SMS & Notifications

For most schools, SMS is the feature parents notice. A message when a child arrives at school changes how families feel about the institution, and it is the single most common reason schools adopt DRAIS.

This guide covers what DRAIS can send, how to control it, and how to keep the cost sensible.

How it works

Things happen in DRAIS — a learner arrives, a learner is absent, a payment is received. Each of those is an event. Your school decides which events send a message, to whom, and whether it goes automatically or waits for a staff member to review it.

[ Screenshot: Notification rules screen ]

Replace with actual screenshot

Event	Something that happened — an arrival, an absence, a payment.
Rule	Your decision: for this event, message these people, using this template.
Template	The wording, with placeholders for the learner name, time, amount and so on.
Audience	Who receives it — guardians, class teacher, administrators.

What DRAIS can notify on

Arrival — a learner scanned in. The most-used alert by a wide margin.
Departure — a learner scanned out.
Absence — no scan by a cut-off time you set.
Pass-out — a learner left the premises during the day, and when they returned.
Fee reminders — outstanding balance, with the amount inserted.
Payment received — confirmation to the payer.
Results released — report cards available in the portal.
Announcements — anything you write, sent to a group you choose.

Automatic or reviewed

This is the setting worth thinking about before you switch anything on.

Automatic	The message sends as soon as the event happens. Right for arrival alerts — a message an hour later is worth much less than one at 7:42.
Reviewed	The message is prepared and held. A staff member reads the queue and sends. Right for absence notices and anything sensitive, where a wrong message costs more than a delayed one.

The setting is per rule, so arrival alerts can be automatic while absence notices wait for review. Held messages appear in Communication → Queue.

Start reviewed, then relax

New schools often switch everything to automatic on day one and spend the first week apologising for messages sent to the wrong number or about the wrong child. Start with review, watch the queue for a few days, and turn on automatic once the data is clean.

Templates

Edit wording in Communication → Templates. Placeholders are filled in when the message sends:

{{studentName}} arrived at school at {{time}}.
{{schoolName}}

Each event has its own template, and templates can be written per language where your school communicates in more than one.

Keep messages short

SMS is billed per 160 characters. A message that runs to 170 characters costs twice as much as one that runs to 150 — for every parent, every day. Trim the school name, drop pleasantries, and check the character count before saving a template you will send ten thousand times.

Quiet hours

Set a window during which DRAIS will not send. Messages generated overnight are held rather than delivered at 3am. Boarding schools in particular should set this before enabling departure alerts.

Bulk messages

For one-off announcements, use Communication → Send Message. Choose an audience — all guardians, a class, a stream, all staff, defaulters above an amount — write the message, and DRAIS shows how many recipients and roughly what it will cost before you send.

1
Pick the audience
The recipient count updates as you narrow it.
2
Write the message
The character count and estimated segments are shown live.
3
Review the cost estimate
Recipients × segments. Worth a second look for a whole-school send.
4
Send
Delivery status is recorded per recipient, so you can see which numbers failed.

Message credits

Your school has an SMS allocation. Communication → Usage shows what has been used, what remains, and where it went by message type.

Note

Arrival alerts are by far the largest consumer — one message per learner per day. A school of 600 learners sending arrival alerts every day uses roughly 12,000 messages a month. Budget for that before switching it on, and consider sending arrival alerts only for the lower classes if the number is uncomfortable.

Delivery and failures

Every message is logged with its delivery status. Failures are almost always one of:

Wrong number format — missing country code, or a stale number on the learner record.
Unreachable — phone off or out of network. Usually delivers later.
Credits exhausted — check usage.

Run the delivery report after your first week. A cluster of failures in one class usually means a contact list that was imported badly rather than a network problem.