schedule it yourself.

Related