Responsible Use

Messaging is a shared network. When one business on a platform sends to people who never agreed to hear from it, the mobile carriers do not punish that business alone. They throttle, filter or block traffic at the level of the platform and the registration behind it, and every other business sending through the same route pays for it in messages that quietly stop arriving.

So this is not a list of preferences. It is the set of behaviours that keep delivery working for everyone here, and we enforce it in software before we enforce it in email.

You may only message a phone number that was given to you or your organisation directly, by the person who answers it, for the kind of messages you are about to send. Everything else in this policy is detail. This is the rule.

• Consent has to come from the person, not from a broker. Purchased lists, rented lists, scraped lists, appended lists and lists inherited with an acquisition are all prohibited, whatever the seller told you about their provenance.
• Consent is specific. Someone who gave you their number to receive an appointment reminder has not agreed to receive your promotions. If you want to send both, ask for both, separately.
• Consent has to be recorded. Keep the date, the method, the exact wording the person was shown, and enough detail to tie the record to the number. Carriers and regulators ask for this after a complaint, not before, and an account that cannot produce it is an account we cannot defend.
• Consent does not survive a sale of a list, a change of business, or years of silence. If you have not messaged a number in a long time and cannot show what it agreed to, do not message it.

If you are ever unsure whether you have consent for a particular number, you do not have consent for that number.

Every message has to identify the organisation sending it, in the message itself, in the first line where the recipient will actually see it. A person who cannot tell who is texting them treats the text as a scam, and they are usually right to.

Do not use a sender name, a display name or a callback number that belongs to anyone other than you. Do not send on behalf of an organisation that is not the account holder on file. If you handle messaging for clients, each client needs its own account and its own registration.

The platform handles the mechanical part. A reply of STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT blocks that number across your account the moment we receive it, and it does not wait for you to notice. HELP returns your identity and contact details.

Your obligations go further than the keyword. People opt out by replying to an email, by telling someone on the phone, by asking a member of your staff in person. You have to accept those requests through whatever channel they arrive on, act on them promptly, and record them on the platform so the block is enforced. An opt-out kept in someone’s inbox is not an opt-out.

• Never message a number after it has opted out, and never message it from a different number to get around the block. Both are treated as deliberate evasion.
• Do not ask someone to opt in again as a condition of an opt-out taking effect, and do not send a marketing message inside a confirmation of an opt-out.
• If you promote a keyword so people can opt in, say clearly what they are signing up for and roughly how often it will arrive.

Send at hours that make sense where the recipient is, not where you are. A contact list that spans time zones is your problem to solve before the broadcast, not the recipient’s problem to absorb at six in the morning.

Canadian and United States rules both restrict when unsolicited and promotional calls and texts may be placed, and some provinces and states are stricter than the federal position. Where a rule applies to your traffic, it applies to you. Emergency and safety notifications are the recognised exception, and treating an ordinary promotion as one is a breach of this policy.

Some of the following is unlawful. The rest is lawful somewhere and still gets an entire sending brand blocked by the carriers, which is why our answer is the same either way. We are not the last word on what anyone may say. We are choosing what travels on our network.

• Sexual content, hate speech, alcohol, firearms and tobacco, including vaping and nicotine products.
• Cannabis, CBD and other controlled substances, including where they are legal to sell.
• High risk financial offers: payday and short term loans, debt relief, credit repair, debt collection by an unlicensed party, cryptocurrency and stock alerts, and any variety of get rich quick.
• Gambling, betting, lotteries, sweepstakes, contests and free prize claims.
• Anything deceptive: phishing, impersonation of a person or a brand, false sender identity, fake delivery or bank notices, and offers that hide who is actually behind them.
• Multi level marketing, affiliate and commission programmes, work from home offers, and lead generation that hands the recipient to a business they never contacted.
• Prescription medication offers and unapproved health claims.
• Malware, links to malicious sites, and any attempt to harvest credentials or payment details.

Do not use public link shorteners or domains shared with other senders. Carriers cannot see where those links go, so they block them on sight. Use a link on a domain you control.

Automated voice on NexBroad Reach is for notifications, alerts, reminders, confirmations and operational messages to people who expect them. It is not a marketing channel, and we do not permit promotional or telemarketing voice broadcasts. Canada and the United States both regulate automated marketing calls far more tightly than they regulate texts, the do not call regimes bite hardest there, and the risk is not one we take on behalf of the platform.

• Name your organisation at the start of the call, and give a callback number at the end.
• Automated calls carry a disclaimer inserted by our carrier. It will be audible, and you should write your script expecting it.
• Keep a way for the person to stop receiving calls, and honour it the same way you honour a text opt-out.

Voter contact, canvassing, get out the vote calls and texts, party or candidate promotion, referendum and ballot advocacy are not permitted on the platform, by voice or by text.

This is a deliberate business decision rather than a view on anyone’s politics. Election communication in Canada carries its own registration and record keeping regime for calling services, the United States adds a separate layer of state by state rules, and both change on a schedule set by election cycles rather than by us. We would rather say no clearly than operate a compliance function we have not built.

Solicitation of donations is permitted only by a registered charity or equivalent non profit, and only where the registration is on file with your account. Every fundraising message must name the organisation and make the purpose of the ask obvious. Fundraising on behalf of another organisation, and fundraising by a commercial party that keeps a share, are not permitted.

SMS and automated voice are not secure channels. A message sits on a handset that may be unlocked on a table, passes through carriers we do not control, and is often backed up somewhere neither of us has ever seen.

Do not send payment card numbers, bank account details, passwords, one time codes for other systems, social insurance or social security numbers, or government identification numbers through the platform.

Health information needs particular care. A message may confirm that an appointment exists, but a message that reveals a diagnosis, a treatment or a test result to whoever is holding the phone is a disclosure, and the responsibility for it is yours. If your use case involves protected health information at any scale, tell us before you start sending so we can agree in writing what is appropriate. Do not assume the platform is cleared for it.

Alongside what you send, there are things you may not do to the service. Do not resell access or make the platform available to a business that has not signed up itself. Do not attempt to reach another organisation’s data, probe the service for weaknesses without our written agreement, script around the interface to defeat a limit, or run automated signups. Do not send test traffic to numbers that are not yours.

Trial accounts have one destination and one purpose. During the trial, test messages and calls reach only the mobile number you verified when you registered, and only the org admin who opened the account and the broadcasters they add can run them. Attempting to reach any other number from a trial account is treated as a deliberate breach rather than a mistake, because trial traffic runs on our own carrier registration and the consequences land on every customer here.

Most of this is enforced by the system rather than by a person reading your messages after the fact. Content is screened automatically before it is sent. Opt-outs are applied at the moment they arrive. Throughput is held to what your registration allows. Complaint rates, opt-out rates and delivery failures are monitored, and a sharp move in any of them is a signal we act on.

We may refuse or delay a send, ask you for your consent records, or decline to file a registration. Automated screening is a filter, not an approval. A message that passes it is still your message, and it being delivered is not us agreeing that you should have sent it.

Sending without valid consent, prohibited content, fraud, impersonation, evading an opt-out, a carrier or regulator complaint, or any attempt to work around the platform controls results in immediate suspension. We tell you afterwards and we tell you what happened. We act in that order because the alternative is letting the traffic continue while we discuss it.

Everything else, including an incomplete business profile, a failed filing or a gap in documentation, gets written notice and 48 hours to put right before a suspension takes effect.

Where a breach costs us money, in carrier penalties, registry fees, regulatory fines or the work of responding to a complaint, we will recover it from you, and the indemnity in our Terms and Conditions covers it. Serious cases are reported to the carriers and registries that authorise business messaging, and that record follows the business rather than the account.

If you received a message you did not agree to, reply STOP to stop it at once, then write to hello@nexbroad.com with the number that contacted you and roughly when. We will identify the account behind it and act on it, and we will tell you that we have.

If you are a customer and you are not sure whether something you want to send is allowed, ask us before you send it rather than after. That conversation takes ten minutes. A carrier block takes weeks to undo.