Who are my Direct Messages sent to?

The Direct Message (DM) feature within Parent Hub is used for sending messages to the contacts of specific students. 

DMs can be personalised with Custom Tags and so, for this reason, a copy of your message is created for EACH student. This means that a parent with 2 children would receive the message twice - provided you'd selected both students, of course! 

To help make this a bit more clear we've walked through an example, below, using the world-famous Simpson family...

1. First up, a quick look at our student contacts for this example: Homer and Marge. We have Marge on the app and receiving emails and Homer receiving SMS and emails.

Remember that you manage this sort of stuff on the Student Contacts tab of the Contacts page (that's where this screen-grab is from).

2. Now we're heading over to Send a DM. I've done a quick search for Lisa and Bart and you can see that we've got 2 parents to whom we're going to send our message. If I wanted to select just one parent or the other, I'd have used the Advanced Search instead.

3. Now we send our message. Being as this isn't a guide on how to send a DM, I haven't included the screenshot for that but there are 2 principles we need to remember when sending a DM:

1. A copy is send to each parent for each of their children.
2. Parents receive messages via ALL of the contact methods you defined for them on the Student Contacts page (see step 1).

So in our example...

• Marge is going to receive 2 copies in the app (one for Bart and one for Lisa) and 2 copies via email (again, one for Lisa and one for Bart).
• Homer is going to receive 2 copies via SMS and a 2 copies via email.

4. After sending, we check the View DM page and find our latest message at the top. Sent about 2 students.

[SCREENSHOT] 

5. Next we click on the "About 2 students" text link to open the Read By stats for this message.

8 copies sent to 2 contacts about 2 students. 4 copies for Marge (2 in the app; one for Lisa, one for Bart. 2 copies via email). 4 copies for Homer.

[SCREENSHOT]

A bit confused about how many text messages you've sent? Our guide on Direct Message sending by SMS can be found here.