How to do a mass text list or mailing list on an Android Phone

I just came back from a trip to Key West and I set up a mass text list for the 68 enlisted people that were out there with me.  I haven’t heard of anyone else doing it and it worked pretty good so I'm going to share it here.  I used this method to send out the phone numbers of our daily duty drivers, pass info on and since I was the Det LPO, I needed everyone's phone number in case there was a problem or someone wasn't where they were supposed to be.  This saved hours of time and we were able to change plans on a moments notice, almost like we had modern communication equipment! 

This works if you have an Android Phone (maybe Blackberry too, not sure about iPhones since I don't own one).  If you have an Android phone, you also have a Gmail account, I’ll put it together is steps.

This method is if you plan on putting the phone numbers in by hand (which I did)

11,         Go to Gmail.

22.       Click on the Gmail button on the top left hand of the screen.

33.       It will bring down a pull down menu, click “Contacts”

44.       If the contact isn’t a contact yet, you need to add them as a contact by clicking “New Contact”.

55.       After they are added, open up their contact card, click on the little crowd of people under the search bar that says “groups” when you put the curser over it and click “Create new” and call it what you will.

66.       Add names like that by opening up the contact you want on that list, clicking on the group icon, and clicking on the group.

77.       To send out mass txt’s by that method, open Messaging on your phone

88.       Click New Message, then Group and scroll down to the group you want

99.       Click on the names of the people you want to send messages to after you’re done, click Add.

110.   Type a message and send it

111.   MAKE SURE YOU HAVE AN UNLIMITED TEXTING PLAN OR YOU WILL REGRET IT!

112.   If you need to send something to all of the same people, just type anther message to them on the same string, you don’t have to click on the individual names again.

There is another method which theoretically should work that I’m going to try next time if I have all of the numbers on an excel file, I’ll export a group into an Outlook CSV, open that file and change all of the information to the numbers on the excel and Import it back into Gmail.