Basecamp and Twilio integrate through Basecamp's Webhooks feature and REST API to send SMS notifications when new messages are posted, to-do items are assigned, or project events occur that require immediate attention from team members who are away from their computers. This integration is used by project teams and agencies that run client and internal projects in Basecamp and need SMS as a higher-urgency supplement to Basecamp's native email and in-app notifications. The connection uses a Basecamp Webhook to detect project events, your middleware to evaluate and route the notification, and Twilio's Messages API to deliver the SMS to the correct person.
What You Need Before You Start
You need a Basecamp 3 account with owner or administrator access to configure webhooks under the account settings, and a Basecamp API OAuth 2.0 application registered at https://launchpad.37signals.com/integrations where you obtain a client ID and client secret for programmatic API access. Your Basecamp REST API base URL is https://3.basecamp.com/{accountId}/api/v1/ where the account ID is the numeric value visible in your Basecamp URL after the 3.basecamp.com domain. From Twilio, collect your Account SID, Auth Token, and an SMS-capable phone number, and prepare a mapping between Basecamp person IDs and mobile phone numbers, as the Basecamp person object includes email and name but not a phone field. Identify the bucket ID values for the Basecamp projects you want to monitor by calling GET https://3.basecamp.com/{accountId}/api/v1/projects.json with an Authorization header set to Bearer {oauthToken} and reading the id field from each project in the response array.
Step-by-Step Integration Guide
Create a Basecamp Webhook from the account settings under Adminland, then Webhooks, clicking Add a new webhook, entering your middleware URL such as https://yourapp.com/basecamp/webhook, and selecting the event types you want to receive including To-do was assigned, Message was created, and Comment was created. Basecamp sends events as JSON POST requests to your endpoint with a payload containing kind, creator, recording, and bucket fields where kind identifies the event type, creator contains the person who triggered it, recording contains the resource that changed, and bucket contains the project context. When a to-do assignment event arrives with kind equal to todo_assignment_changed, extract recording.title for the task name, recording.assignee.id for the new assignee, and bucket.name for the project name, then look up the assignee phone from your directory and call POST https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/{AccountSid}/Messages.json with To set to the phone and Body set to a message like the project name plus task name plus assigned to you in Basecamp. For message creation events where kind equals message_created, extract recording.subject as the message title and creator.name as the author, then send an SMS to all project members on your notify list rather than just the creator, fetching the project member list if needed via GET https://3.basecamp.com/{accountId}/api/v1/projects/{projectId}/people.json.
Common Issues and How to Fix Them
Basecamp Webhooks send events for all activity across all projects in the account when configured at the account level, generating high event volumes in active accounts with many projects. Add a project-level filter in your middleware by checking the bucket.id field in each webhook payload against an allow-list of project IDs you care about, and discard events from projects not on the list before making any Twilio API calls. Basecamp OAuth access tokens expire and must be refreshed using the refresh token flow at POST https://launchpad.37signals.com/authorization/token with grant_type=refresh_token, and your middleware will receive 401 Unauthorized errors from the Basecamp API when the token expires. Implement automatic token refresh by storing the token expiry time alongside the access token, checking before every API call whether the token is within 60 seconds of expiry, and refreshing proactively rather than waiting for a 401 to trigger the refresh flow. Basecamp does not send a handshake verification request like some other webhook systems, which means invalid endpoint URLs are saved without error and events are silently lost when delivery fails. Confirm your webhook is delivering by checking the Webhook delivery log in Basecamp Adminland, then Webhooks, which shows the last delivery status and response code for each registered webhook.
How to Get More from This Integration
Build a daily project digest by running a scheduled job each morning that fetches all incomplete to-do items for each monitored project via GET https://3.basecamp.com/{accountId}/api/v1/buckets/{projectId}/todolists.json, follows the to-do list URLs to retrieve individual items, filters for items due today and items assigned to each team member, and sends each person a single SMS summarizing their tasks for the day rather than one SMS per task. Extend the integration to campfire messages by subscribing to the message_created event for Basecamp Campfire recordings, filtering for messages in designated urgent channels by checking recording.type equal to Chat and the campfire name matching your criteria, and sending an SMS to the on-call person when an urgent campfire message appears. Create an inbound SMS bridge where team members can post to Basecamp by sending an SMS to your Twilio number in the format PROJECT {projectId} {message text}, with your middleware parsing the command and calling POST https://3.basecamp.com/{accountId}/api/v1/buckets/{projectId}/messages.json with a JSON body containing subject and content fields to create the Basecamp message programmatically. Use Basecamp's schedule and milestone events by subscribing to the event_created and event_updated webhook kinds, and send SMS reminders to project members 24 hours before any scheduled Basecamp event by combining the scheduled event's starts_at timestamp with a delayed job system.
Conclusion
Basecamp and Twilio together ensure your team receives SMS alerts for important project activity the moment it happens, bridging the gap between Basecamp's notification system and the phone your team always has with them. Contact Telphi Consulting to set up and customize this integration for your Basecamp projects.
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