Post an announcement
For posters: composing an announcement, choosing where it goes, and how it reaches families — push, digest, and (if enabled) text message.
Announcements are the organization’s official voice — posting is limited to people your school has designated (board members, the office, committee chairs for their areas). If that’s you, here’s the craft and the mechanics.
Post an announcement
- Open Announcements and choose New announcement.
- Write the headline and body. You can attach images, files, and links — if the announcement relates to an event or sign-up, link it so families can act in one tap.
- Choose the audience: the whole school, or a narrower group (a single grade, a committee) when it only concerns them.
- Post it now — or save it as a draft, or schedule it for a date and time.
A posted announcement appears in the feed immediately and notifies families according to each family’s own preferences.
Drafts and scheduled posts
Anything not yet published lives behind Drafts & scheduled, the button beside New announcement on the feed: everything queued to go out, soonest first, then your drafts. From a row you can Edit, Schedule or Reschedule, Publish now, Unschedule (back to a draft), or Discard.
Board members see their own unpublished posts there; school admins see the school’s. Families see none of it — an unpublished announcement isn’t in the feed, doesn’t count toward anyone’s unread badge, and can’t be opened by anyone who can’t manage it, even with the link.
Writing Sunday and sending Monday morning is the point. So is drafting the snow-day notice before the snow.
How it reaches families
Worth understanding, because it explains “did everyone see it?”:
- Push — families with push enabled are notified right away.
- Digest — families on digest mode get it in their daily or weekly summary instead.
- Text message — if your school uses SMS and you mark the announcement urgent with SMS delivery, opted-in families also get a text with a link back to the app. Only urgent announcements can go out by text — the app enforces it.
Families control their own mix (see the parent-facing Choose what you get notified about), and families who never touched their settings follow the school’s defaults — which your school configures; see Set your school’s notification defaults. So “posted” never means “everyone was pinged,” and that’s by design.
Did it land?
Your own posts carry a read count on the feed card, and the announcement’s Readership view gives you the full picture: a progress bar, a filter for All / Read / Unread, and the list of families behind each number.
Two things to read it correctly. It counts families, not people — one parent opening it marks the family read, which is the right unit for “did this household get the message.” And the denominator is the announcement’s actual audience, withdrawn families excluded, so a committee post is measured against that committee rather than the school.
Use it before you re-send. “Forty of sixty families have seen it” is a reason to wait another day; it’s also how you find out that the notice you thought was urgent reached almost everyone by lunchtime. Reactions still tell you how people felt about it — readership tells you whether they saw it.
Use SMS like the siren it is
Text messages command attention and cost real money per send — which is exactly why the app restricts them to urgent announcements. “Pickup is moved, today” is urgent; “bake sale in three weeks” is not. If everything is marked urgent, families opt out of texts, and then the real emergency misses them too.
Editing and follow-ups
Spotted a typo or a wrong date after posting? Edit the announcement — the feed shows the corrected version. For material changes (event canceled), consider a fresh announcement instead: families who already read the original won’t reread it.