Conversations allow you to initiate two-way communication with up to 15 participants. Conversations function as a reply-all exchange, meaning everyone included in the thread can read and reply to all messages.
You can include parents and guardians, staff members, and students (if enabled by your district or school). Once the purpose of the Conversation has been fulfilled, it is considered a best practice to stop the thread to prevent additional replies and avoid confusion.
When a Conversation is stopped, participants can still view previous messages, but they will no longer be able to send new replies. For more information, see: Stopping Conversations.
How to Create a Conversation
(1) Click the Message Button
(2) Click Create New Message or Start Conversation
(3) Select who you would like to begin a 2-way conversation with by typing in the name of any staff, guardians, and/or students (if enabled) that you would like to create a message with
- By default, you can view the entire Directory when searching for users to include in a Conversation
- Select participants from the search results
- Repeat until you have added all desired participants
Note: Messages can include up to 15 people.
Note: If you would like a conversation with more than 15 users, please reach out to our support team.
(4) Click Create to begin the message and type your message
Note: You can also add attachments by clicking the paperclip icon (5)
Once you have sent a message, you can do the following:
(6) Click on the information icon to view who is in the conversation
(7) Click the three-dot menu in the top right corner to Stop, Mute, Download, Rename, or Archive the conversation
(8) Click the three-dot menu next to your message to see who has seen that message from the group it was sent to
(9) Click the three-dot menu above your active messages to view your archived messages
Some Things to Note:
- Messages are sent to recipients in both the method and language that the recipient prefers.
- When a new message is received, a bubble will appear above the message icon.
- Guardians will have SMS (text) as their default method of notification. Staff may choose to receive notifications as an SMS (text) message, while others may receive them in their email, or they may view them when logged into Connect, either in their browser or in the app. They can reply from any of these modes in their preferred language, and it will appear in your conversation window in your preferred language.
- If you have both email and SMS contact details, the default notification method is determined by each district’s settings.
We’ve added a short label (e.g., For Dennis) at the start of most system-sent SMS messages. This helps clarify who the message is for and which account it belongs to when multiple users share the same phone number in Connect.
If notifications are not successfully sent to the preferred channel, the system will use the alternative method. For example, if the user's email inbox is full and the notifications are not delivered successfully, the system will send the messages to SMS. Once the issue behind the failed emails is resolved, and the user’s email status is reset either by the user or by Connect support, the system will revert to sending communications via the preferred channel - email.
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