Sending alerts

Alerts are the ad-hoc notifications staff send to parents and students about their co-curricular activities — training cancelled today, bus running 20 minutes late, change of venue for Saturday’s fixture. They go out via SMS, email, push notification or all three.

Where to send alerts

Two entry points:

• From a session — alert everyone involved in this specific session.
• From an activity group or team — alert everyone in the group or team regardless of which session.

Go to Co-Curricular → [the session, group or team] → Send alert.

The alert form

Fields:

• Recipients — automatically filled based on where you started. Parents, students, staff, or any combination.
• Method — SMS, email, push notification, or all. Email is best for longer messages; SMS for short urgent ones; push for app users.
• Subject — only used for email. Keep it concise.
• Message body — the content. Plain text works everywhere; HTML for email only.
• Send time — Now (default) or scheduled for later.

Recipient targeting

The recipient list is built from the session, group or team you started from:

• Session alert — students in the session’s roll, their parents, and the coaching staff for the session.
• Team alert — everyone in the team plus parents.
• Activity group alert — every team’s students and parents in the group.

You can fine-tune the list before sending — uncheck specific people if needed, or restrict to a subset (e.g. parents only, not students).

Method choice

Most schools send urgent cancellation alerts as SMS + push for redundancy.

Templates

For recurring messages — training cancelled due to weather, running late, change of venue — save the message as a template. From the alert form, choose Save as template before sending. Next time the same situation arises, pick the template and send.

Templates are per-school and per-activity-group, so coaches see only the templates relevant to their activity.

Scheduling

For non-urgent alerts that need to go out at a specific time (e.g. a reminder the morning of a Saturday fixture), set a send time in the future. The alert is queued and goes out at the scheduled time.

Cancel a scheduled alert before it sends from the alerts list.

Logging

Every alert is logged with:

• Who sent it.
• When.
• Recipients (and which ones the system couldn’t reach — bad phone numbers, blocked emails).
• The message body.

Use the log to confirm a message went out (e.g. when a parent claims they weren’t told).

Replies

If your SMS provider supports two-way SMS, parent replies are logged against the alert. Staff can see the reply thread on the alert detail page.

Email replies go to the from-address — usually the coach or a shared inbox.

Costs

SMS sends are billed per recipient. Email and push are free. Consider the cost when picking the method:

• Tens of recipients via SMS — fine.
• Hundreds of recipients via SMS — consider email or push instead.

The school-wide SMS budget is visible in your portal admin settings if you need to track usage.

Tips

• Be specific. Training cancelled is less useful than Training cancelled today due to rain. Resuming Thursday.
• Keep SMS short. Long messages get split into multiple SMS, doubling or tripling the cost per send.
• Use email for complex messages. SMS isn’t the place for a detailed venue change with bus times — link to a page or send an email.
• Don’t over-send. Parents stop reading alerts if they get one for every minor thing.