Enhance your school notification system

Seamlessly manage Voice, SMS & Email campaigns

Ensure your school notification system
can initiate and track time critical notifications

Capacity | Redundancy | Capability

Regular school communications are an invaluable way to engage and inform parents on everything school related. Thankfully the days of crumpled letters being handed over at the school gate (and lost) are long gone. In their place is a choice of sophisticated, multi channel school notification systems to help manage every requirement and opportunity to engage with parents – from the weekly school meal order to critical emergency alerts.

Alerting Hub, with its unique campaign or event-centric approach, has wrapped all the essentials into a flexible, programmable platform – we make it easy to send, track and collate SMS, voice and email messages through your school notification system.

The growing importance of
school notification systems

There are an ever-increasing number of children attending school. As of Jan 2020 the figure stood at 8.89 million pupils in England in 2020, attending over 24,000 schools. With the many pressures placed on schools the ability to effectively communicate with parents is critical. Improved parental engagement is not only beneficial to a child’s learning journey but can also have a positive financial impact for the school – payments made easily and on time. Crucially at times of emergency, school’s have the ability to send alerts, through a variety of channels to ensure the message is received and acted upon. Thankfully we live in a world where over 95% of adults between 25 and 54 have a mobile phone, making a wide range on communications possible

How notifications are used in schools

Sent by voice, text and email there are a number of practical ways to use a school notification system – it’s not just about snowdays!

School closing and delay notifications
Automated attendance notifications
Automated lunch alerts & lunch menus
Parent programming
Discipline concerns

Budget Hearings for School District
Late bus pick-up/drop-off
Overdue library books
Field trip reminders
Standardised test schedules

Early release reminders
Academic advising appointments
Reminders of tryout dates/times
Grade reports
College application deadlines

The challenge of
delivering school
notification systems

A school may want to send a message to one parent, one tutor group, one year group, the entire school. Some notifications are urgent (emergency situation), others are for general information and not so time critical. Some notifications are routine, repetitive, whilst others need to be sent adhoc. And finally a school will want to know the responses – which parents/careers got the message? Who responded? Who needs chasing?

In short a wide variety of bulk notifications, related to specific school campaigns, sent through various channels (or a combination) at scheduled or adhoc times – a lot for any school notification system to be able to support.

All the messaging
essentials covered

Enabling schools to communicate directly with their audience according to preference — whether via text message, phone call, or email— helps a school ensure targeted outreach. However schools should look to reserve certain channels for emergency use only, to avoid dismissal. Alerting Hub supports all these modes of communication. Through the SendAlert API you can seamlessly send out SMS, text and email alerts and announcements, through you school notification system.

Easy tracking, monitoring & reporting of results

Sending out notifications, be it to parents, students, staff, is only part of the story. A means to an end. Most important is generating the desired outcome. As a result of texts, phone calls or emails being sent, the school must be confident that the school community is safe, happy, informed, and learning.

This confidence can only be delivered if there is adequate monitoring in place. If an SMS failed to get through will the system track this and send via an alternative method? If a message has been received but ignored can the system administrator see these and send follow-ups? Is it easy to track and monitor the results associated with a particular school campaign – given that multiple messages, about multiple topics will be sent out any given week?

Alerting Hub’s return path makes all this possible providing an important value add to any school notification platform.

Sending out notifications through a number
of channels

Mass Text Messaging

Deliver short, simple messages straight to a parent’s phone – with links for further info or to complete tasks.

Voice broadcasts

The most intrusive way to get a critical message delivered, heard and acted upon – with the ability to engage in real-time 2-way dialogue.

Sending bulk Email

A popular preference for parents, email is an easy way for schools to communicate – unobtrusive and ready to be opened when convenient.

Powerful combination

Send notifications through a combination of channels to ensure the message gets through.

Everything you need
wrapped up & available out-of-the-box

Return path
Easily track and monitor results associated with a particular campaign, regardless of channel – SMS, Voice and Email
Redundancy
Multiple servers in multiple locations
High capacity
Full scalability in the cloud. As the demands of your application increase the Alerting Hub platform will automatically scale up to match

Sender ID
Instil confidence in respondents that the message being received is genuine and deserves attention.
Embedded URLs
Include links to event specific landing pages, where recipients can gain further information and guidance.
Text-to-Speech
Enable the same message to be sent as a text or played within a voice call using text-to-speech

Full capability

Get in touch

Tell us what you need from a mass notification platform.

Enhance your school notification system

Ensure your school notification systemcan initiate and track time critical notifications

The growing importance ofschool notification systems

How notifications are used in schools

The challenge ofdelivering schoolnotification systems

All the messaging essentials covered