News & Updates

SMS: The Quickest Way to Keep in Touch With Your Students

By Paolo Dona — Nov 26, 2010

Communication with students is an important daily task.

They need to be contacted if class schedules change, if a payment is due, or if their attendance is low.

As of today, you can send your students SMS messages directly from NiftySchool.
Let’s see how:

1) Enable SMS delivery in the configuration.

SMS need to be explicitly enabled from the configuration. SMS messaging is switched off by default because there is an extra cost involved. You do not want your staff to send them out unless they are allowed to do so.

Choose the phone number that will be used in the ‘From’ field of the messages that you send. Messages sent using NiftySchool will come from this phone number. You can use
a shared office number, or your personal mobile number.

Once you accept the terms and enable the service, you can move on to a student’s page and send the first message.

2) Go to the student profile and click on ‘Send SMS’.

3) Fill in the details and send.

To send the message, you need to fill the following fields:

• From: this is the number from which the student will receive the message, automatically populated with your default number specified in the configuration (but you can change it if needed). Usually this is the school’s phone number.
• To: This is the mobile phone number of the student, in international format. This is taken from the student file, and automatically converted to the correct format (00 + country code + number). You can change it before sending if incorrect.
• Body: This is the text of the message you want to send — a maximum of 160 characters.

If you want to send a test message, you can either create a fake student with your number or change the number in the form before sending.

4) Check whether the SMS has been sent.

After sending the message, a status report will be shown.
It usually takes the carrier/network operator a few seconds to send the message, but you can check that it has been submitted correctly.

5) Check and download reports in Excel format.

In the Stats/Reports section, you can now see a list of all of the messages that have been sent.
You can see who sent the messages, to which student and when.

The list of messages can also be downloaded in Excel format, and filtered by date.

6) Pricing – how much does this cost?

SMS cost £0.07/each (less than standard operator rate) and will be billed on top of your standard subscription on a monthly basis. You will receive separate payment request to your PayPal account, with the correct amount.

For example, if you send 100 messages you will be billed £7. Consider how much time you would spend calling the students instead of sending them a message.

Only messages successfully delivered to the phones will be charged: you will not pay for messages sent to dead numbers or phones that are not reachable.

We hope you enjoy the new feature! If you have any issues, feel free to let us know.