E-Communication software

[ReverentCreature]

Our school is currently having issues with SchoolComms

 

Currently if we send out a newsletter to ALL PARENTS, the hard copy report lists every parent that needs contacting! If the father has been e-mailed, why would we need to send a hard copy to the mother??? Alternatively if send out a newsletter just to the PRIME PARENT, we are preventing ourselves from e-mailing those who are not prime parents. Either way we are having to photocopy hundreds of newsletters! Parents have given us their e-mail addresses so we DONT send them hard copies any more!

 

SchoolComms say this is by design and cant be changed any time soon so we are looking for an alternative product that will only e-mail ONE OF THE PARENTS and wont request hard copies if one of the parents has been contacted. We will go paperless if it kills us!

 

What do your schools use? We have looked at ParentMail but it doesnt integrate with SIMS which is what we want now that we have inputted all their details.

 

Thanks

[GREED]

I'm gonna stick up for SchoolComms a little here (mostly as one of the developers is a good mate of mine but also my experiences of this), there as so many individual scenarios that everyone is going to have with sending out messages to parents, particularly split families. The way it is done now ensures that messages get out to prime parents who are split, at the expense of sending many to those who are not.

 

Not an ideal scenario, but we altered the priorities listings in SIMS to make better use of the system. We used priorities 1,2,3 etc etc as codes rather than true priority orders, and staff fully understood the meaning, and this gave us loads of flexibility with sending our mailings from Schoolcomms. So for example, if dad has an email, mum doesn't, set priority of mum 2 (Note, I am using this as an example before the barrage of criticism comes my way!)

 

You may well find others have similar shortcomings. This is a limitation of the connection to SIMS, as SIMS would need to pump though a family identifier with the contacts it sends through.

[vikpaw]

The report you get for hard copy i think will tell you if the parent is prime or not. I used to go down the list and check for when a kid has both parents listed. yes it's a bit of a manual process, but much less arduous than copying and printing loads of stuff.