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Communication Tools

Added Oct 04, 2019 •

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View this webinar for a quick overview of our suite of communication tools. Learn how your school can use voice messaging, text alerts, and more to better communicate with students and parents.

Show Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome to our My Edlio webinar for today, my name is Sarah and I am helping you guys out today from our client success team. And today we're going to be discussing some communication tools that you all have access to with your CMS with us and I do have a representative here from our technical support team in the chat to answer any questions just in case I don't see it or if there's something that I can't answer. And we also will stop at the end for any questions but we can definitely go ahead and get started. So some of the communication tools that we offer here at Edlio are going to be services that you have for free as included with your base package with Edlio, and some are going to be added on features. So I will go ahead and get started with the first feature that does come included with your your CMS base package and that's using our email sender. The email sender is a great way to get in touch with parents, the rest of your community, students even if you need to get in touch with them, and it does come like I said included with that CMS base package. So what you're going start with when you are accessing your email sender, is in your main admin site dashboard. And you can access the email sender by going into announce, and email sender. Or you can go into your hamburger menu and then go again into announce and then email sender. One handy link here is going to be about best practices for the email sender which does take you to our Edlio help center, which is a very great resource that we highly recommend you check out. This article will help you with some best practices for composing effective emails. But to go ahead and get started, when you have, when you first sign into the email sender you'll be prompted to manage your setup. And right now I'm signed in as a website administrator which means that I can send emails from my own email address, my personal email address in this view, or from my organization, or from my school. So when I first sign into email sender I'll actually be prompted to set this up and I'll need to go ahead and say that my name, and I'll need to go to my profile to add an email. And then this is what will show up in the header of the email that gets sent. If I'm sending, if I choose to send emails from my organization, if I'm sending something kind of on behalf of my school or my organization for example, then I'll need to go in and make sure that that stays managed here by clicking the pencil icon to the right hand side of the name. And then the email address that will, it will actually be sent from. And then replies will also go back to that as well. And then I'll go ahead and save changes. Now that I've already signed in and managed that set up when I go to email sender I get this view of all of the sent emails, which I can also view as being sent by my organization, email sent only by me, and an email sent by everyone that has a user profile on my website. I can also download all of this information in a CSV file to be saved for whatever reporting purposes that I need it to be saved. And let's say that I just need to send a new email today. So what I would select is new email and then I'm going to be taken to this screen where I can select the layout. And we have a lot of different layouts that you can utilize when composing an email. This layout here does allow me to pull events that I have created in my CMS. So events that I have manually created in my calendar, events that are synced from my Google or Outlook calendar if your school uses Google or Outlook. Those will be able to be populated here if I need to send that information to my parents or my community. For example, as part of, you know, the relevant information that needs to be included in that email. This one allows me to include news articles that I have created from, in my news and alerts section of my CMS. So let's say I'm going to go ahead and choose that, and then continue. and then I'll be taken to a section where I will actually create the content. The first section is just going to be basic copy content. This section does also allow all of our rich formatting options that are included in page editor. But then here I'll go ahead and look into adding my news. So I'm going to go ahead and select from any category, and I'm going to select up to 3 news articles. I can drag and drop the order of them. Perhaps even another article if I need to. And then I'm going to go down here and finalize the rest of the content. At any time I do have the option to preview the email and see what it will look like from any device. This is a desktop view. And then this will be what it would look like from a mobile view. The actual appearance might vary to some extent from this because devices and email clients will vary in the way that it'll display in email, but this will give you a general idea of what it will look like. And I'm going to go back to the email. I've decided that this is what I would like to utilize and I'm going to save and exit. Now let's say I'm ready to go ahead and send one. So I can go into this email that was composed earlier today and select recipients. It wasn't sent to anyone so let's go ahead and do that. And I'm going to continue. Currently, it's going to be sent from my school and my school my organization email address that I can select and manage setup. Then I can go ahead and add my recipients. So I can do that by manually adding them. I can add some existing email list recipients. Or I can upload a CSV file of content. So I'm going to go ahead and give it a subject line and then my delivery options. I do have the option to send this email right now or I can schedule this email. Say I want to send this on Monday at a certain time. And then I could select to have that sent right then or perhaps I, again, choose to send it now. And then I would go ahead and select send now or perhaps I want to come back and keep editing it so I would save and exit. This is where all the drafts and sent emails will be stored. Let's say for example you'd like to go back and view the recipients of an email. So you go find a sent email and select the three dots on this right hand side, and view recipients. As we can see, one person did receive the email and was given the status delivered. Perhaps I want to actually download a report of that and view a fuller report of delivered, opened, clicked, and not delivered. I could also at this point review that email. And then finally with this, I could copy this email if I would like to recreate the exact same email. Now let's go ahead and move on to some of the add-on features that we have to additionally communicate with our parents and community. When we go ahead and go down and to announce, we see in our announce feature that we have the option to send text alerts and voice messages. Voice and text messages are an add-on feature. You can get in touch with your client success specialist or sales team for additional pricing for your school on that. So let's go ahead and test out sending a text alert. Here you will find in the main dashboard a list of all of the tests, the sent messages that we have sent using text messages. You can see this, a similar report of delivered and not delivered messages as in the email sender as in the text alerts. So we go over to this button on the right hand side and select recipients. And view the phone number, the status, and the time delivered. For longer lists of recipients you can search, you can review the alert to see what message was sent, and then copy the same message if so. In the settings of voice and text are where you can view more detailed settings for having your voice and text ID setup. With voice and text, you do have the option to set up caller ID so that individual phone numbers do appear on the voice and text delivery. With voice messages, they're going to be sent from a pool of phone numbers. You can set up that caller ID to send voice messages. Text messages are always going to be sent from a pool of phone numbers due to carrier restrictions. So caller ID is reserved as a practice for voice messages. However, if you leave it on the default setting of a pool of phone numbers, that will make the delivery time faster. To set that up you'd enter in the phone number that you'd like to call or the caller ID, and select call number. When the number is dialed you'll be prompted to enter a code. Once the code is registered, that number will be registered as the caller ID. There are some additional settings here for answering machine detection and voice message delivery. The similar settings appear for text alerts. Let's say we want to send a voice message or a text alert. So I'd like to send a new voice message. So I would select new message and then enter my recipients. Say I would like to enter a phone number manually in a similar way that I entered a email address manually. I do have the option to add that. I can add an existing list of previous recipients from a list of individuals who have received a voice message. And then I can also add from a CSV as well. The subject line is going to be for your user records only so you can keep track of what messages were sent when. And then this is when you will type in the script. You can have the voice and text settings call you so that you can record the message in your own voice, or you could use the text-to-speech service. Type your script and then it will create an audio of your script. And then as we saw with the email sender, you do have the option to send it immediately or send it later. Now let's say we'd like to send a text message. We'd navigate to text alerts, new alert, and then an extremely similar set up to voice settings, you'd enter the recipient either manually or brought from an existing contact list, or from a CSV. Then here you would insert your message. You can adjust the way that your school's name appears. There are a couple of alerts here that you'd want to be mindful of. Messages containing more than 160 characters will be kind of condensed into multiple messages. And then recipients do have the option to opt out often and help for more options. But as we saw with both the email sender and the voice messages, we can send now or send later. And that covers one of the add-on services that we offer for text alerts and voice messages. Now let's go ahead and move on to our final topic with our app alerts. So the school news app is an additional add-on service that we also offer. That is a application for parents to download onto their smartphone, or their mobile device, or tablet to receive app alerts, news, and events relating to the schools that they have set up to receive messages from. It is available on Google and Android. And a parent will be able to add multiple schools, so if a parent has children at multiple schools within a district, let's say a child at the elementary school, one at the middle school, and one at the high school. The parent will be able to add multiple schools inside one application to receive news and alerts from instead of having to download multiple applications, one for each school, which is really handy for those multi-child households. And then inside the application is a, almost newsfeed like interface where the parent or user can toggle between app alerts which I'll go ahead and demonstrate, but also it will be pulling a feed of news that the website will publish. So if an individual creates a news article inside the CMS, they do have the option after saving it to add it as an app alert. and that will populate to the school news app feed. What will also end up populating to the school news app feed are events that are added to calendars from Google, Outlook, or are manually added from the CMS. The final way that parents can receive messages from the school news app is with a feature called this app alert. And you can send individual push notifications to the news apps by going to app alerts, and new app, and then type in your message up to 160 characters. You can link to an outside link and then send. And then that will trigger an individual push notification sent to the user's device with the schools news app populated. And it will send an app alert to that school's app alerts feed. So those are the major communication tools that we offer through our Edlio services. Again, the email sender comes part of your base package with most, all Edlio customers having access to this. The school news app, voice messaging and text messaging do come as add-on features, so we would encourage you to just get in touch with your Edlio representative for more information about that. And as always, you can get in touch with us for any need or concern by going to help, and then help center. The help center has tons of great resources and does have information articles about all of the topics that I discussed today And this is also where you can get in touch with our Edlio support team, which will also have a link to the help center. And then if needed you can get in touch with Edlio support by giving us a call or creating a new technical support case. So I want thank everyone for joining us today and please let us know if you have any questions in the chat.

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