Off Topic - Mass Text Services

[brodgers]

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

[chand]

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. 

[brodgers]

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

[kcalderw]

Just FYI, Remind was just bought out by Parentsquare.

[Kris_Baeten]

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

[kcalderw]

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

[mickiemueller]

ParentSquare recently purchased Remind.

[MarkLoundy]

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.

[kcalderw]

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

[Justin_W]

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.

[JimmyR]

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.

[MattDPenn]

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.