feature request: bulk message parents students

Hi Donald!

Your school can actually enable inbox messaging, which would allow you to send direct inbox messages to students you teach and their parents. If your school has this function enabled, you should be able to go to your roster, click “Send Communication To,” select students, parents, or all, and then send a bulk inbox message to the selected users.

If you don't see this option, it may be because your school has chosen to disable inbox messaging.

Thanks for your reply, @Bryna Gleich, and for raising this question, Donald. Although I know the Ideas portal is the place for feature requests, I'm excited to see this here because there are a lot of ideas rattling around seeking a more robust email functionality, and I'm always happy to see more folks joining the campaign! ?

Our school disabled the built-in inbox messaging because we really struggled with some aspects of it. I field frequent requests to be able to hand-pick a group of folks (from a roster, from a community group, from a directory) and send them an email. This could even work just like the “send communication to” button in the Roster - but with a selectable list instead of all-or-nothing.

PS. Donald, have you tried “Send Communication To”? It's a button at the top of your class roster that allows you to copy the emails of all your students and their parents/guardians to paste into your own email client. It would be awesome if it also worked for parents of students in community groups!

Hi Lauren! actually we had a huge inbox messaging enhancement roll out earlier this year (EAP in spring, general availability this summer). Some of the highlights - reply versus reply all controlled by the sender (one of the biggest Idea forum asks!), it is now more like email versus a text thread so a teacher for instance could have weekly agenda messages and those are separate messages. The key to what constitutes a ‘new’ message is recipient sender+list+subject+original send date. We also added rich text formatting so you can include links, font format for accessibility etc., search now searches all message text, subject and recipients whereas before it was limited to just recipients. And bulk mark as read or archive options. You should check it out!

Hi @Bryan Lorenzo we don't have anything in the works yet but I know this is also a big ask out here. Would love to do some brainstorming if you want to hop on the phone. We talked about it when we first embarked but the complexities came in with the fact that people have potentially more than one role and it's based on your relationships to other users, and also to the group itself so gets a little weedy. Shoot me a message if you'd like to chat!