topic Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services in Peer-Peer Topics

Off Topic - Mass Text Services

brodgers — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 21:21:09 GMT

Our Youth Apprenticeship case managers work with anywhere between 75-130 students. They have a need to mass text their students weekly to remind the students to check-in with them. They want to hide the student cellphone numbers from each other and want the text to come from the case manager's cellphone number so the students can easily respond back.

Does anyone use a mass text service that they can recommend? I see there are a number of them out there that use a web portal for sending the mass text which would be ideal.

Thank you!
Brad

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

chand — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 14:32:06 GMT

Hi!

We're looking at a bunch of these services. The finalists included Remind and TalkingPoints. Many teachers might already be using and are used to Remind, though it will likely be more expensive than other platforms.

Let me know if you need contact info for either of these.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

Kris_Baeten — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 14:06:36 GMT

I am curious if anyone uses ParentSquare? www.parentsquare.com
We are looking into new notification systems as well and this one looked pretty good but was hoping to get feedback from someone who used it.

Thanks!
Kris

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

mickiemueller — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 14:07:20 GMT

ParentSquare recently purchased Remind.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

brodgers — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 14:34:16 GMT

Thank you, @chand! I will investigate Remind and TalkingPoints for our need.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

MarkLoundy — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:02:48 GMT

Kris,

We've used it for three or four years. I'm a campus-level admin and I like being able to address individual grade levels or even classrooms and differentiate between staff and families as recipients. I also use it for permission forms. ParentSquare also has a robust automated translation capacity and allows recipients to designate Web, email, or text options.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

kcalderw — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:06:06 GMT

Just FYI, Remind was just bought out by Parentsquare.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

kcalderw — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:06:35 GMT

Yes, I've had it for 5 years in two separate districts. Can't recommend it enough.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

kcalderw — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:07:44 GMT

FYI, if you have any "off-topic" questions please feel free to post them on our K12 Technology Admin Discord.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

Justin_W — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 15:10:18 GMT

We use SchoolMessenger. I think they've gone through a couple owners since we've used them, but the s ervice has remained rock solid for us. They were most recently bought out by Powerschool.

We use the service for all of our "mass notification" needs - so voice calls and email too. I'm told it can do some social media also but we don't utilize that feature.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

JimmyR — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:29:28 GMT

We looked at several services but the decision was made to go with ParentSquare. I'm not involved with the service at all but sat in a few meetings to ask one basic question - "does it archive messages so we are compliant with are data retention policy?". Sort of funny but that was my tiny part of the review process. ParentSquare told us they did and the department running that service is supposed to setup the retention policies.

Re: Off Topic - Mass Text Services

MattDPenn — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 17:57:43 GMT

We've moved to using Thrillshare/Apptegy for our phone messaging needs and it's been working great for us and support is generally very quick. You can set it up so responses go back to a specific # or email address. That said it's also integrates(ed) with a website but I assume you can just get the mass messaging feature if you want.