School Messenger Basics for WELS Schools

WELS PowerSchool (PS) is now using School Messenger (SM) for connecting with students, staff, and parents. There are several things to keep in mind that are somewhat different from our previous SwiftK12 product. SM relies on the data (email and phone numbers) found in student contacts, so making sure that you don't have duplicate contacts is important. You can reference our help article on contact consolidation for more information. There is also a detailed online manual for SM, however, since SM works with multiple student information systems (SIS), it isn't written in a way specific to PS or to our specific installation. That's where this article comes in. It will be used to document things specific to our implementation of SM.

PS will export student, staff, and guardian information nightly to SM. This means that when you make changes in PS to a student, staff, or guardian's contact information, it won't be immediately available in SM. You'll need to verify that information the following day. In order for a contact's email or phone number to be included in the nightly export, the Custody or Lives With checkbox needs to be checked. Both may be checked as well. Check your staff demographics pages to ensure that your teachers have an email address and phone number entered, or they will not receive any messages. This is also a good place to remind users that the teacher number needs to be unique. See the How To Add New Staff article for more information.

The SMS text feature will require the person to opt-in to receiving texts from SM. Here is flyer that can be shared with users so that they can opt-in. Users just need to scan the QR code and opt-in. There is one "issue" that could arise with your contacts when they are opting in, but still not getting the text messages. This is because some carriers (T-Mobile being one) do not enable texting to and from short-codes sometimes by default. A contact would know that this could be an issue for them when they text the 67587 short-code to opt in and do not receive the confirmation text letting them know that they have opted in for SMS messages from SchoolMessenger (the message is a default, and won't contain specific school/district info), or when they send the Y or Yes to 67587, and they receive a Network error. They may need to reach out to their carrier and just let them know that they need to be able to send and receive from short-codes. Once the carrier adjusts their account, they will be able to opt in and receive texts from our district with no problem.

The SM product is really two separate components, Message Sender (MS) and School Messenger (SM), both found in the Start Page > Applications menu. Most broadcasts should be done with Message Sender. The process is much like SwiftK12 was. First, make a selection within PS, then go to Start Page > Applications > Message Sender. Enter a descriptive subject and type of message. In the recipient list, you can change the targets to Contacts, Associated Guardians, or Both. It will default to both. In this context, contacts refers to the students you selected, not their contacts. Associated guardians refers to their contacts that have custody or lives with checked. Select both if you want the message to go to everyone. If you wanted to add all staff members, for example, you would choose Custom Rules from the Add Message Recipients drop-down, then select Contact Type from the Select a field drop-down, then Is in, and check the box for Staff. When you click Add, all staff that the user has permissions to view will be added. When you have added all the rules you need to, just click the Add Recipients green box in the lower right corner of the screen to add the additional recipients.

This is where custom lists come in to play. Users can create custom lists for common groupings. Go to the Start Page > Applications > School Messenger and then click on the Broadcasts tab and Lists. Click on Add New List. For this example, we are going to create a list to send to all students, staff, and guardians.

1. Enter the name as YourSchoolName Students, Staff, and Guardians.
2. Add the description as Send to everyone at YourSchoolName.
3. Add the list rule by selecting the field Contact Type, and then is, and check the Staff and Student boxes.
4. Make sure target recipients is set to Both to include the guardians.
5. Click Done.

This custom list will now be available to you in PS when you click on MS. You won't need to make a selection first. Just go to Start Page > Applications > Message Sender and in the add message recipients drop-down menu choose saved recipient lists and then select the list you created above.

The next screen allows you to select the type of message to send (phone, email, SMS, or posts to social media). You may select any combination of these. Phone messages may be recorded or may be text to voice. A quirk that isn't obvious is that the Translate box needs to be checked in order to go to the next screen. Once checked, you may uncheck the Spanish box if you don't need that. This applies to all message types. Email is pretty straightforward except for the From field. This field needs to be broadcasts@schoolmessengermail.com. You may put whatever address you'd like in the reply-to field. Email stationery may be created within the SM portal and could then be used here as well for school newsletters, etc.  SMS is just SMS, so the 160 character limit is enforced. You may choose to connect to Facebook or other social media feeds as well, but those will need to be setup individually. The message can then be reviewed and sent.

There are several functions in the SM portal for viewing reports and opt-in status of phone numbers. Go to Start Page > Applications > School Messenger and then click on the reports tab. To check the status of parent's opt-in, select SMS Status and then enter their number. There currently is no way to check the status of all the contacts at just your school. This tool will, however, allow you to troubleshoot when a parent notifies you that they aren't receiving the texts from school. The reports page also allows you to check the history of the messages you sent.

You can also use this portal to check if a contact in PS is indeed in SM. Click on System and then Contacts and then search by person and enter their last name. You can then click on the phone, email, sms link under destinations to see what data the system has for that contact. Another confusing thing is the word pending under Consent for phone and nothing for SMS, even though the opt-in has been completed. We do not require consent to send voice message, so it is OK that it just says pending there. It is also OK that nothing shows under consent for SMS. We are unsure if this is a bug or not. Remember to check SMS opt-in status by using the SM Portal > Reports > SMS Status page.