Best parent comms for attachments

[Claireld]

I'd love to know which parent communications system you use that allows you to send attachments to parents easily, without adding each one by one. I'm meaning mainly for school reports, which need a different attachment for each student and cannot be bulk sent. What do you use, and do you recommend them? Thanks

[dmj]

EdulinkOne is good for this sort of thing.

I appreciate you didn't say so but I kinda inferred that you were talking about emails; you really shouldn't be considering sending by email, unless you are sending links to login to another system: email protocols are inherently insecure for what could be sensitive information.

[howartp]

SchoolComms does exactly what you’re asking, at least from SIMS.

 

Create an Individual Report then attach it by name of the report; it sends each parent/child their respective version of it.

 

@dmj’s comment is interesting and one I’d not considered. Ironically with SchoolComms, the only way to upload reports to their SchoolGateway app/portal is to send them by email and tick the “Also upload to portal” checkbox when doing so!

 

As an aside, SchoolComms doesn’t handle non-binary gender pronouns - it’s tied to the male/female Sex field in SIMS - so you can’t refer to him/her/they etc in the covering email if you have any students affected by this.

[TechMonkey]

Generally I advise against sending out attachments, though that is a personal bugbear anyway. Make it part of the body or make it a link.

Our report distribution is part of the MIS, they get uploaded to a parent portal and then we email the parents to say the reports are available on the portal and to go get them. This has the added benefit of Parents knowing where they are so cuts admin of having to resend reports that have gotten 'lost'.

 

So the best question is, what MIS are you using?