E-mailing Parents

[meastaugh1]

Hi,

I'm just wondering how other schools manage and administer e-mailing parents?

Do you manually add Contacts to your Exchange server (or whichever mail server you are running)? How do you keep the data up to date (ie address changes)? Do you bulk e-mail at particular audieces (ie parents of a particular year group)?

I'm aware of services such as parentmail, but that for example would mean issuing (more) username/passwords to parents. SchoolComms may be ok.

Another option I'm considering is creating a parents site on sharepoint, then letting parents add their e-mail address and choose options to subscribe to certain mailings. Parents could also be responsible for updating their contact details. One big potential downside is that we may start duplicating data in our MIS and Sharepoint.

I'd be interested to hear how schools do this.

thanks
Mike

[Geoff]

Isn't just posting info on the website sufficent. Then just leave it up to the parents to periodically check the website? That's how we do it here. Specifically with PDFs.

[meastaugh1]

That point was raised when this was first suggested. We do upload periodic bulletins to the website at the moment. I suppose the thinking is that we have more chance of contacting people if we e-mail, rather than rely on them to check the website.

[CyberNerd]

Probably the best way is to pull the info directly from your MIS and generate a mailing list from that. Alternatively you could set up a web page to get parents to sign up to a mailman mailing list - that way the emphasis is on the parents to keep the details updated. http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html

Also consider SMS, IIRC CMIS will SMS parents - but it costs

[ITWombat]

That's OK for general mailings with just an anonymous Dear Parent/Carer
In other circumstances where a student name is mentioned you may need to any check mailing flag just in case their is a court order or other block on an individual parent

[Geoff]

Also keep the Data Protection Act in mind when your collecting all this info so you can produce your mailing lists.