Send media with WhatsApp

You can send and receive rich media via WhatsApp, including image, video and audio, which has the potential for huge impact and innovative tactics across campaigns. Take voice notes from supporters directly to decision makers or use supporter generated content across your socials!

To send media, you'll need to use a media template but you'll be able to receive media as a reply from any template.

Here's a guide to sending media with WhatsApp:

Step 1: Host your media
Before you can create a media template message, you'll need to host the media you want to send and copy the URL to the hosted media. The most common places to host images, videos and files is AWS, your website asset library or in a dedicated media library hosted on the web.

Step 2: Create and submit media templates

Create your media template in your template approval doc as usual and share with your account manager to submit. You'll need to include the URL to where your media is hosted. Check the latest file types and size limits supported here.

Note: It's only possible to send audio files like voice notes once a conversation window has opened. You'll need to send an initial message and then utilise Automations to reply to people with your voice note.

Note: Media templates are designed for media that can be played or forwarded in WhatsApp and so only allow for links to media hosted on a local server, rather than social media sites like Youtube or Facebook.

Step 3: Using your media template
Your template will be submitted and approved with the URL with a variable at the end that allows you to add the URL slug (the bit of the URL after the /) to select the specific piece of media you want to send in each message using the template.

Select your template and enter the content as usual. The last variable content box is the box for you to add the URL slug for the specific media you want to send in the message. The URL will not appear in the text of the WhatsApp message, this will add the media to your display in your message.

Step 4: Check the preview

In the preview section of your campaign build, double-check the file name/server URL is correct.

Step 5: Send a sample
When sending media, always check your message by sending a sample to yourself. If the sample isn't coming through it likely means WhatsApp has blocked the send because it couldn’t pull through the file via URL you provided in the template and editable content. Double check that you’ve added the correct full URL split across the template (core URL) and the editable content (slug)

Tip: check you haven’t got the / in both or neither field!

If something still isn't coming through, contact support@yourmovement.org and we can help you identify the issue.

On your campaign overview page, you'll be able to preview and export any rich media received.

Setting up a Zap for media uploads
You can get all the information about particular actions, like a call happening or a message being received, transported into Zapier. You can then filter on any condition, for example, someone sending an image, which then allows you to do anything in any of the 1000s integrated products afterwards, like updating a tag in SalesForce, process the image or notify your team.