SMS
Everyone knows how to send an SMS but It’s important to know the rules when sending an SMS through ParentMail:
When selecting recipients, you will always select the students as the recipients, for example, all students in year 6, ParentMail will then check who their parents are and send the text to them.
Sending SMS messages costs credits, whereas sending an email does not. Always consider how urgent your message is before pressing send, you could save some money!
To send the text to just the primary contact for each child, tick the ‘Send to Primary Contacts only’ button whilst composing an SMS. This will send the text to the contacts that are marked as the primary contacts on ParentMail. If you use an MIS, they will be marked as Priority 1 or PG1 within your MIS. To send the text to ALL contacts, whether they are primary contact or not, leave the ‘Send to Primary Contacts only’ button unticked and they will all receive the text!
If a parent has more than one child, the ‘Send Per Student’ option will send an individual SMS per student. For example, two children = two texts. If you want to avoid this, make sure you have selected the ‘Send Per Family’ option and only 1 text will go to the contacts that have multiple children. The mail merge options to populate the Student First Name and Student Last Name will only work if you use the ‘Send Per Student’ SMS setting. Adding the mail merges: Parent Title, Parent First Name, Parent Last Name, Student First Name and Student Last Name, will take some characters up depending on the length of the name.
Recipients are not able to respond back to the text message, if you would like to receive a response, consider using our Online Forms application instead.