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New Publications

Create a new publication

Main Menu > New publication

In the majority of cases you may not need to change any settings or do anything more than: Choose recipients > Enter message > Upload attachment (if applicable) > Hit Publish

The following notes give a little more detail on each of these steps and the additional options.

  1. Set date and time (if necessary)
    If your school has a ‘default’ time slot set for consolidated daily (or weekly in some cases) emails to parents your message will automatically be set to this time (e.g. 16.00). If you want your message to go in a separate email or at a different time you may change this, either by choosing a different time slot from the list, or switching to custom date to pick any date/time.
    Note that a future date/time also allows you to check and edit your message later if necessary before the emails actually go out.

    If your school does not have a default time set then your message will show the current time. You can change this to a future/date time if preferred.

  2. Order and importance options

    If you are using a time slot you will see the option to tick to Push to top of email – any publication(s) with this ticked will be shown at the top of a consolidated email; others will follow in the order that they were created. If using custom date to set any other date/time or send your message immediately, you will see the High importance option. Ticking this sets the ‘high importance’ or ‘red exclamation’ mark flag used on important or urgent emails. Note that your message will still be sent at the time shown above – ticking this option makes the red flag show, but does not make the email go out urgently; that is determined by the time setting. (This option only shows for ‘custom date’ messages as emails going within a time slot may be consolidated with other less urgent or more routine messages).

  3. Choose recipients – by groups/sets

    Please also see video ‘Selecting recipients in SchoolPost’ at the bottom of this page.

    Use the group/set drop-down menus to choose a ‘set’ of students such as a Year group, Class or House. The number on the right will change to show the number in your selection. If you have combinations of groups/sets such as Year groups which you often send to (e.g. Junior School, Sixth Form) you may also have ‘quick filters’ available – again, simply choose from the list. If you want to send a message to another combination of groups/sets/individuals click the Add groups/sets/filter button to create a new recipient list. This allows you to select multiple sub-groups using Ctrl-click (Windows), Command-click (Mac) or Shift-click. For more detail on selecting multiple groups and combinations see the section on filters.

    Note that if you do this from within a publication you are creating a one-off recipient list for this publication only – if you want to save a list for future use you should create a ‘set’ or ‘filter’ first as described in the section on Groups, sets and filters.

    To send a message to parents of specific individual pupils you can use Select individuals to pick from a list, or if you have a line-separated list of pupil names or codes (your MIS codes) you can paste this in directly using the Paste names / codes link and the system will automatically match the list to the student accounts (for example if you have an absence report exported from your MIS). Once you have made your selection a drop-down will appear to select whether your message will go to Students, Parents, both, Parents cc Students (which copies the message to students but only allows parents to complete any attached reply or consent form), or Students cc Parents (ditto but the other way round, i.e. only students can reply).

    If your system is using the ‘Priority’ (or ‘Rank’) field a list of pre-selected Priorities will also appear, defaulting to the priorities/ranks set in your system settings. You may change the selection for this message by ticking/un-ticking  the appropriate numbers. The number of final recipients shown on the right will change as you do so.

  4. Choose recipients – by selecting individuals
    Hit Select individuals to open the individual picker window. Use this option to select any combination of individual students from throughout the school, or if you want to start with a group and remove just a few individuals.
    Hit Search to bring up a list of all students or use the group/set drop-downs to narrow your selection down first, then tick/select the individuals you want to select. To select a whole group less a few specific individuals, start by searching for the group as shown below, click the ALL box to select the whole group, then de-select the individuals not required. Hit OK to apply your selection.

  5. Enter your message
    The Subject and main body fields shown below form the text that is actually sent within the email (also see the example email in the introduction). View email allows you to see a preview of how the email will look to parents in a pop-up window. Test email sends a copy of the message to your (i.e. the logged-on user’s) email address. Full screen expands the editor view.

    Depending on your school’s settings, you may be able to apply additional formatting to selected text by clicking the styling drop-down – usually showing ‘Paragraph’ as the default style. You may also have stored ‘snippets’ or short templates for messages (or parts of messages) that you can pull into your text by selecting from the ‘Merge fields/templates’ list. This is usually used for common messages such as absence or commendations – please contact us if you would like to add some templates to your system. (templates are not editable by the school at present, but this will be added in a future version). The same list can also be used to insert personalised fields such as {FirstName} {LastName}, {Salutation} or pupil name(s) into the body of your messages. If you would like to use these but do not already see them in the drop-down list please contact us; we will need to check that the correct fields are being imported from your MIS before enabling them. If you want to attach any documents to your message use the Select files... button to locate and upload them. You can attach any number of files up to a total of 20MB for each individual file. Your school’s system settings will determine the file types you are able to upload (usually PDF, Word, jpg, gif, png for example). By default the ‘Secure publication’ flag will be off – tick this if you want to require parents to enter their password before they can retrieve the full message content, e.g. if it contains sensitive information. ‘Co-owners’ allows you to select other staff accounts (‘Contributor’ or other types which cannot already access other users’ publications) which will be able to view the logs and replies to this message.

  6. Set your reply options

    Please also see video ‘Choosing response options in SchoolPost’ at the bottom of this page.
    The initial default or pre-selected ‘response type’ will depend on your school’s system settings and publication type – but will usually be ‘None’ or ‘Message’.

    a) None – no reply link will be available for this message/publication.

    b) Message – this allows parents to click a reply link and type a short message into a simple ‘one-field’ form.

    The ‘Email address for replies’ field will automatically be pre-populated with your own address; this is where an email alert will go to whenever a parent replies. You may edit this if you need replies to go somewhere else or remove it if you do not want an email every time someone completes the reply form. You can enter multiple emails separated with; All replies also go into a data file which you may download later (i.e. a list of all replies in one file) so you do not need to also receive the emails for each reply unless you particularly want to. Usually the ‘Message template’ box will be left blank, but if you want to you can pre-populate the message for them by adding some text here, then parents can edit this before they hit the send button (e.g. you might add ‘Please enter your reply here’).



    c) Form – This allows you to attach a more sophisticated reply form including multiple choices and consent/agreement to terms.



    The ‘Email address for replies’ field operates in exactly the same way as described in the ‘Message’ reply section above. All replies also go into a data file so you can download a single file of all replies later. The View/Edit button allows you to design a form, or to copy (and edit) one from an existing template. Note that (as with filters) if you create a form from within a publication you are creating a one-off form for this publication only – if you want to save a form for future use you should create one separately first in the Response forms menu. After clicking View/Edit you can select an existing form/template by choosing one from the ‘Library forms’ list. To build a new form from scratch start by choosing an ‘item’ from the ‘Response form items’ list. See the section on Reply forms for more detail on creating and editing forms. The ‘Response end date’ allows you to specify a date and time after which replies will no longer be accepted (the form will simply be replaced with the text ‘Replies are no longer being accepted’).

    d) Email (replies not logged) – this allows you to specify an email address for replies, but rather than using a form within the system the parents’ reply link will fire up their own email system so that they can begin writing a message.
    Note that these replies are therefore ‘outside’ the SchoolPost system, so are not logged or stored in any way; this option results in nothing more than emails being sent from parents to the specified email address.

    e) URL – this allows you to specify a web address which parents will be taken to if they click the ‘reply’ link – e.g. it could be a page on your website (or any website) with further information, or it could be a reply or survey form provided by another system.
    Again, note that this takes parents ‘outside’ the SchoolPost system. The reply logs will be able to tell you which parents have clicked the link, but not what they did after that.

  7. Save, Publish (or Submit for approval) The Save button at the bottom of the page will save your message (including any attached form, filter, attachments) as a Draft which you may return to later.

    If you have publishing rights the Publish button will save your message and make it live (‘Published’) to parents. Note that it will not actually be emailed or become available in their mailboxes until the publish time. If you do not have publishing rights you will see a Submit for approval button instead, and a drop- down list of staff who are authorised to approve your message. Hitting Submit for approval will put your message into an ‘Awaiting approval’ status and send an email to the nominated ‘approver’.

See the appropriate sections in the sub-menus for more detail about choosing individuals, editing sets and filters, and reply options including forms.

Previewing your publication

Main Menu > Publications > View web page (the ‘pencil’ icon)

This opens a preview window of the complete message including response options (e.g. form) as the parents see it.

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