What this helps you do
Audiences group the adults you reach so a message goes to the people it concerns and nobody else. Every send goes to exactly one audience: there is no combining audiences, no excluding one and no rule that works out who fits. Two kinds do different jobs, and keeping them apart is the whole skill. An audience THE SCHOOL ASSIGNS is structure only your school knows: Lower School, Grade 5, Room 12, Bus Route 4, Varsity Soccer, the after-school programme. You create it by name and you put the right people in it. An OPEN INTEREST is something a parent or guardian chooses for themselves on their preferences page, and it appears in Blasts as an interest: Athletics News, Arts & Activities News, School Events, Volunteer Opportunities. On top of both sits All Parents & Guardians, which reaches everyone connected and cannot be deleted.
When to use it
Use an assigned audience whenever the message follows from a fact the school holds: a route running late, a classroom that moved, a grade's trip returning behind schedule, a practice cancelled for one team, a deadline that applies to one division. Use an open interest when the message is news somebody might want: the concert, the book fair, a call for chaperones, how the season is going.
How to do it
- Open Audiences. Onboarding has already seeded the four open interests and All Parents & Guardians; your own structure is not seeded, because only your school knows it.
- Create an audience per division, per grade, per classroom, per bus route and per team or activity, named the way families say it: Lower School, Grade 5, Room 12, Bus Route 4, Varsity Soccer, Jazz Band.
- Set How people join. Choose the school assigns for anything structural, so it is never offered to parents as an interest. Choose parents choose for a genuine interest. Choose either when both make sense.
- If you need a combination, create it: Grade 5 Soccer is its own audience, filled with the adults it concerns. A parent or guardian can be in as many audiences as apply to them.
- Inside audience is for keeping a long list tidy, one level deep, under an open audience. When you add people to the inner audience yourself, only people already in the outer one are accepted, but people can join audiences in other ways too, so treat every audience as its own list and send to the one you mean.
- Fill the assigned audiences yourself: open the audience and use Add people, or use Bulk assign from Parents & Guardians to place many people at once.
- Create Staff by hand and set it to the school assigns, so it stays a closed list. The same goes for the after-school programme roll, which is an enrolment fact your office holds, not something a parent should tick.
- Decide per audience whether replies are allowed. Leave replies on for anything a parent needs to ask about, such as a dismissal change or a volunteer call.
Example
The transportation office is told that Bus Route 4 will run the Elmgrove stops before Quarry Lane from next week. Someone in the office opens the Bus Route 4 audience, which they built in August from the route list the school keeps, and sends the new stop order to the eighty-odd adults in it. Grade 5's field trip returns late the same afternoon and goes to Grade 5. Neither message reaches anyone else, so families do not learn to skim school messages.
Good to know
- The Hub never works out who belongs. It receives no class list, route list or team sheet from any school system. Somebody at the school decides who belongs, by hand, with Bulk assign, or by naming an existing audience in an import or signup; or a parent chooses an interest.
- An adult with children in two grades belongs in both audiences and gets both sets of updates, as two separate sends. That is you putting them in two lists, not the Hub working anything out.
- Keep All Parents & Guardians for what genuinely concerns everyone, so a whole-school message stays rare enough that people still read it.
- There are no rule-based or dynamic audiences: nothing re-sorts itself when a term changes.
- At the end of the year, archive what you will rebuild. History is kept and the connections stay, so families roll forward with you and next year's grades start clean.
- Open interests are published to Blasts as interests a person can pick; audiences the school assigns are never published and never shown to parents.