FAQ - Make sure your community is connected. Valid, emails, subscription options and hard bounces

With announcements and SMS text messaging, MySchool offers a very quick and easy-to-use tool to maintain your community communication needs. Having a problem with a user not receiving emails? Confused with the statistics and statuses? Have you checked the spam folder but still not received the announcement?

Here are a few helpful tips to make sure your communications (announcements) are reaching the right target audience.

Email fields

In every profile, within the contact tab, you can enter two email addresses, Primary and Secondary. The system's default behaviour is that all communications are sent to the primary email field only. You can contact our support team to change this to either send to both or send to the secondary if the primary field is empty. The emails must be in a valid format xxxxxx@site.com. The system will not allow users to manually enter a bad email format. However, imports can produce bad data. This may cause the profile to be corrupted. In edit mode, if you have a system error, then contact our support unit to reset the email field for these profiles. 

Top tip: A user needs to have a valid email to save the profile as 'Active'. Simply set their account status in the security tab to disabled. This will allow you to save the profile for your records and data reports, but the user will of course not receive any communications, nor be able to access the portal.

Users with no email

As an online SIS, MySchool shows its power when all of your community is connected. For access to the system, then an email is mandatory. We have a few useful features that can help administrators keep their records up to date. 

1. A quick overview would be to choose a target population from an announcement and use the email stats to give you a quick overview of your coverage. In this example, you see that 90.1% coverage is available. Use mass edit to update if you know them or try another means to obtain this information.

2. Use quick reports to filter users who are classed as guardians within a school level, then extract the information to Excel with their telephone number. 

3. If all else fails then you can use the questionnaire module to print hard-copy versions and send these by mail if you know the address. Why not prepare these at face-to-face events like a parent-teacher day or school sports event?

The user is not receiving the announcement

If the users have a valid email, there can still be several other checkpoints to go through. 

1. Verify the email inbox. If the user states that they have not received an announcement, then make sure they were included in the original announcement audience. If they were, then ask them to check their spam folder or junk email inbox. MySchool uses a multi-national e-mail provider, and certain servers can class the traffic as spam. Advise them to add the mail sender to their trusted senders' list to avoid future problems. If there is a problem, then a copy of the announcement is available in their portals, so encourage them to log in and check while you verify further. 

Top tip: During the onboarding process, why not include this as a checkpoint within your admissions workflow? That way you will be sure that you are connected from the start.

2. Check their opt-in options on their contact tab. If both are unticked then they themselves have opted out of communications. reset them and encourage your users to stay connected. 

Only users with permission can send emails to override this. Users can sometimes opt out without thinking about the long-term consequences, so check their reasons for doing so. 

3. Try to send them an individual announcement. If they still don't receive this then contact our team to check out the email server. In these cases we often get the following messages;

• SPAM - As we explained, our email provider can sometimes be put in the SPAM files of other email providers. This after a few times will cause all future emails to be rejected from the same source. We can reset this but must ask that the user adds us to their trusted sender list.
• HARD BOUNCE - This means that the email provided does not exist. Please ask the user to provide a different email or to check locally with their email provider. It could be a simple typo error.
• SOFT BOUNCE - This could be for multiple reasons. An outage in the user's email server, disabled emails. We can reset it, but if the problem persists, then it is best to ask for a different email. 

All the announcements are pending

We do appreciate that certain events can happen with our provider and our services. this may cause the status of the announcement to show as pending, and not be received by your users. We are continuously improving our services, but sometimes bottlenecks can happen. This may be a simple case that it is just the status which has not been updated, yet the announcement has been sent. It may also be that as with a real-life traffic jam we cannot do much and just have to wait for the situation to stabilise.