Join Notify

Who is Notify.gov for?

Government agencies at any level of government who deliver federal programs are able to use Notify.gov. Those who sign up to new Notify.gov become our partners.

All federal agencies are invited to use Notify.gov to send text messages to their employees, other federal agencies, or to the public.

Non-federal agencies (state, local, territorial, or tribal governments) who administer or deliver federally-funded services may qualify to use Notify.gov. These programs must specify which federal program the messages they want to send are related to. The Notify.gov team confirms our authority to work with these programs as part of our agreements process.

What partners receive

To use Notify.gov to send messages (outside of our Trial Mode), partners sign a one-year Memorandum of Understanding with us. This is a basic agreement outlining our relationship and responsibilities.

Our core, no-cost, service offering includes:

  • Up to 250,000 messages to use over your first year*

  • One toll-free sending phone number

  • An easy-to-use web-based interface for sending bulk or individual messages

  • Dashboards and downloadable reports for tracking message delivery

*We plan to offer plans with additional messages soon; please contact us if you need more messages so that we can understand your use case!

How to get started

Interested in trying Notify.gov before signing an agreement? We can provide qualifying partners with access to Trial Mode to review Notify.gov features before deciding. In Trial Mode, you can test sending messages, explore the personalization and customization features, and review sample delivery reports.

Tell us about your program

Let’s determine if Notify.gov is a good fit for your organization. To get started, we’ll ask you for information such as:

  • Organization name and type
  • Point of contact’s name and email address
  • Your associated federal funding, program, or authority
  • The program(s) you want to text about
  • Who you are planning to text
  • What you’d like to achieve by texting these people
  • The estimate number of texts you’d like to send in the first year
  • Who would you like to include on the Trial Mode account?
  • Provide the official government email address to invite your team members
  • When would you like to send your first text(s)?
Get started

Next Steps

Our team will review the information you provide, and follow up with any questions. We’ll contact you no matter your qualification status.

We provide you a one-year, Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). To text the public fully in Live Mode, your organization will need to sign our MOU.

Getting Started FAQs

Plans that include additional messages for a fee will be available soon. We want to design these plans based on our partners’ needs, so please contact us if you hope to be able to send more messages. We’d like to talk with you.

Right now, Notify.gov supports sending messages to North American numbers (+1). If you’d like to send to international numbers, we want to hear from you.

At this time, Notify.gov provides toll-free service numbers. We will be exploring offering shortcodes in the near future. If you wish to send from an existing phone number owned or operated by your agency, this is something that might be possible in the future, but is not currently on our roadmap.

While public API integrations are not yet available, we are working on enabling these. If you're looking for this feature we want to hear from you.

To understand how Notify.gov works, see our Security page for the basics. If your IT team needs more information we’re happy to share a larger security package upon request.

We are not a System of Record. For more see our Security page.

Text message notifications are governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Different levels of government have different consent requirements. Download and share our overview of the TCPA with your legal counsel as a starting point.

Notify.gov shares back information about message delivery that we receive from individual mobile phone carriers. Carriers can only provide information about whether a message was successfully delivered to a specific phone number (not a person). If you happen to send a message to a landline or out-of-service phone number, these messages will show up as ‘failed’ in delivery reports.

Unlike email, you cannot see if someone reads a message or clicks on a link you included in a message. This is a limitation of SMS in general, not Notify.gov. We do highly recommend setting goals for your texting campaigns and tracking performance. By combining the delivery reports provided by Notify.gov with other information from your program, you may be able to assess engagement and impact.

We’re on call to answer any questions as you get started using Notify.gov