Bulk messaging from teachers

Amanda Polson

Am I missing something or is there really not an option for teachers to send a message through their class roster page to all parents/guardians as a group? In the “Send communication to > Compose Message" box, each name has to be individually entered. It is obviously possible to enter the full list of parents, but it seems unnecessarily complicated and more than likely at least one parent will be forgotten. They can copy the emails as a group and paste into an email, but we wanted to use messaging through the portal to have a central location where messages are kept and tracked.

This seems like a fairly common need, so I feel like I must have a setting wrong or I'm missing another obvious solution. How do other schools/teachers send messages to their classes?

Bryan Lorenzo

Hi @Amanda Polson - if you have Inbox Messaging enabled the “To" field should be populated with the name of the class and will include the parents of all students.

Amanda Polson

@Bryan Lorenzo thanks! Thats what I was expecting, and we do have it enabled, but nothing shows. The support person I talked to told me we needed to write them all in, I'm glad that's not the case! Now I'll just need to figure out how to fix it.

Kathy Hannon

@Amanda Polson - FYI - Community Groups only allow you to send messages to “Members” (the roster individuals) not Parent of members like the Academic, Activity & Advisor groups do.

Bryan Lorenzo

@Amanda Polson - check your academic term begin date under Core > Settings > School information > Years & terms. If the date has not yet started, the class won't appear in the “To” field when you go compose the message.

Amanda Polson

@Bryan Lorenzo - thank you so much, that is my issue! Our school year has not yet started. How do people generally work around that? Before the beginning of the term is when our teachers need to probably send the most correspondence to families, and also when its most helpful to have a list that is automatically updated so no one in the class is left out. Do people set their terms to start before the first of school?

Amanda Polson

@Kathy Hannon thank you! That's good to know.

Jo Giesecke

@Amanda Polson There is an option to COPY the email addresses. I found this to be the easiest way to deal with class emails. Just copy and paste the emails into the BCC field.

Shannon Krise

@Amanda Polson Our first term begins on 7/1 (Beginning of our fiscal year) and the last term actually ends on 6/30 (last day of our fiscal year) even though the last day of classes is earlier in June and classes start on 9/6. We did this for several reasons, but I guess that's why we've never had this issue of not being able to bulk message parents from the closs roster before the start of school.

Amanda Polson

@Shannon Krise that's good to know! I will make a note for next year that we should set things up like that.