What this helps you do
Blasts gives your school a direct channel to the families it serves, with their consent. Each parent or guardian installs the free Blasts app once, usually on the phone that gets the pickup call, and connects to your school. After that the delayed opening, the dismissal change and the deadline land on that phone, clearly marked as from your school, instead of in a newsletter thread nobody opened. The Hub picks the right path for each person: someone already on Blasts gets a request in the app; someone who is not gets your invitation email with the enrollment code.
When to use it
Enrollment and back-to-school are the moments. Put the invitation in the enrollment 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 Connections in your Hub and click Sync connections once so your enrollment code is published.
- Add the enrollment code and QR code to the enrollment packet and the registration confirmation, and click Print the enrollment kit for the office counter, the open-house table and the pickup-line sign.
- Where the enrollment 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 enrollment page.
- Each parent, guardian or staff member installs Blasts on their phone, opens Settings, enters the code and taps Join.
- For families who enrolled but have not scanned, export the parent and guardian contacts you already keep and use Add many at once or upload the CSV. Invitations are checked on Blasts and spread out at up to 200 a day.
- Point your enrollment or registration form at the inbound webhook on Integrations, or use the Zapier app, so each new family is invited the day they enroll.
- Accept requests under People who want to connect, or turn on auto-accept in Settings during enrollment season.
Example
Registration opens in April. The code goes in the confirmation email and the kit sits on the office counter and the open-house table. In August the office uploads the parent and guardian contact export for the families who did not scan, and those invitations go out over the following days. By the first week of school 780 of 900 families are connected, and the first two-hour delay reaches them at 5:55 a.m.
Good to know
- Each adult connects on their own device, so a household with two guardians is two connections. Group them under one household on the person page and use One per household when a mailing only needs to reach the family once.
- 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.
- Connecting is consent-based: a family can mute or disconnect at any time, including when a student moves on or graduates.
- Import columns: your file needs an email column. The Hub also recognizes name, first name, last name, phone, address, birthday, household, and interests (a column headed audiences, tags, groups or lists works too). Files are limited to 5,000 rows and 2 MB, with a preview before anything is sent.
- There is no connector to a student information system, a learning platform or a parent portal. Contacts reach the Hub as a CSV export, through the inbound webhook, or through Zapier.
- This is Blasts, not SMS: no carrier fees, and no spreadsheet of parents' mobile numbers to collect or pass around.