How the Send page totals are calculated
The final step of sending a message in Call Parents is the Send page. This allows you to review the amount of messages being sent to your selected people. The below guide will help explain how these totals are worked out.
Step-by-step guide
In this example we are sending an SMS message and an email to the whole school which is 997 people. In Call Parents, People are the students and staff members. Contacts are the parents/carers of the students.
1. The first panel shows the number of SMS messages, in this case 573, that will be sent and that you will be charged for. You may find that sometimes you are sending more messages than you have people selected. The reason for this is that you are either using Parental Responsibility or Priority 1 and 2 as your message setting or a contact has provided more than 1 number/email address. You can also see that out of the 997 people selected only 391 selected people (students/staff) will be sent a message to their contacts. This total deducts the selected people that have no contacts, contacts with no numbers and siblings.
2. The second panel shows the number of emails, in this case 382, that will be sent. The process of how this total is worked out is the same as the SMS messages.
3. The end panel gives you the number of selected people who will not be contacted and breaks this down into:
- The people who have no contacts
- The people that have a contact but no valid details i.e. no number or email address
So of the 997 selected people 378 of them have no contacts at all and 385 have a contact but no valid details. The best way to fix these issues is by finding out what message setting you are using in Call Parents and then checking your MIS system to make sure the contact for that person has the relevant priority setting. A list of who you need to check in your MIS can be found by clicking on the number link (in this case 574). This will open a new page and show you all of the selected people that will not be sent a message.
The final part of the summary shows you who is going to be contacted, in this case 406 people, and receive at least 1 message. It also shows the selected people who will not be contacted, in this case 23, as their contacts match another person who has also been selected i.e. a sibling. Note - If you use the student first name placeholder in any of your messages then it becomes a custom message and will send out to the same number/email for all siblings e.g. if one parent/carer has 3 students Billy, Sarah and Steven they will receive 3 SMS/email messages with each name present.
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