Messaging families and publishing announcements

A message expects a reply and belongs to a thread between named people. An announcement expects none and goes to an audience — the whole school, staff, teachers, students or families.

Sending an announcement as forty individual messages is the most common way a school's communication becomes unmanageable.

Messages are threaded, so a conversation stays in one place rather than scattering across replies. Attachments are uploaded with the message rather than mailed separately.

• Sent — it has left your hands.
• Delivered — it reached the recipient's account.
• Read — they have opened it.
• Read is a fact about the message, not about whether anybody acted on it.

An announcement names its audience explicitly. Choosing families rather than the whole school is what keeps notices relevant, and relevance is what keeps them read.

Delivery and read state are recorded so a school can answer the question that follows any incident: did this family know. That record is more useful than a memory of having sent something.