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Automatically schedule messages for school hours with Social Sender

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Developers 3 min read | wrote in blog on April 29, 2019

There’s nothing worse than getting home after a long day’s work, sitting down for dinner and then being interrupted by a call from a telemarketer. By the same token, it’s also really annoying when you’ve missed important information because it was sent when you weren’t expecting it. When you send your messages can be just as important as how you send them, in getting your message across. How do you think parents, students or staff would feel about receiving a text message from your school or university outside of social hours (9am-6pm)? It can be disruptive or cause important information to be lost. That’s why we have created a free feature, that automatically prevents your messages being sent at unexpected or inappropriate hours – introducing Social Sending.

While it may seem like a rare occurrence which wouldn’t impact your business, you’d be surprised at how many unexpected situations lead to messages being sent after hours. Messages that are sent manually by teachers and staff rely on their decision as to when messages are delivered. But bulk sends rely on your business systems, and despite how well your code is written and tested – you can’t plan for all variables and scenarios (although the talented among us may get pretty close).

For schools and universities, business messaging is an efficient communication channel which achieves higher response rates than email or phone calls. To maintain these increased levels of engagement, it’s important to respect the personal nature of messaging and avoid accidentally sending a message at unsociable hours. You can monitor systems during business hours, but it’s critical you avoid blasting a list of hundreds of parents at 4:00 am. Your systems may be pretty efficient now but wait and see what happens when they need to deal with hundreds of angry parents who have been woken up by an early message, or missed it because it was sent too early!

Social Sending is a safety net that gives your school or university confidence in business messaging, where systems continue to operate outside of hours. It’s a free feature that automatically ensures you avoid sending messages at inappropriate hours. This feature can easily be switched on by support, to limit messages between 8am-6pm using your account’s local time zone. It will automatically queue messages outside this window and only attempt to resend the next business day.

If this sounds like something your school or university could benefit from, switch on Social Sending by contacting support.

 

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