SMS

We're looking at SMS communication to students and parents and I've been asked to look at providers and approximating how much we're going to expect to pay, though I've no idea on how many messages we'd send (and the price appears to be very much based upon that).

A back-of-a-napkin calc gives me approx 50'000 ish a year, but that's a wild swing in the dark.

If you use SMS:

- how many students do you have?
- how many messages do you send a month/year?
- what's the purpose behind the messages? (exam reminders, EMA notifications, opt-in marketing, etc.)

Cheers!
Dale

TextAnywhere

we find this great as you can export out of your mis and upload the details to the site.

very school friendy

We use keep kids safe at our place and by all accounts from the office staff it works well. links into sims and is easy to use.
Link

We have been testing a system for our LEA. It is based on Ja.nets text messaging system I believe.

We currently only send absence messages to parents, which is usually between 20-40 a day I would say. When the snow hit, we did send messages to parents telling them we were actually open to our 1300 students priority one contacts.

We are looking at perhaps sending other notifications to parents, and possibly to sixth formers. We have also done a data capture exercise to get hold of staff mobile numbers.

We started using it properly in September and have used only about 4000 messages as yet.

We did a trial of Keep Kids Safe, but didn't like the contract (read the small print if you're interested in their trial). We also took a look at Groupcall and teachers2parents. None of which would work correctly with our time table for the absence texts.

KeepKidsSafe here. Seems to work.