Articles on: Sematime Messaging

How to send SMS messages to a few parents

Sending messages to a few parents is a little different than sending messages to a class, stream or the whole school. In this section, we look at how to send messages to a few parents whose phone numbers you have beforehand.

If you want to learn how to send group based messages, see this article - how to send a message to a class, stream or the whole school.

You begin by entering the phone numbers of the people you wish to send your messages to then proceed to type your text message and finally click the 'Send' button. It's that simple.

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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