Articles on: Sematime Messaging

How to send SMS messages to a class, stream or the whole school

On this article we look at the process of sending messages to a large group of people such as a class, stream or even all the parents in the school. This is called group-based messaging.

For this to work, we need you to have saved the phone numbers of our parents in the 'Contacts' section of your account where they are organized into groups. For example, we can have a group of all Form 4 2024 students or another of a particular stream e.g Form 4 East 2024. Learn more on - how to add parent contacts from an Excel file

You start by typing the names of the groups you want to send your message to under the 'Recipients' section. Sematime will auto-suggest names for you select as you type. You can also click the 'Add from contacts' link underlined in blue in case you do not remember the groups names off-head.

Finally, type your text message and hit the send button. A few things to note...

As you write your message Sematime will show a preview of how it will appear on the parents phone. The preview has two parts, your text message and the message signature - the section highlighted in red on the above image.

The message signature is a unique message that is attached at the end of all the messages that you send. It is meant to show extra details such as the name of the sender & their callback phone number. For example, Sent by The Abc School. Call 0706129100.

In addition to the preview, Sematime also shows the number of SMS pages, characters and amount of SMS units needed to successfully send your message - the section highlighted in green. What are SMS pages, you ask?

A single SMS message has a character limit of 160. However, if you exceed this limit, your message will be split into smaller segments called 'SMS pages' which are then re-assembled by the recipient's device to form one long message. You can learn more on this here - what are SMS character limit?

After sending your message, you will get a delivery report summary. At first, all the messages will be in the 'Pending' status but will gradually get updated to either 'Delivered' or 'Failed' based on the delivery confirmation report we get from the mobile network operator e.g Safaricom, Airtel, Telkom etc.

You can then click on 'View Report' to see a detailed delivery report for each parent. Come with us to the next section to understand more about SMS message delivery reports.

Updated on: 04/04/2024

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