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Contact Lists and How to Connect Them to your Website [Edlio Webinar]

Added Oct 20, 2021 •

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Check out this webinar highlighting Edlio's Contact Lists feature! Our Edlio expert will show you best practices for building out your Contact Lists and all of the different ways they can be used with your Edlio site!

Show Transcript

Today what we will talk about is a broad overview of contact list feature, we won't stop there because the beauty of this of our contact list stopped in and of itself but when used hand in hand with two other Edlio features These features you can use because you have your contact list organized and ready how to best practices for creating and managing your lists Today's webinar in a nutshell and a few basics of contact lists, these two features that I mentioned here first one is newsletters which was formerly known as email sender and the second is broadcast we will discuss both of those today so So there are lots of different ways that you can communicate using your contact lists it kind of helps to step back and think of should a brainstorm what are all of the possibilities for contact list and there really are endless possibilities here so but just you know real quick communication is everything but it shouldn't take you forever to do it every day every day we communicate with students, parents, board members, teachers but we've tried to do at Edlio is to create a form of communication that's easy and can go out to as widespread a community as possible so you might be thinking contact lists are only for administrative assistants or registrars but they are for anyone. For example an athletic director or coach could have contact lists for scheduled, tryouts, digital forms, you can have a specific contact list for your 8th grade graduation class including their parents with all the details you could will show you just a little bit how teachers can create their own contact list whether manual or for those who subscribed to their pages and classes They can send out messages or newsletters that include test prep details, grammar, writing prompts, links to videos to kind of strengthen that homeschool connection which we know all of the studies show that that results in learning retention and Librarians can create a newsletter showcasing all the new books that are featured that month, or talking about a new process for downloading an e-book. Principals this is a wonderful way to send out inspirational thoughts. I know parents say when they go to a new website they often look first for that Principal to see get to know that Principal a little bit so those student spotlights the Principal's can feature inspirational messages that are very helpful. Guidance counselors can create a newsletter or send out a message including some social emotional wellness tips which we know students definitely struggle with the way that the pandemic has resulted in education being sometimes at home and limited in social interaction so guidance counselors can also provide resources. School nurses can provide covid updates, drama and art teachers can highlight class activity so lots of different things that a contact list and do so before we look at this communication it can't just take one for everybody has different needs it takes different venues to get that person to have their light bulb moment where the message was received in the perfect way today we want to show you how our Edlio features were created with you and mind and your community that has different needs in mind as well so just clicking a few boxes pulling from already created news items in calendar event can result in complete received communication wrapped up with a bow ready to send ready to receive so the first feature that will talk about today is the newsletter future as I mentioned built in mass email tool with created with busy school staff members in mind. We'll talk about this today the best part is that it's easy but the best part is that it points people back to your website to dig deeper into all the beautiful things that you have to offer the second is the broadcast feature which is an add-on feature if you have any questions about how to make that work on your site reach out to your client success specialist and for example you have a message that you would like to send out step one you select your channel you could send an email, text, and voice all three channels or you can choose one or two, compose your message which would automatically translate into the languages that you check the boxes and finally choose your recipients and this is where I contact list gets to shine and we'll talk a little bit about the SIS integration piece as well So as we jump into the platform today please remember to ask any questions that you might have so let's start with the how to in the best practices for creating and managing contact list you can create contact lists in multiple ways it solves your problems because part of your community will no longer slip through the cracks everyone will be able to be kept in the loop so as you're watching today it might help you to jot down some notes make a list of who or what maybe special population of your community is kept in the dark maybe it's a certain language group maybe it's a group of people who might not have access to a computer who might use only text messaging on their phones it might be people who aren't going to be as likely to go to your website but may benefit from having that newsletter sent to their email so that they can click read more and be automatically over and over again directed to your website so jot down some of those populations that would be included so you know some contact list our whole school, all contacts, you might focus it on one grade level and just real quick I want to show you today were going to focus on 8th grade graduation just as an example to wrap our minds around that 8th grade graduation you would like to get a volunteer maybe a group of volunteer parents to come chaperone for the 8th grade graduation dance on You could create a widget your homepage. that whenever people come to your homepage they can enter their contact information into the widget that would feed into a contact list. I'm going to show you how to do this quick example following along you're welcome to join us your hamburger menu you can scroll down to announce and down to contact lists that's where you can find the contact list feature so let's go there together real quick before we create our widgets The form widget which I'm going to show you is great because you don't have to have a contact list already created you can create one while you're placing the widget but today for this example we're just going to create a new list to practice first thing I do when I get to see we have different types of contact list which we'll go over in just a moment we're going to create a new list we're going to name this list 8th grade chaperone Let's call it chaperones and we're going to add this new list so right now this list is empty and we have different methods for adding contacts into that list so I'll jump ahead real quick you can add them in a single contact you know if that's more your style some people prefer to add them in bulk and I'll show you how you would do that so you can click "add in bulk" you would then download the CSV template which would then show up wherever you have your download set ton appear your whether to desktop or download folder like putting my on my desktop so that I can find them easily you know there's a couple different ways of doing this you can open your CSV template via Google Sheets or Excel I use Google Sheets this is something that's a preference for me you can open that up and then you would copy and paste maybe you have another spreadsheet where you have your 8th grade parents and you can copy and paste those fields to meet the purposes of the CSV once you finished it you going to come back to this page I have one finished you're going to click "add in bulk" again and this time you're going to drag the completed spreadsheet right over into this box and it gives you a little message that duplicates will be removed and let's just click add contacts so now we had an empty contact list and now we're about to fill it up with a few parents here so we now have three parents it's not completely realistic because most contact list would have several items in it but now I want to show you how to connect a form widget to contact lists so let's go back to our dashboard again is click on your name up here and this time I'm going to use my hamburger menu to go to page management > home page widgets I really like this widget feature it's a great way of highlighting or featuring something when people go to your website so that they really can't miss it they don't have to dig for it we're going to drag the form widget here I always tell my clients takes a few times adjusting to find that perfect spot where you wanted to go we're going to change your title to "Want to chaperone the 8th grade dance?" Kind of a call to action and you know you can also put the date with whatever date that would be for this one we're just going to choose first name last name and email because we know some people don't like to give a phone number at this point where you need to connect it together with a contact list so so let's select contact list and that means you can either type the name of the existing list and search for which I love this part you get to create your own list right here so for this one we're just going to type 8th grade because we have a couple different list we're going to choose 8th grade chaperones select list and now we get to choose from these new features here what we want the widget look like this I'm going to choose this one here I want it to move with the page or do I want it to stick to the window so I'm going to choose stick to the window because I like that people can't lose it that way when they scroll Click save changes and now we go back to our homepage and we're going to refresh a few times and wait for it to pop up here we go so now when a parent comes to your website and has an opportunity to chaperone I'm sure the child might not be thrilled with that kind having their parent at the dance but and I'm going to show you once you fill this out that the information goes directly into your contact list click subscribe when we to go back to our contact list feature announce > contact lists, or you can access it through your dashboard we find the list which now has four items in it and now Misty Rosenberg is a parent that can chaperone the dance if I want there's a couple options for things that I can do here once I've selected these I want to backtrack just a tiny bit and talk about the different types of contact list here so you might have noticed already my pages for loading a little bit in this column right here you have list type what the differences between the one you find you one that's personal you might have seen me a lot of list on this page but probably need cleaning. Personal page whenever you see personal page this means that someone has subscribed to Teresa Lee's page Somebody went to her teacher page and they maybe have a student and you know in one of her classes and they click subscribe so now they're part of her personal page contact list another one that you might see is a class so that means somebody has gone to Daniel Benson's English 2 page and subscribe to his class so he can then send out communication specifically to that class and the third one is custom and this is the one that you saw me create custom means these are the lists that you created specifically for a reason to draw in a group of contacts and possibly students who have been recommended to go to summer school can be placed in a list together, all 8th graders, as an example as a teacher create a Tuesday / Thursday tutorial contact list that means I can send out a newsletter a quick little email newsletter which we will practice in a second out to my students that are only in that tutorial Stepping back here we've already talked about how to create a contact list let's talk about the things that you can do with that contact list so I'm going to step back and as I mentioned there were two key features that you can use with your Edlio CMS: broadcast and newsletters. We're going to start with newsletters so if you're following along feel free to click the newsletters feature as I mentioned it was previously known as email sender and the reason I love email sender what we now call newsletters is because it create something beautiful but also to send people back to your website every time they click read more they go back to your website so let's open this newsletter I just want to show you how easy it is to create a newsletter, let me know you the layouts you start from scratch your given a wide variety of templates depending on what type of information you want to put into that newsletter I would have to say these are very popular using events and news or only news because of the way that you can just check a box auto-populate those items that you previously created into this newsletter but of course a lot of people like to just start from scratch and have boxes set up a certain way to add photos, captions, and messages beneath them so step back to the one that I already created using the first layout where you can pull events and news item into the newsletter so the first thing I did I started with my top left corner I added some text I changed it to a header I decided if I wanted to center it in the side you can hyperlink to something, you can change the color as soon as I click into another box the content will change here and I'm just going to delete these for you so I can show you how easy and fun it is to add events to your newsletter. I'm going to click add events and now I have a special calendar created just for my 8th graders so I'm going to select that specific calendar here and I'm going to select these four events that I want to feature here, we've got an 8th grade guidance counselors event coming up and we have three sessions that help the 8th graders choose the Core Curriculum that they're going to be a part of The I will click add 4 events then we go over to add news and I would just select and again I'll delete these so that you can see how fun it is so here we have our 3 news items or four, how many ever you'd like to put in there, and then click add 4 stories So then we've got basically the constant of your newsletter I have a little blurb here just introducing the newsletter to my parents helping them transition their children very smoothly over to high school so before we send we always like to preview what it's going to look like so when you click preview newsletter you get to see exactly what it's going to look like here. So we have our heading we have our events pulled right here and our news items and then our little message right here for parents to know exactly what this newsletter will be. And super cool whenever for example if they want to read about the fall student fair they don't need to be scrolling and scrolling on their device they click read more, they're taken straight to your website which is the end goal and here they get to read about the fall student organization fair Same thing with the events they can even choose to place this on their calendar once they read it so for example you know they know their child needs to go to this meeting they click read more they're taken to this event they get to see the photo, they can copy this to their calendar and go back to the events list to see the other details so definitely we've created this to be something that's that's geared towards you excuse me, I clicked the wrong tab here So when we go back to our dashboard let's talk about how to send a broadcast I didn't mention with the newsletters for the last step of that is to connect with newsletter the contact list of your choice after you've added the content so but because of time I'm just going to jump in quickly to broadcast So remember, broadcast is an add-on feature and you can talk with your client success specialist. It let's you send out messages in easy three-step process so let's click Broadcast. You might not have access so just follow along on the screen if you don't I just want to send a message out to my eighth grade parents about a graduation meeting so I would click new broadcast I would have my name ready to paste here where it says broadcast name I decide how I want to send it out I click Send you would probably send it from an email address that's of your of your school so that people will know who it's from but I'm just going to choosing user on this one here you would put your subject so here were working on the email part and you would have your message whatever your message you want your message to me if you want to translation here's a great place for you to pop it in so we're going to choose Spanish, Chinese Mandarin and that's it, let's just choose two for this one now we're moving on to the text message part which occassionally will have to be truncated to be a little bit shorter so we might have to delete something we're just going to delete some information here and we've got our translations that auto-pulled from the previous one now we would like to send the message using text-to-speech and they will also choose from those same translations when we click continue this is where you can connect it to a contact list so we want to connect it to our eighth-grade parents contact list that we've already created I'm going to click add and as soon as we send that message they will receive an email, a text message, and a voice call so that's the beauty of broadcast today for you to see. The last piece I want to talk about here is the integration piece so The integration piece is truly one of the most beautiful things about Edlio's CMS platform and how we build your trust because we don't want you to racing around looking for things and other platforms paying monthly fees, annual fees somewhere else because everything that you need is already in the Edlio CMS. So you can integrate using Edlio's features for example the news feature, the form widget as I showed you just a minute ago you can people can subscribe to teacher and class pages which integrates their information to whatever you're doing and we also have a couple of SIS integration pieces here where you can integrate with your SIS using either custom data importer that you can have set up to sync your information nightly. Also Edlio has an SIS API integration with and you can see the names of these SIS integrations here: Aeries, Illuminate, Skyward, and PowerSchool These are available with the broadcast add-on and data can flow one way into your contact list in the Edlio platform syncing nightly we hope that we've given you a very kind of, I know this was kind of rushed in a nutshell, but the way that the contact list can streamline and save you time while you're also keeping your community in the loop from the smallest levels the smallest classrooms to the schools as whole types of messages so we have those contact list which include everyone thank you for joining us and have a wonderful rest of the day

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