What this helps you do
Your student information system keeps enrolment, attendance, grades and the official contact record; your learning platform keeps coursework; your parent portal keeps what families log in to see. The Hub holds only the adults who are connected or subscribed, the audiences they are in, and what you sent. It holds no student data and is not an official record of contact. Whatever the system, the doors are the same four: a CSV export you upload on Parents & Guardians, the inbound webhook that adds one person at a time, signed outbound events that tell your systems who connected or replied, and the Zapier app when both ends are apps rather than code.
When to use it
Use CSV at the start of a year from an opted-in guardian export. Use the inbound webhook when enrolment or an activity signup should add someone the day they join. Use outbound events when your own systems should know who connected or opted out. A school can run the whole year on the enrolment-packet code and one spreadsheet.
How to do it
- Export the opted-in parent, guardian and staff contacts from the records your school already keeps and upload the CSV on Parents & Guardians. Email is the only required column.
- Point the enrolment or activity-signup confirmation step at the inbound webhook on Integrations.
- Add your HTTPS endpoint under events out if your own systems should hear about connections, opt-outs and replies.
- Ask for the Zapier app if you would rather not write code.
- Put people into divisions, grades, routes and teams yourself, with Bulk assign, or name an audience you already created in an interests column or a signup field. No door creates an audience or works out who belongs.
- Send the delayed opening, the route change or the activity cancellation from Send, beside whatever your emergency procedure already requires.
Example
A school uploads its opted-in guardian list in August and confirms they agreed to hear from it; everyone on it can receive by email from the first send. The office then spends an afternoon with Bulk assign putting those adults into Lower, Middle and Upper School, the six bus routes and the fourteen teams, working from the lists the school already keeps. At 5:30 on a snowy morning one Blast goes to everyone and one goes to the route that cannot run. The student information system was never touched.
Good to know
- There is no student information system, learning platform or parent-portal connector. PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward, Clever, ClassDojo, Canvas, Google Classroom, Blackboard and Remind are named here only to say so, and none is planned.
- No door works out who belongs. A CSV row, a webhook post and a Zapier action each add one adult, and place them only in audiences the school already created and named; where that adult belongs is a decision a person makes, or an interest the parent picks.
- The Hub holds no student record. Everyone here is an adult: a parent, a guardian or a member of staff, each connecting as themselves.
- This channel sits beside your emergency procedures and official notification, and replaces neither.
- Read Student data, households and school systems before anyone proposes using this channel for something a school system already does.