You can quickly and easily send out text messages to a large number of recipients corresponding to your MIS Data using our Text Message Add-on.
Generating the relevant recipients in relation to parents requires a secure connection from your school's Management Information System (MIS) to Juniper Education. As such, we integrate with a company called Wonde. Wonde provides a high level of security, allowing you to remain in control of the data we access.
- Buying more Credits
- Creating a New Text Message
- Writing your Text Message
- Saving / Sending your Text Message
- Checking your Mail Queue
Buying more Credits
Before being able to send text messages, you must ensure that you have enough tokens to send out your messages. To check this, click on the Bundles tab on the left-hand side of your Dashboard. From here, you can buy differently sized bundles on a cost-per-text basis. Further, below on the same page, you can find your purchase history for any invoicing you may need. Finally, your current amount of Credits will display on the top right of the page.
Creating a New Text Message
To begin with, create your new Text Message that will be sent to the decided recipients.
- First, click on the 'Create' tab on the left-hand side of your Dashboard, this will bring you onto a new page allowing you to write your text.
- Now, enter a Message Subject, this will be what parents first see when they see the notification come through on their mobile devices.
- After that, click on the Add button beside Recipients to choose who will receive the text messages (names that have been greyed out mean that your MIS data does not contain a contact number person).
- If a person has multiple contacts set for them, you can click on the small Envelope icon to select which person receives the text. On the other hand, you can click on the drop-down icon beside the Add button to only select Primary contacts.
Writing your Text Message
At this point, you can begin writing your Text Message and tailoring the message to be personalised and professional. To start with, you have a couple of options available as to how you write out your text:
- If you're trying to personalise your text message, by using the 'Insert Placeholder' button, you can make the text generate the individual parents' name throughout all of the texts sent (for example, Hi {parentname} - our school..).
- If you're trying to confirm parent details, you can use the 'Insert Placeholder' button to generate the parents' personal email address throughout all of the texts sent, for example, "Hi {parentfirstname}, text us back to confirm whether your {emailaddress} is correct.
- Through the use of the Emoji button (smiley face icon - see above), you can insert an emoji into your text from our large list of emojis. However, using these may take up more characters than normal characters, causing more credits to be used per message.
- When inserting Placeholders, above the content box there is an area for Characters (see above). This will most likely be an estimate between two values, this is due to different Placeholders having different potential character lengths. For example, parent names are going to be different lengths, therefore it may take between 3 - 10 characters per message. Find out more about Placeholders here
- Besides the Characters area, there are Messages (see above). This part will tell you how many texts worth of content you sending per recipient.
Note: The longer the text message that you're writing, the more credits you'll be using. Make sure to check you have enough credits for your texts before sending them out - Click here for more details.
Saving / Sending your Text Message
From here, you can view a preview of your text message, save it as a draft or template, or send it straight away.
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Preview: This will allow you to view your text from a parent's perspective on a mobile device, this can help you decide whether your text needs changing before being sent out.
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Save Draft: If you're not quite ready to send this text out or you're awaiting further details, save the text as a draft and send it at a later date under the Drafts tab.
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Save Template: Save time by not having to rewrite texts, save it as a template to reuse as many times as you'd like. This is great for texts such as training or snow days and can be accessed under the Templates tab.
- Send Now: Use the 'Send Now' button to directly send your text out to all of the decided recipients.
Checking your Mail Queue
After sending text messages out you'll want to check your Mail Queue to see whether any of your texts have failed to go through.
- First, check the details of the message to make sure it's the correct one by referencing the subject; you can check how many credits weren't used as well as how many messages failed to send.
- Through the use of the View Contacts button, you are able to check which recipients failed to receive the message, as well as the reason for the text not sending correctly.
- you can attempt to continue to try sending the message by pressing the Continue Sending button if you believe it should have gone through.
- If you'd like to try resending all of the messages stuck in your Mail Queue, you can use the Continue Sending All button.
- Finally, if all of the messages failed due to the number being incorrect for example, you can use the Clear All button to void the unsent messages.