What this helps you do
Setup gets your school ready to send: your profile and branding, your timezone and interface language, the school-controlled Blasts account, your email sending address, and the preferences page where parents and guardians set their language and choose the interests they receive. A new school sets all of this up through onboarding. Setting up a Hub is free; sending uses prepaid credits.
When to use it
Do this once before enrolment or back-to-school, and revisit it if your website, your timezone or the person who holds the account changes.
How to do it
- Sign in at /hub/signin/ with an email code, a passkey, or Sign in with Blasts, then open Settings.
- Enter your school name and website so your logo and colors can be captured automatically.
- Set your timezone and country so a Friday afternoon note actually goes out in the afternoon where your families are.
- Choose your interface language. Parents and guardians choose their own on their preferences page, which matters in a school where families read several.
- Confirm the school-controlled Blasts account: a mailbox on your school's own domain (not a principal's personal address), which is the root of ownership and recovery. Publish the DNS TXT record Settings shows you to verify the domain, and leave it published.
- Check Email sending: the Hub provisions a sending address for you. Every new Hub starts with 50 email credits, and a new school Hub sends its weekly digest on Friday afternoon, which you can change.
- Copy the preferences link into the back-to-school email and the enrolment confirmation. That is where each parent or guardian sets their language and picks the school news they want. A school's preferences page does not ask for celebration dates; leave the celebration messages in Settings empty and nothing is sent.
- Decide the two enrolment settings separately: turn on auto-accept for enrolment season so a connection request is accepted at once, and leave leader approval off unless several coordinators share the channel.
Example
In July the office manager enters the school name and website, and the Hub pulls the logo and colors so every Blast looks like the school. She sets the timezone, verifies the domain, turns on auto-accept, leaves leader approval off so the athletic director can send his own cancellations, and puts the preferences link in the back-to-school email so families set their language on the day they read it.
Good to know
- The Blasts account belongs to the school, not to one person, so it keeps working when a principal or an office manager moves on.
- You can change the interface language anytime; only the Hub chrome changes, never what families wrote or chose.
- In a small district, each school can run its own Hub, or one Hub can carry campus audiences. Decide before you start inviting people, because that choice shapes every audience you build.
- Leader approval and auto-accept are separate settings that happen to live near each other. One is about who may send; the other is about who may join.