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How do I send automated announcements to families?
How do I send automated announcements to families?
Alex Karl avatar
Written by Alex Karl
Updated over a week ago

ClassTag allows you to send automatic messages to individual families, based on data from your student information system. ClassTag's automated announcements are great for attendance notices, truancy, honor roll, lunch balance, overdue books and anything else you’d want to automate! Sending automated messages not only saves you time, but also ensures that messages are sent consistently and efficiently.

There are three steps to set up automated announcements:

  1. Create an Announcement Template

  2. Reach out to Customer Support to set up an Automation

  3. Send an Audience File to ClassTag

You can set up as many Automated Announcements as you like.

1. Create an Announcement Template

Go to the Create Announcement page, click on Templates, and create a new Personal template. This is the messaging that will be sent with your automated announcement. The title of your announcement will be needed for Step 2.

2. Set up an Automation

Contact ClassTag support at customersuccess@classtag.com to set up an automation. Include the following information:

  • Subject Line: Automated Message Setup

  • Name (title) of the Announcement Template you’d like to automate

  • The name of the file you intend to use for the audience file (recipients)

Please note: Automation setup can take up to 24 hrs to be established. You will need to plan ahead for your first automation of each individual message.

3. Send an Audience File

Every time you send an audience file to the SFTP folder, the message will be sent within 5 minutes to the recipients included in the file. Please remember to use the file name associated with the automation every time. Your CSM can remind you of the SFTP folder and credentials where you will send this file.

Audience File Format

Make sure that the column with student IDs is named studentSisId. Please see the sample format below, and remember to name the file exactly as you determined in Step 2.

The audience file should be a CSV file with UTF-8 encoding.

Notes

Please note that:

  • Values in the file cells may be wrapped with double quotes

  • The Audience File does not accept any additional fields

  • The announcement template does not support attribute/merge fields

  • The file is automatically removed from the folder as soon as it is processed

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