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[Edlio Webinar] Broadcasts Messaging

Added Jul 28, 2020 •

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Enjoy this webinar highlighting the Broadcasts add-on feature! We show you how this new tool allows Edlio Website admins to send out voice, text and email alerts with this mass communication add-on.

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So let's get started. I wanted to thank you all for being here today for this My Edlio Webinar. My name is Danny and I am a member of the Client Success Team here at Edlio. I am joined today by member of our Technical Support Team and all-around great guy, Juan Alvarado. If at any point during this webinar you have questions, please don't hesitate to pop those in the chat box here and Juan will get those answered for you. We are real excited about today's webinar. We are going to be talking about Edlio's newest add-on feature, Broadcasts. We'll show you how this new tool allows Edlio Website Admins to send out voice, text, and email alerts all from within your Edlio Admin site. Let's get started. Alright, so here at Edlio our mission is to make the lives of educators easier through approachable and powerful technology. We focus exclusively on K-12 communities. We power over 15,000 schools and districts across the country and across the world. That is a lot. Edlio already prides itself on being on the cutting edge of mass communication with your school community. We already have Edlio Engage, pictured here, an easy-to-use, all-in-one private social network for your school community with a focus on family engagement which we all know is so critical to increasing student learning outcomes. With Engage, you have the ability to send out urgent alerts within the platform that can go out to parents as an app alert, text, or a phone call alert. If you'd like more info on Edlio Engage, I highly recommend reaching out to your Client Success Specialist. Again, I am on the Client Success Team here. Now we also have a couple pre-recorded webinars in our Help Center focused entirely on Edlio Engage if you'd like more information there. Let's get to what we're talking about today, which is Broadcasts. Now, with the changing state of the world, I think we all know how important it is to ensure that our school community has the most timely, up-to-date information. Today, I want to focus on how you can accomplish disseminating that information with Broadcasts. What is Broadcasts? Broadcasts is a multi-channel message delivery platform. Districts and schools can quickly reach out to parents and other members of your school community about news and events in and around the school and the classroom. Broadcasts delivers messages to cell phones, landlines, email addresses. Now, while the primary message target is parent/guardians, anyone can be subscribed with a phone number or email address. Contact information comes from your existing contact lists within your Edlio CMS. So if you're using an SIS-- Student Information System-- to manage your contacts and you've already integrated that into your Edlio CMS, then you are good to go. What delivery channels are available with Broadcasts? Broadcasts consolidates and builds on top of existing technologies that the Edlio CMS already has in order to deliver messages. Meaning, again, you can do all of this from the comfort of your Edlio admin site. Now we have voice calls, SMS-- or text messaging-- and email. One of the first things I want to mention is that these don't have to be purchased all together. Let's say you really want to focus on just getting voice calls out there, you can purchase a package with just voice calls. Let's say you like the idea of voice calls + text but you want to hold off on email Broadcasts for now-- you really like our Email Sender feature-- you can just bundle Voice and Text together. It's important to remember that with these, bundling in whatever fashion you'd like, y'know, the more you bundle, the more you save. It's something to keep in mind if you are interested in implementing Broadcasts at any point. Let's talk about the first one here. We'll talk about Text-- or SMS. I just want to go through all of these with you here-- text, voice, email. We'll talk a little bit about these options then we can jump over to the Edlio CMS to see how easy it is to do this. SMS-- we'll start with that. Just like regular text messages, there is a character limit for sending out SMS messages with Broadcasts and that is 300 characters if using simple characters and 134 characters if using any sort of special characters that would require data to encode. Now the UI will show whether or not the message contains the special characters that cause the reduced character limit. Let's go on over here to the admin site Alright, now I'll show you, if you do have Broadcasts-- again, it is an add-on feature. Reach out to our Client Success Team here and they'll give you pricing on that. If you do have it, you can get to it here. Hamburger Drop Down Menu > Announce > Broadcasts. Easy enough. So this is what you'll see-- these are all the completed Broadcasts that have been sent out here. We'll touch on this a little bit more later. Right now I want to show you how to send out a Broadcast. We'll click "New Broadcast" in the upper right here. So right down here you have your email, your text, and your voice. Right now we have it auto-selected to Voice but I want to send out a text. If you do want to send out all three at once, if you have all three, you can do that, but right now we're just going to send out a text. We'll name it here. [typing] A lot of school communities are asking questions about school reopening plans for the fall so we'll start with that and now we have the actual body-- the message-- what parents are going to see when they get this message. Right now, just a standard message. "Please visit, edlio.com to see our school's plan for reopening in the fall." Let's just say Edlio.com is a school's website. So this will direct parents to your Edlio site to see your plans-- whatever they are in the Fall. We'll click that. This is where you're going to select your contact list. Whatever school community members you want to send this out to, this is where you are going to do that-- Add Contact Lists. We'll add this Parents list right here. So we have them added here as the recipients. The Broadcast will be sent to this contact. There is only one contact in this contact list-- normally there will be hundreds or thousands depending on your school community. It'll show you here that we're just sending out the one message to one recipient. Right down here it'll show you how many messages you have left in your plan so right now we have quite a bit here-- 44,000 looks like-- and then down here we have the option to either send now or we can plan to send this out later if we like. Let's just say we'll send this out now. It's pretty simple to get one of these out. So I'm going to come back here and we'll go on to the next part-- Voice Calls. Now Voice Messages in Broadcast Messages can be sent two different ways-- either as a pre-recorded message or as a message generated using text-to-speech services. We impose a hard limit of five minutes on recorded messages but we usually advise schools to keep the length to under two minutes. We'll come back over here just like we did before. Actually, I just want to show you this. This is what it looks like when you actually send a message. We'll actually get into delivery reports in a little bit but as we can see here, it was successfully sent out. I want to get back now and show you how we send out this voice message and what that looks like. Starting here, Hamburger Drop Down Menu > Announce > Broadcasts. The one we just sent out is in progress. We're going to send out a new Broadcast-- this time, a voice message, which has already been set up here to do the same thing as before. [typing] School Reopening Plans. This is where I can choose what I want to do here so I can either select here-- call me to record a voice message and this will go ahead, I put my phone number here, it'll call me here and I'll be prompted to record that voice message--- whatever text I'd like. I can go back and listen to it then. If I don't like it, I can change it or I can send it through here where I can type whatever I want to send and the text-to-speech service will go ahead and read this out for me. It'll be read in that robot-y sounding voice that'll be used for the call. That is one easy way to go ahead and get that message out. Again, you'll want to add your contact list. It'll tell you here how many voice calls you have left. In this case we have 9,950. Same thing as before, you want to send right there. Boom bam- you're good to go. We'll go back here to talk about our last element which is email. Now, Broadcasts allows users to send simple rich-text messages to recipients. Now, some of you might be wondering if this will replace your Edlio Email Sender and I just want to tell you that the free Email Sender is very much still available to user, even if you have Broadcasts. Email Sender is geared more towards newsletter-type content, there's usually more graphics, etc. In this case with Email Broadcasts, we're thinking these are meant for sending simple messages that are largely equivalent to the other channels we've seen here. You really want to use this to get out important, pertinent, timely information. That's how these should be used. Again, we'll jump back. We'll go from here this time. We'll go to Announce > Broadcasts. Simple enough. This time we're just going to select Email instead of Voice. [typing] [typing] School Reopening Plans And so here you can choose which email you'd like to send this from. I'll show you how we add these here in a little bit. These are confirmed emails. We'll use that same message. [typing] School Reopening Plans. This is who the email is going to be coming from We have the subject and the body. Same thing as before-- we want to select the contact list. We have 48,00 emails left there and we'll go ahead and send this one. Same screen as we saw before. That Broadcast was sent! Here we have all of our previously sent Broadcasts-- this what we were looking at before. We can look at this and what a successfully sent Broadcast looks like. You'll notice the green check here. This means that was sent. Now we're going to come over here and click on these three dots. This is the one we just sent out a minute or two ago. We'll click on those three dots. We can take a look here at the content of it. We saw that message before. That was the one that was sent out as a text. We'll go back here and click on these three dots again. The next thing we can do is look here at the Delivery Report. We're going to click Report and from here you can check the status of the message. Here we can see that it was delivered right there and it'll also show, for whatever reason, if it wasn't delivered. You're sending this to hundreds if not thousands of people. You can go through here and it'll show whether or not it was delivered. Let's say for some reason, it wasn't delivered. There's a few different reasons why that could have happened. The person could have unsubscribed, and we'll go more into that in a little bit. The person might have provided an invalid number. Sometimes a phone cannot receive text messages. These are just a couple of things you might see here under "status" as to why somebody didn't receive that message. I want to go back here while we're in the CMS. I want to show you the setting sides Broadcasts as well. Let's go home. Now, to get there you're going to go to Hamburger Drop Down Menu > Site Management > Settings. We have all these options here. We're going to go to Broadcasts. As an Admin, you won't see everything I'm seeing here. I just want to highlight a couple of important things that you will see. First off, your Broadcast usage. You can look at these here and see how many you have used and how many you have left. Come down here and you can see which channels you would like auto-selected. Before when we went in we saw that Voice was the only one that was auto-selected. We can see here that it was checked off. Email was not checked off. We'll check that off now and then text message as well. Whenever we go in there now, all three will be auto-selected. Now we come down here to our email addresses. Down here you can add or remove email addresses from which you would like an Email Broadcast to come from. All you have to do is add the email here. You will be sent a verification prompt to that email address, click on it, and that email address will now be verified and able to be used to send Email Broadcasts. Down here we have Caller ID. A quick thing to note about text messages. Text messages are always sent from a pool of phone numbers. Carriers may block text messages from a single this ensures fast and reliable delivery of text messages. So what this means is when a text is sent out to your school community, it's not going to be a thousand messages sent out from one single number. We have the same pool of phone numbers that we'll use to send out that message, so not everybody might receive that message from the same phone number. When we get down here to Voice Messages, much like the Text Messages, Voice Messages are initially sent from a pool of numbers by default. If you would like the phone call to be coming from your specific school number, you can set up Caller ID right here. You'll get a phone call with a short verification process and a short numeric code you'll have to enter to verify that school number is in fact your number and  boom-- you are good to go. Pretty easy. Let's pop back over here. I just want to talk about a couple more things. Unsubscribe-- how do users opt out of Broadcasts? While want school community members to be up-to-date, we also want to give them the option to unsubscribe if needed. For email, each Broadcast message will contain a link in the footer of the email to manage subscriptions preferences. Recipients can use the link to unsubscribe from Broadcasts. For Texts, recipients can always reply to a Broadcast message with STOP to automatically unsubscribe. This will unsubscribe them from all text messages sent by Edlio. Schools are encouraged to include instructions on how to opt out in the Broadcast messaging when possible to remind recipients of how to opt out. For Voice, each Broadcast Message will end with a message-- "To stop receiving messages like these press the pound sign to opt-out." This allows the recipient to opt out of all Broadcast messages from the school. Pricing-- I want to get into that real quick. The needs for each school can vary wildly, so for pricing, definitely reach out to your Client Success Specialist. Broadcast Messages are sold in chunks, starting at 25,000 messages and each individual that receives a message counts towards your overall usage. Remember, you can always check your remaining messages by going to settings or in the send screen right before you send out your Broadcast messaging. It'll tell you right there-- boom-- this is how many messages you have left. I think that's pretty much going to wrap up everything here for us today. If you do have any questions or concerns please reach out to Tech Support or your Client Success Specialist. If you're not sure who that is, please email clientsuccess@edlio.com and we'll be happy to point you in the right direction. I also highly recommend coming here to help.edlio.com, our Help Center. We have several different resources at your disposal including tips and tricks and help articles for any questions you might have related to your website. It's pretty fantastic. We also have a ton of previously recorded webinars just like this one today and this one will be uploaded to the Help Center in the near future. Our webinars have a lot of useful information. Again, this one will be uploaded, so if for any reason you need to go back and reference this, you'll be able to do so. I definitely encourage you to go check that out. There's tons and tons of great information there. Lastly I just want to thank you all for joining us today for this webinar. We'll be hanging around here for a couple more minutes. If you have any questions, throw them in chat box and Juan will get those answered for you. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day and please stay safe out there. Bye bye!

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