Why are my outbound messages not showing up in the thread?

Question: I sent a campaign and I can see that students are responding, but the outbound message doesn't show up in the thread. Why isn't my message displaying? 

Answer: The main reason this is happening is because you have duplicate students with that same number.

Quick rule in our system: if you have multiple students with the same phone number, all inbound messages from that number will display in the threads for all of those students. Our system can't tell which is the "correct" student record for that phone number, so we show the message on every student. This does not work the same for outbound messages. We will only display outbound messages on the threads that are associated with the ID that we are using to send the message. For example, if you use contact_id 25 in your audience for a campaign, the outbound message will only show up on the thread for student 25. If student 26 also shares that number, the outbound message will not display in that thread because we were looking at the contact_id, not the phone number. In short, all inbounds show up all the time across students with the same phone number. Outbounds will only show up based on the identifier we used for that student.

If you see inbound messages that appear to not have a corresponding outbound message, look up that phone number in our system and compare the results. There are most likely multiple results for that number, and you used a different contact_id to send the message than where you are seeing the inbounds.

If this is not the case, and you do not see duplicates or any other reason why these messages would not show up on a student's thread, please create a zendesk ticket.