What this helps you do
Blasts gives your school a direct channel to the adults it serves, with their consent. Nobody has to install anything to begin: import the opted-in parent and guardian contacts your school keeps, or post a signup from your enrolment form, and those adults become email subscribers, receiving your messages by email. Anyone who already uses Blasts, or who installs it later, can connect with your school, and from then on their messages arrive on their phone or desktop screen instead of an inbox. The Hub moves that person from email to Blasts on its own when they connect with the same email address. Each adult connects as themselves, so a household with two guardians is two people.
When to use it
Enrolment and back-to-school are the moments. Put the invitation in the enrolment packet, the registration confirmation, the back-to-school letter and the first-day folder, and repeat it each year for new families. A second push at open house or curriculum night catches the rest.
How to do it
- Open Parents & Guardians and click Sync connections once so your enrolment code is published.
- For the fastest start, upload the CSV export of the parent and guardian contacts your school already keeps and confirm that everyone on it agreed to hear from the school. Those adults become email subscribers and hear from you by email the first day you send. Adding addresses by hand, one at a time or with Add many at once, sends invitations instead.
- Add the enrolment code and QR code to the enrolment packet and the registration confirmation, and click Print the enrolment kit for the office counter, the open-house table and the pickup-line sign.
- Where the enrolment link is enabled for your Hub, paste that one standing link into the back-to-school email and your school website: each person who opens it gets their own enrolment page.
- Someone who enters your code in Blasts sends your school a connection request. Accept requests under People who want to connect, or turn on auto-accept in Settings for enrolment season so they connect the moment they ask.
- Point your enrolment or registration form at the inbound webhook on Integrations, or use the Zapier app, so each new parent or guardian is added the day they enrol.
Example
Registration opens in the spring. The office uploads the parent and guardian contact export and every one of those adults starts receiving school messages by email that week, without installing anything. The code goes in the confirmation email and the kit sits on the office counter, so the ones who prefer Blasts connect over the summer and their messages quietly move to their phones. By the first delayed opening the office has one list and two ways of reaching it.
Good to know
- Starting on email is not a lesser version. An email subscriber receives the text, formatting, links and images of the message you send, from your school's sending address, and is counted in the same audiences. Files attached to a Blast reach people on Blasts only, so put anything an email subscriber needs behind a link.
- Each adult receives as themselves, so a household with two guardians is two people and two credits. You can group them under one household and tick One per household when one copy is enough; that limit applies to Blasts delivery, and anyone on email still gets their own copy.
- Connections are made by adults: parents, guardians and staff. If your school decides an older student should receive school messages directly, that student connects themselves on their own device, the same way and with the same ability to leave.
- The connection carries from year to year: returning families are already reachable when the next school year's calendar goes out.
- Consent-based throughout: anyone can change what they hear about on their preferences page or reply STOP, and people on Blasts can mute or disconnect there. STOP also clears the audiences that person was in, including ones the school assigned, and they are not restored if they later reply START.
- Import columns: your file needs an email column, and every row is one adult parent, guardian or staff member. Useful columns are name, household and interests (a column headed audiences, tags, groups or lists works too). Remove any student columns before you upload: a column headed birthday, DOB or date of birth is read as the ADULT's own birthday, so a student's date of birth must never be in the file. Files are limited to 5,000 rows and 2 MB, with a preview before anything is sent.
- An import adds people. It places someone in an audience only when an interests column names an audience you already created and set so the school can add people; it never creates a grade, a classroom, a route or a team, and never works out where anyone belongs. See Organize by division, grade and interest.
- This is Blasts plus email, not SMS: no carrier fees, and no spreadsheet of parents' mobile numbers to collect or pass around.