Predictable & Accessible Announcements For Your Community

This guide serves to help you understand how numbers come across from SchoolStatus Connect, and what your families and staff can expect as recipients of messages.

What number will my messages come from? Well, that depends…

• If you send a non-reply-able Announcement, recipients who receive that message as a text will see the same consistent phone number from any user sending a non-reply-able Announcement.
• If you add a voice broadcast, that also will come from the same consistent (though different from SMS) phone number each time, no matter who is sending it in the district.
• If you send a reply-able Announcement, initiate a 1:1 call, or start a Conversation, recipients will see a different unique provisioned number for that interaction. Conversations and calls made between the same two people about the same child (ex., Teacher A and Parent A about Child A) will typically have that same number throughout the course of a year. If that same Teacher and Parent share another child, they may converse about (ex., Teacher A and Parent A about Child B), that will likely be a different unique number. Group conversations will generate a new phone number for each unique pairing of participants.

Ensuring Announcements Are Predictable And Easy To Access For Your Community

1. Start a new Announcement and select your audience, then go to your Announcement Settings.
2. Do you want it to come from the same number each time? Keep Email and SMS Replies off
3. Turn on Public Broadcast. This will ensure the Announcement can be viewed by anyone without the need to log in to access the contents. It is important to note that because the recipient is not logged in, the system does not know what their language preference is, so they will see the Announcement in their browser in whatever language it was written in. They will, however, see any Public Broadcast Announcement sent to their Email in their preferred language in that email.
4. Turn on Priority Announcements. This will ensure the message goes to all recipients in all methods of communication they have associated with their account - email,/phone, and/or in-app notifications.
5. Do you want to send a pre-recorded message as a phone call as part of your Announcement? Turn on Voice Broadcast and record your message

Read more about Announcement settings here.

Before sending your Announcement, remember you can:

• Preview your Announcement as an Email or SMS
• Schedule your Announcement to go out at a determined future date and time
• Or just send your Announcement! Read more about creating and sending announcements here.

After sending your Announcement, don’t forget to:

• Check your Delivery Data to see up-to-date delivery and engagement statistics. Read more about Announcement delivery data here.

Here are some additional resources that may help you!