What this helps you do
Audiences group your families and staff so a message reaches the people it concerns. You always have one All Families audience that reaches every connected parent, guardian and staff member and cannot be deleted. Onboarding seeds a small set of starter audiences you can rename, archive or replace: Athletics, Activities & Clubs, School Events, Volunteers, After-School & Childcare and Staff. On top of those you build the audiences your school actually runs on: grades, classrooms, campuses, bus routes, teams and clubs. Open audiences appear as choices on each family's preferences page; closed ones such as Staff are yours to assign and are never shown to families.
When to use it
Use audiences whenever a message concerns one part of the school: a field trip returning late for one grade, a classroom change, a bus route running behind, a practice cancelled for one team, a rehearsal moved for the drama club, a chaperone call for volunteers, a deadline that only applies to one campus, or a staff notice that should stay with staff.
How to do it
- Open Audiences.
- Create an audience per grade, per campus, per bus route and per team or club, named the way families say it: Third Grade, Kindergarten, Bus Route 7, North Campus, Varsity Soccer, Jazz Band.
- Choose how people join each one: families choose it themselves, the school assigns them, or either. Set Staff to school assigns.
- To nest a classroom or a team inside a grade, set Inside audience to the parent, for example Room 12 inside Third Grade. A child audience only accepts people who are in the parent.
- Let families pick their grades and activities on the preferences page, and use Bulk assign from Connections for staff and for the lists the office keeps.
- Decide per audience whether replies to its Blasts are allowed. Leave replies on for anything a family needs to ask about, such as a dismissal change or a volunteer call.
Example
The third-grade field trip hits traffic and will be back at 4:15 instead of 3:00. The office sends the new arrival time and the pickup door to the Third Grade audience only. The other grades, dismissing normally, never see it, so families do not learn to skim school messages.
Good to know
- A family with students in two grades joins both audiences and gets both sets of updates.
- Sending to All Families asks for a step-up confirmation first, which keeps the whole-school send rare enough that families still read it.
- Audiences are lists that families choose or you assign. There are no rule-based or dynamic audiences, so a contact export does not fill a grade audience by itself; import it, then Bulk assign, or let families choose.
- At the end of the year, archive the audiences you no longer need and rebuild the grades; the connections stay, so families roll forward with you.