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[Edlio Webinar] Broadcasts Overview

Added Jan 09, 2021 •

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Check out this short webinar highlighting Edlio's mass communication add-on feature, Broadcasts! We show you how this new tool allows Edlio Website admins to send out voice, text, and email alerts all from within your CMS. We also highlight Broadcasts' new translation feature!

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Alright, I think we are ready to get started. I wanted to thank all of you for being here today for this MyEdlio webinar. My name is Danny and I am a member of the Client Success team here at Edlio. We are also joined today by our Technical Support team, who can answer any questions that you may have throughout this webinar. If you do have any questions please do not hesitate to pop those in the chat box here and we will get those answered for you. We are super, super excited about today's webinar. We're going to be covering one of the newer additions to Edlio's family here and that is Broadcasts. I will 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. So let's get started. There are a lot of takeaways from 2020 as a whole, but one of the things that we noticed here at Edlio is that lot of schools who maybe weren't hip to this before I finally understood just how important it is to ensure that your school community has the most timely, up-to-date information. Your Edlio site is just one way your school or district can accomplish that. Today I want to focus on taking that to the next level by showing you how you can accomplish that with Broadcasts. Let's get into what Broadcasts can do for you. 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 school and the classroom. Broadcasts delivers messages to cell phones, landlines, and email addresses. While the primary message target is generally parents/guardians, anyone can be subscribe with a phone number or email address. Contact information comes from your existing contact lists within the CMS, so if you're using an SIS-- a student information system-- to manage your school contacts and you've already integrated that within your Edlio CMS then you're good to go. What delivery channels are available with Broadcasts? Broadcasts consolidates and builds on top of the 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. This means no jumping around between your site and some third-party platform to get these out. It all lives in the same place We have voice calls. We have SMS, also known as text messaging, and we also have email. I want to mention that these do not 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. You just want to focus on text messages, you can purchase a package with just text messages. If you are looking to save some money and cast as wide a net as possible when getting information out your school community your best bet is to bundle all three of these together. I also wanted to point out one of our newest features with Broadcasts, which is the ability your messages, so if you live in a multi-cultural/multilingual community where multiple languages are spoken at home, this could be an invaluable asset. I'll demonstrate how this works here just in a minute. So the first thing I want to show you is each kind of message you are able to send out with Broadcasts. We'll talk a little bit about those options and then jump over to the CMS here just to see how easy it is to send it out. Now the first one, our favorite, SMS text messages. Like all text messages, there is a character limit for sending out SMS messages with Broadcasts and that is about 256 characters, if using simple characters and 134 characters if using a any special characters that might require additional data to encode. Our user interface will show whether or not the message contains those special characters that causes the reduced character limit. You can see how many characters you have left in your message. So let's jump over here to the admin site and see what it looks like to send out a Broadcast. So the first thing I want to do here-- I can go over here, we just added this. Click Broadcasts here or you can go down here to Announce, Broadcasts. You can also get here by going to the hamburger drop down menu-- Announce, Broadcasts. So here we have every single Broadcast that we've ever sent out. We'll go more into this later. What we're actually going to do right now is select a new Broadcast and we're going to go ahead and give this Broadcast a name. Right here are all of our channels, with email text and voice. Right now, I'm just showing you how to send a text message, so we're going to go ahead and deselect these two and just leave text. Now we are at the compose message screen. We'll start here at the top-- our default language for all channels. This is going to be the default language you're using here to send that your message I'll show you why that's important in just a sec. So here in the message body we're going to go ahead and add our message. So right here, we have Rilo High School and it's kind of gives your recipients the opportunity to know where this is coming. It's completely up to you if you'd like to keep that there. We do always recommend keeping in this "Reply STOP to opt-out." We always want to be able to give recipients the opportunity to opt out of receiving these messages if need be, if they want to. We'll go ahead and add this here, "Welcome back. Cohort A meets in-person Monday and Wednesday. Cohort B meets in- person Tuesday and Friday. Everyone is virtual on Friday. What we're going to do now down here is add a translation. You can add three transations at any time. You can see here we have a list of languages. I'm going to go ahead and select a random language. Alright, so it's auto-translating down here. You can see it's working for me. This is what I wanted to show you here. So this is a long message and will use twice as many credits, so whenever you do add a translation, there is a really good chance it will use up more credits/more messages to send this out because of that translation, either due to special characters or just you know, more characers used within the translation, so we do have that here, so this one will use twice as many credits to send out this message and the translation. Now we are at the send screen. Remember, you can send these out to any of your contact list so if you've already integrated your Student Information System-- SIS-- you're good to go. If you have questions about SIS integration, please reach out your Client Success Specialist or Tech Support. You can select add contact lists or search under recipients, so I already know the name of the list I want to use. I'll be using this one right here. There is only one contact and again it's giving me that warning just letting me know, "Hey! Since you're using translation, this is a slightly longer message and we're going to use two credits on this one." We have the option to send now or send later. I'm going to send now. Look at that! Broadcast sen. Very, very cool! I want to go back and review what this message will look like to the recipient. I can click Broadcasts and you can see here that it is in progress, it should show sent in about 30 seconds or so. We'll go in here and review Broadcasts. This is what it's going to look like to the recipient. We have the reply stop to to opt-out here and even the translation right down here. Let's go back here and we'll go on to our next channel, which is Voice-- voice calls! With Broadcasts, voice calls 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 5 minutes on recorded messages but we advise keeping the length to under 2 minutes. Now let's see what it looks like sending one of those out. Again, we'll go over here to the admin site-- Announce >> Broadcasts. We'll go ahead and create a new broadcast. That one I just sent out here a minute ago has been succesfully sent. Select New Broadcast and again, this time we'll just be using our voice channel on here so we'll just select that one. We'll go ahead and give this Broadcast a name. Staring from the top here-- our default language for all channels is English. Again, remember that is mostly important for translation purposes so if we do add a translation, we know which language we are transferring from to whichever language you have selected for the translation. First we have the "Call me to record a voice message" option here. You enter your phone number. You'll get a call and be prompted to record your voice message to send out to your school community. You do have the option to review it before you decide to send it out to make sure your message is just right. So if it takes you a couple times to get that message just right. You got that option here with the recorded voice messaging. You can also use this text to speech feature here. Now we'll go ahead and add our message here so when the person receives this phone call, using this text-to-speech service, they will be read this message here. We're also going to add a translation. Remember, you can add up to three translations here. So we'll go ahead and add a couple here. Alright, we have our three translations. They're all working right now to translate. One thing I did want to highlight, which I did not before, so you click down here to see the translation itself. You can go in here and edit anything you would like. Let's say the translation isn't working exactly how you'd like it to or you like to alter it just a little bit you can come in here and actually do that yourself. If you're using translation, it will read out the messages and any translation back- to-back, so the first message will read in English, then Translation A, then Translation B, then Translation C and then we'll repeat the entire message again from the top. Again, we can add contact lists by searching for it here or searching for the one that we know we want to use-- that one right there. We can send now-- just like that. Fantastic! We'll come down here to our last channel and this is email. Broadcast allows users to send simple rich-text messages to recipients. 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 still very much available to use even if you have Broadcasts. Email Sender is geared towards newsletter-type content, whereas email broadcasts are meant for sending simple, direct urgent messages. You really want to use this to send out out pertinent, timely information. We're going to come back here to the admin site. We'll go up here-- remember you can get here by going to Announce > Broadcasts or by using the shortcut here-- Boradcasts. We'll select New Broadcast and go right to this screen here. So what I want to do right now is show you what it looks like to send out a Broadcast to all three channels at once-- email, text, and voice. We're going to keep all three of these checked here. We're going to give this broadcast a name, as we do every single time. Notating that we have all three channels. Okay, default language-- English We'll come here and you choose where your email will show that it's coming from. I'll show you how we can add an email here later on, so it can come from whoever you'd like for it to come from. We'll go ahead and select that this one is coming from me. [typing] [typing] [typing] Now we will go ahead and add that same text here. We'll add a translation in French. We will go ahead and add our text here so this is our text message. We have our French translation for email, French translation here for text, and now we will go ahead and send out our voice message as well, which also auto-populates with that French translation. Again, if you add any more here, like Spanish, it'll go ahead and automatically populate them here and here. Again, we'll enter the name of that list. Again this one here will be using more credits since we are adding those additional translations for the text message feature so this will send as several different text messages. We'll go ahead and send now and look at that! My Broadcast has been sent. In under 2 minutes I just sent out a text, an email, and a voice call to my entire school community in two different languages-- all from within my Edlio website CMS. While we're in the CMS, I want to take a moment to look at what a successfully sent Broadcast looks like. Now, you'll see here these two are just going out now-- the voice call here and this is the message with all three channels here. We'll go here just to see what these look like. Again, in Review Broadcast you can review what the broadcast looks like to the recipient. We'll come here to report. The main thing I really want to focus on here is actually this status down here where it says delivered. Let's say if a user unsubscribes or if they provide an invalid number, if their phone cannot receive text messages,  it will let you know here under "Status" if if they haven't received the text message and while we're still here, I want to go ahead and show you the settings side of Broadcasts. So, to do that we'll go to the hamburger drop down menu >> Site Management >> Settings and from there we're going to go to Broadcasts. Alright, now from the top here, we have all three channels that we currently have. This is our quota, which will show how many messages we have in our package, how many we've used so far, and how many we have remaining. Down here we have which channels will be selected by default. So when we went to go start our Broadcast before, you noticed all three channels were blue and checked off and that is because we had all three checked off here. Let's say you'll really only be using text messages. We can go ahead and de-select these, so when we get there, we'll auto-default to only text messages. Down here we have our default language, which is English, again this is for message translations. You only want to have that set to whatever your default language is that you'll be sending out these messages in. Here is where you can add other email addresses, so if you want to add any other email, this is where the the email broadcast will be sent from, so the one I just sent out was sent from daniel.benson@edlio.com so if you ever want to add a new email address to your broadcasts, this is where you can do that. Add their name, email address, and then once you add it here and select save up top, this person will go ahead and get an email with a verification code, they'll click that code and now that email can be used to send out Broadcasts. Alright, and I wanted to cover caller ID options next. Text messages are always sent from a pool of phone numbers. Carriers may block bulk text messages from one single phone number, so this ensures fast and reliable delivery of text messages. With voice messages, much like text messages, voice messages are initially sent from a pool of numbers by default. It's really easy to set up the caller ID so the calls are all coming from your school's phone number. You can do that right down here. You enter your number, you'll get a phone call with a short vacation process that includes a short numeric code that you'll have to enter to verify that it is, in fact, your school's number. Once you do that, you are good to go. You can start sending out voice messages with Broadcasts and again, it will show up as your school's number on the caller ID. We'll come back over here. We were just talking a little bit about why maybe a message might not have been received by a recipient, so we always need to give users the option to unsubscribe. Now, for email each broadcast message will contain a link in the footer to manage subscription 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 message when possible to remind recipients on how to opt out. And lastly, for voice, each Broadcast message will end with the 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. Alright and before we wrap up here, I did want to go over pricing briefly. Now, the needs for each school can vary wildly so for pricing, 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 your Broadcast message out. You can see how many message you have left. I think that'll just about wrap everything up today for us here. If you have any questions or concerns please reach out your Client Success Specialist. If you're not sure who that is, please reach out to clientsuccess@edlio.com and we'll point you in the right direction. I also highly recommend coming here to help.edlio.com. We have several different resources at your disposal including tips and tricks and help articles for any questions you may have related to website. We also have a ton of previously recorded webinars with a lot of useful information. In fact, there will be a copy of this webinar in the Help Center in the coming days, so if for any reason you need to go back and reference any specific information from this webinar today you can go and I do that right here. Again, I wanted to thank all of you for joining us today for this webinar. We'll be hanging around here for a couple more minutes so if you have any questions, please feel free to throw them in the chat and we will go ahead and get those answers for you. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. Please stay safe out there. Bye bye!

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