Sending bulk messages

Gergirl

Hi folks,
Im not sure if I'm posting this in the right place but hope you can help me.

I am trying to do some work for my local primary school bringing them into the digital age.....

My first step is looking at how they communicate with teachers, parents and pupils-right now there are lots of paper notes; text messages and a sad website.

Do you think I should set up a Facebook page or would I be better off with a new site courtesy of Wordpress? Or should I look at some form of an app?

The big thing that is costing them money at the moment as far as I can see is text. Every year they are spending about €1,000 just on texts: saying stuff like cake sake on on fri; school closed because of snow; school finishing early today etc etc...
There is also the thing of these paper notes in the kids bags-I think it would be great if the teacher could just type up the note and it would be published to all relevant parents in some cheap and easy manner....

All help, thoughts, comments greatly appreciated,

Many thanks, ger

Jim2007

Went you are talking about publishing stuff relating to children and their schedules etc, you need a secure website. So Facebook is most definitely not the way to go.

The Corinthian

Research your market.

Looking at your post, you've jumped the gun completely and don't appear to know exactly where to start - you've even posted on a mobile app forum and suggested to new media options, neither of which are really related to mobile apps, for example - so doing that might be an idea.

You have two principle target markets; the parents and the children (who could well be further subdivided, as a 7-year old's adoption of technology will differ to a 12-year old's). So the first thing I would do were I you is find out, via a questionnaire or other means, what do they actually use.

Otherwise, you're at best speculating; guessing that people use Facebook, when in reality only 20% might, for example, and overlooking options that just haven't dawned on you yet - email, for example, would be an obvious option.

So find out what your market uses first, then build a solution that best addresses it.

Secondly, you say that the present policy of sending texts is costing the school €1,000 p.a. Do you know what the unit cost is - that is, how much does each SMS cost to send? I ask this because the cost of outgoing SMS can vary wildly - you can find providers charging anything between €0.03 and €0.15 per SMS without difficulty, and if you're presently paying closer to the upper limit, then you could already solve your problem simply by changing provider.

However, returning to my principle point, research your market. It's pretty silly to build a solution of any kind before you've bothered to check if anyone is even going to be able to use it, let alone want to.

Gergirl

Folks,

Thanks for the advice - yes Corinthian you are correct - I am new to boards - this is my first post - and its probably in the wrong place - but I REALLY appreciate your advice.

The reason I posted here was to see if anyone knew of an alternative to texting (e.g. an app) - i know of BBM and Facebook messenger and iMessage - but all of these are too limited. the reason I'm focussing on this now is the cost of the texts - the service provider they use now is 4.4 cents a text (so each message going to 300 parents is costing 13.20!)- the lowest I have come up with is 3.6 cents - it would be so cool if I could find a way to do it for free.......

Anyhow, just to say thanks again for the advice - I'll let you know how I get on

Gergirl