How to send Emails from your school website HERE’S OUR QUICK AND EASY GUIDE TO USING YOUR PRIMARYSITE EMAIL SYSTEM
01636 616 630 PRIMARYSITE.NET CUSTOMERSERVICE@PRIMARYSITE.NET
Welcome to our step by step guide for using your Email System within your PrimarySite Website. In this guide we will cover: •
Importing of contacts via MIS report importing and Wonde integration
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Creating and sending your email
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Delivery Reports
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Parents/carers who are not receiving communication
This document will help you achieve all these things in an easy step by step process. If you have any questions, please get in touch. Before we look at creating your email in the email system, you must firstly make sure the data you are using is correct within the MIS system used in school. These next few paragraphs will explain how to manage your pupil contacts; this information can also be found in our managing your school contacts user guide.
GETTING STARTED Please note that the ‘Communication’ tab can only be accessed by a person who has the role of Superuser, or who is assigned to a role that has permission to edit one or more sections in this area. To find out more about user roles and permissions, please see our User Management guide. The next few paragraphs will talk about your school contact data and making sure this is correct. If you have read the ‘how to manage your school contacts’ guide, then please do go straight to page 11 below.
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ADDING CONTACTS THROUGH INTEGRATION If your school has MIS integration set-up, you will see the contact details from your MIS in the contacts area. If not, you will need to either add contacts to the system manually (under the manually added contacts tab) or import contacts from your MIS via a .csv or .txt file. If you would like to integrate your MIS with PrimarySite, please do give us a call on 01636 616 640.
The screen print above shows a school who has our gold plus package, and TheSchoolApp. Should your school not have gold plus, the app access column, app activated column and the manage app access button will not be in place. Please be aware that our system will go through two updates to pull through data each day. These updates will start at 9am and 3pm (GMT). This work will not be seen straight away at these times, you will need to check thereafter.
IMPORTING CONTACTS Should you not have MIS integration you will need to download your contact data from your MIS system or populate an excel spreadsheet manually. Save the data as a .csv file or .txt file
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DELETION OF HISTORIC DATA Any previously imported data uploaded via a csv or txt file, will need to be deleted prior to uploading a new csv file. This is so that it will not create any duplicates of pupils/contacts. Please note that any manually added contacts will stay the same.
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The screen print above shows both manually added and imported contacts; you can distinguish the manually added contacts as it shows ‘M’ next to the pupil name. The pupils added via imported data have no letter associated at the side of the pupil name. Once you have a csv or txt file saved, you would need to upload it in the pupil contacts area by selecting the Choose File button, locating your file, and then Import. Please remember that any previous data will need to be deleted by this point.
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Once your contacts have been imported your pupil contacts will then be listed. A full instruction guide can be located in the FAQs section of the contact area, this guide relates to the SIMS system only at present.
ADDING CONTACTS MANUALLY There may be a time when you will need to add a contact manually. You will need to be a Superuser or App Admin of the website to do this. Reasons for adding a contact manually is because anyone that is not a pupil contact will not pull through on any integration update. e.g. Staff members and Governors. To add a manual contact, you will need to click the ‘Add Contact’ button below.
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You can add pupils one by one manually by typing them in on the left-hand side and clicking add to save each pupil. Please note, fields marked with * are mandatory fields.
Please note that when adding priorities, only Priority 1 contacts will pull through into the booking system and text messages area. ALL priority contacts will pull through into the email system.
Once a contact has been successfully added it will look like this:
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If adding staff members, you will need to populate both the contact name and the pupil name field with the same name. Please use the word STAFF in the mandatory Year group field and Class name field. This will help you to easily identify your staff members and will automatically group them together under the STAFF title when selecting your Year group or Class name from your drop-down options within the communication systems.
Should you add staff members into your contacts it would be worthwhile putting these into a staff member group. If you manually add a contact that has already been pulled through from your MIS, it will not overwrite or be overwritten by the same pupils imported via a database.
CONTACTS FILTERING There is the ability to filter the pupil name in your contacts section by either their year group, class group or you can search by a pupil’s name, a contact’s name, an email address or telephone number within the search bar. This allows you to look for a pupil easily within your data.
If you set a filter in place, there is also a button to reset, should you need to use this. Should there be more than one contact for a pupil, these will all show within this area if you have searched for the pupil, and you will see that there is a telephone icon for the phone number and an envelope icon for the email address associated. 8
PARENTS/CARERS NOT RECEIVING COMMUNICATION Once all your data has been imported and you are ready to send out your communications, you may find that some parents/carers do not receive them. Possible reasons for this could be: -
A pupil contact has a court order against them; this contact will not receive any communication from any PrimarySite systems. If the parent/carer or email provider have reported our emails as ‘spam’, this will potentially stop them from receiving any communications from our systems. If the recipient email inbox is full, any email communication will not be received.
Please note that any communications already sent by the school will not be received by the recipient after the above has been rectified. You will need to re send them again.
CREATING GROUPS Why might a group be created or administered? There might be several clubs that a school has, a music class, football club, after school club etc. School pupils will form part of these clubs and will need to be added to ‘a group’. To create a group, you will need to click on the Groups tab and choose a name for the group that you wish to add, e.g. music class. 9
Select the pupil/s that need adding to the group by ticking the box next to the pupil’s name.
You will have the ability to edit a group once it has been created. To do this, click on the group you have created, and it will appear like the below. You then can tick new pupils or untick a pupil, remembering to click the update button once finished.
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CREATING AND SENDING YOUR EMAILS Once your data is in place you can then begin to create your email. To get started, when logged in to the school website, go to the ‘Communication’ tab and click ‘Email.’
You will then be directed to the below ‘Send Email’ screen.
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The first step is to select the recipients of the email. You can choose to send your email to individuals, classes, years or groups by selecting your option from the drop down. Please do remember that you need to manage your contacts through the communications menu, for the recipients to pull through to your email. Any emails that are sent to groups will go to all contacts of a pupil that have an email address in the system.
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Once your recipients have been selected, you will see them move over to the ‘your recipients’ area’. Should you need to remove individuals from here, select the red circle button next to their name. Should you wish to start again, you can select the yellow ‘clear list’ button above the ‘your recipients’ box, this will remove all the selected contacts from the box. You will then need to enter an email address for any replies to be sent to, as the email will not be sent from a school email address but the PrimarySite system. Secondly you will need to add the subject of your email.
You are now ready to compile your email. As well as adding text, you will be able to add images and links into the body of the email using the image and link icon buttons in the text area highlighted below.
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You will also have the option to add attachments to your email, should you need to send out any documentation. This can be done by selecting the yellow ‘add attachments’ button; from here you will be taken to your computers file explorer to select the attachment from where it is saved. Once you have added an attachment, you will also have the option to remove this should you need to, by selecting the red ‘remove’ button.
It is important to remember, that the total file size of attachments cannot exceed the file limit of 6MB. Roughly speaking this is around 6000KB, you may see your document saved on your computer in this format. When you are happy with your email and the selected recipients, you will need to click the yellow ‘send email’ button. This button will outline how many how many recipients it will be sent to.
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DELIVERY REPORTS Once an email has been sent, you will be able to see the delivery report for each of these in the sent messages section of the email system.
If you click on any of the emails in the sent messages area you will then be taken to the delivery report screen for that message.
The delivery report will show the date and time the email was sent, the reply to email address provided, along with the subject and body of the email message itself. Underneath the email you will then see a ‘sent to provider’ section. This will list all the recipients the email was sent to at that time and its status.
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PARENTS/CARERS NOT RECEIVING COMMUNICATION You may find that some parents/carers do not receive the emails sent. You will be able to tell if an email has not been delivered from the status against the delivery report for that email. If delivered, this will state ‘delivered’, however you may sometimes see ‘bounced soft’ or ‘bounced hard’ in the status field. Reasons for this could be: -
If the parent/carer or email provider have reported our emails as ‘spam’, this will potentially stop them from receiving any communications from our systems.
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If the recipient email inbox is full, any email communication will not be received.
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Could temporarily be out of network range.
Please note that any communications already sent by the school will not be received by the recipient after the above has been rectified. You will need to resend them again. If the email system regularly encounters a problem with an email address it is trying to send to, this will result in the email address becoming ‘deactivated’ in the email system. You will be notified in the send email area if you have any deactivated email addresses. You will be able to click the notification to view a list of these email addresses. We will be able to reactivate any email addresses that may have been deactivated by the system, but we would require confirmation from the parent themselves that they are happy for us to do this.
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QUESTIONS THAT HAVE BEEN ANSWERED? Please see the below for the FAQ’s tab, for the most common questions we are asked:
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