You can send SMS, emails, letters or in-app messages for future students, prior to them starting attending your school, from the Students > All Students > Applicants or Communications areas. Take a look at these articles for more details on sending a Mail Merge email or creating a template to use in an email.
Permissions
You'll need to have the Send and administer school communications: Administer permission to send communications to applicants. If you don't have the permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.
Before sending communications
In-app messages
To send in-app messages to guardians of applicants through the Parent Portal or Parent App, you will have needed to either:
- switched the Parent Portal on for guardians of applicants - you can see how to do this here.
- completed step 3 of the new school year setup process - you can see how to do this here.
Email or SMS
To check that guardians of applicants have an email address or mobile number logged on their profile in bulk rather than having to check each profile, you must set up a custom group.
- Go to Students > Enrolment > Custom Groups and click the green button.
- In the slide over, add in the custom group name and select that it could contain All students.
- Add students manually to the custom group.
- Go to Students > Parents & Guardians > Bulk Update > Guardian Contact Details.
- Select the custom group in the filters.
- Check each guardian has an email address or phone number.
Sending communications via a Mail Merge
You can generate letters or send SMSs or emails to applicants or their guardians from School > Communications > Select communications type > New Mail Merge.
Type the name of the intake season in the 'To' field. Select whether to email applicants or guardians of applicants who have:
- Been newly created
- Had their offer rejected
- Been offered a place
- Withdrawn their application
- Accepted their place (so you send communications to the students who will be joining in September)
How do we select enrolled applicants?
There isn't a group for enrolled applicants, because they are not longer counted as applicants. Once the students have been given an enrolment date into your school, they are not longer counted as applicants. To target these students, select a student group they'll be in next year.
Sending communications from the Applicants page
To send an email right from the Applicants page, go to Students > All Students > Applicants, select the intake season, then go to Applicants from the left-hand menu.
Just select all the students you want to email the guardians of then click the Bulk action button to select the communication option to use.
You can then send all the applicants’ guardians your message.
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