School Messenger - Selecting Recipients

After student contacts were converted to the PS new contact system, changes needed to be made in School Messenger. These changes added additional options to choose when configuring your broadcast. 

Also refer to Adding Recipients and Understanding the Counts Guide

Terminology:

Target  - recipients

Contacts - Staff and student data

Associated Guardians - guardians and contacts

To select recipients:

1. Open School Messenger as you normally do.

 Checkout the School Messenger link which is the last link on the left navigation bar. When you use this, you don't have to log into School Messinger!

2. Click New Broadcast.

3. Click the drop-down next to Recipients.

4. Click Custom Rules.

5. Add criteria to select the students for this broadcast. For example here I have selected school as the field and Burlington Technical Center as the school. Click Save. 

Below, I am narrowing my recipients further by selecting only those that speak French. 

5. Click Add Recipients. Now you are back to your dashboard and your recipient details are visible.

6. In the column called Targets, click the drop down.

7.  This is where you indicate who should receive the broadcast.

Your choices are: 

• Contacts: Selecting Contacts will send the notification to ONLY Students/Staff, no Guardians.

• Associated Guardians: Selecting Associated Guardians ONLY will result in ONLY the chosen Guardians category receiving the notification.

• Both: This means both Students and/or Staff AND Guardians will be included in the notification.

Do not select Contacts unless you want to send to students and staff.

Select Both when you want tot include all contacts -  students, staff and parents.

8. Now click the Guardian Category Restriction box "Restrict to these categories." Select everything except the Emergency box. This excludes emergency contacts from your broadcast. This is the only way to do that.

Note: The categories 1-6 are not configured for anything at this time. So including them all, get everyone. The only category is energency which is applied to the emergency contacts duirng the nightly import to School Messenger.

Continue with setting up your broadcast as you normally do. 

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