Maintain Parent Email Groups in MIS, Office365, or Parallel?

[BFish]

Hi everyone,

 

I just wanted to reach out and get some feedback to see how other schools actively maintain pupil parent contacts and parent email groups (parent forms & parent year groups)?

 

My school has done it for a number of years where we have the access the parents input and maintain through the MIS. However, each time a change occurs the technology staff manually also maintains a parallel email distribution list of each student's parents as well as all parental form and year group contacts. Naturally, one of our biggest complaints in doing this way is frequent human data entry errors, delivery mail issues when in bulk without errors, major human resource time maintaining and poor parental feedback on the matter year after year.

 

We were looking at doing any initial parental email exclusively through our SIS system to see if we can improve on the issues I mentioned above. The two drawbacks are it is not mobile friendly and it takes about 2 minutes for an average teacher to be able to email a parent where as it only takes a few seconds in outlook for them to find a parent or parent group to send.

[jthompson]

You definitely need an authoritative record of contact details in your MIS, with solid procedures on how that gets updated (even for obvious typos), with privileges on it suitably controlled.

 

As for bulk email communications with parents/guardians, that ought really to be done via a tool that hooks into your MIS, nice and separate from your main email service. It's worth spending money on.

 

There'll be others, but we use EduLink and happy to recommend it.

[vikpaw]

Look at Salamander Software they can make the MIS the authoritative source and update AD, O365, make groups etc.

I think it’s free too for the initial tool.

Their value added (paid) service is great though.