A charity programme may not run games of chance or recurring donations

The requirementstatement

A campaign registered under the CHARITY use case must not solicit lottery, sweepstakes or raffle entries, and must not enrol donors in recurring donations.

Severityseverity: BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: campaign.sample[] + campaign.description
Where it liveslayer: Message contentMESSAGE_CONTENT
How Ekas settles itdetectability: AI · formAI_FORM; A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD; A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
Who requires itauthorities: T-MobileCTIA
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies when the use case is CHARITY.

Why this rule existsrationale

The charity use case buys favourable treatment — higher throughput, a lighter consent standard than marketing — on the basis that the traffic is mission communication to supporters. Games of chance and recurring billing are the two things that turn it into a payment funnel, and both carry the harms the concession was never meant to cover: a raffle is gambling however good the cause, and a recurring donation enrolled by text is a subscription the donor cannot see, cancel or reconcile. Charities are caught out by this constantly and in complete good faith, because the raffle at the fundraising dinner and the monthly giving programme are the two most normal things a small charity does.

How to fix itremediation

Take the draw and the recurring enrolment out of the text programme and keep both on the web, where the donor sees the terms and the billing schedule. The messages may link to them; they may not run them. Done when no sample asks for an entry, a ticket or a monthly commitment, and every donation ask in the campaign is for a single gift.

A compliant exampleexample

Riverside Shelter: our winter beds are at capacity tonight and we need blankets. Give once at https://riversideshelter.org/give Reply STOP to opt out, HELP for help.

Common mistakespitfalls

Linking to the raffle page rather than selling tickets in the thread is the fix; describing the raffle in the message and linking to it is still soliciting entries and still fails.

Provider rejection codescodes

The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.

Provider	Code	Resubmit
Twilio	30462	No

Notesnotes

CTIA dropped this from the Short Code Monitoring Handbook at v1.9 while T-Mobile section 6.7 retains it, so it is a live requirement on the strictest reading rather than a historical one. Divergence recorded; strictest reading kept.

Rules you will hit next

6 other rules read campaign.sample[] + campaign.description. Fixing one field to satisfy a single rule is how a resubmission trades one rejection for another, so read these before you change anything.

MSG-034Samples must not be framed as test, demo or machine-to-machine trafficBlockingBLOCKING MSG-045Samples must not impersonate another organisationBlockingBLOCKING MSG-175Content must not invade privacy, defame, or otherwise cause harmBlockingBLOCKING MSG-177Content must not depict or facilitate substance abuseBlockingBLOCKING MSG-179Alcohol content must not be aimed at people under the drinking ageBlockingBLOCKING MSG-DECEPTIVEContent must not be deceptive, misleading, or impersonatingBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-209 is one of 122 message content rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.