Broadcasts are one-to-many messages to the families connected to your school — open-house announcements, fee reminders, term-start notes, event invitations. They go out as both an in-app notification and an email, so they reach families wherever they happen to check first.
Unlike a CRM reply (which is a 1-to-1 message inside an existing conversation), a broadcast is a fresh outreach to a list. Use it sparingly — schools that broadcast weekly see noticeably lower open rates than schools that broadcast monthly.
Choosing recipients
The composer offers six built-in recipient lists. Each one queries your CRM at send time, so the audience is always current.
- All contacts — every family who's ever touched your school (inquiry, booking, or open-house signup). Use for the big stuff: major announcement, new program launch, end-of-year wrap-up.
- All inquiries / Active inquiries — the difference matters. All includes families whose inquiries have been closed (rejected, enrolled elsewhere, gone cold). Active is only the inquiries currently in your pipeline (status: new, contacted, qualified). Active is what you want 90% of the time — closed inquiries don't want to hear from you again.
- All bookings / Upcoming bookings — similar split. All includes past tours; Upcoming is just the confirmed future ones. Use Upcoming for "reminder: your tour is tomorrow, here's parking" type messages.
- Open House interested — families who signed up for any of your open-house events. Useful for "next event scheduled, save the date" outreach.
Refining with segment filters
For the three inquiry-based lists, you can add filters to narrow the audience further. Two axes today:
- Student age range — only families whose child's age falls in your specified min/max. Useful for "we're opening a new Year 7 programme" where Year 4-6 families aren't relevant.
- Inquiry submission date range — only families who inquired in a specific window. Useful for "we noticed you reached out last month but haven't booked yet" follow-ups.
A live count under the recipient picker updates as you change filters, so you can see exactly how many people you'll reach before composing. The actual delivery list is recomputed at send time — late inquiries that arrive while you're writing will still be included.
Filters are intentionally NOT available on booking-based or open-house lists. Those are smaller, more targeted audiences where additional filtering rarely changes the right call.
Writing for translation
If your school's auto-translate is on, the broadcast you compose in your own language gets fanned out to French, German, and Italian on send via DeepL. Each family receives the broadcast in their preferred locale (set at signup or by browser language at first contact).
For most broadcasts, auto-translate is fine — DeepL handles conversational and informational tone well. For two situations, compose per-locale manually:
- Legal notices and consents. Word choice matters; DeepL's "good enough" is not good enough for anything with legal weight.
- School-specific terminology that doesn't translate. "Internat" vs "boarding" vs "convitto" can carry different connotations.
The composer has a "Translate manually" toggle that splits the content into four side-by-side editors. You can copy your source language and tweak per locale, or write each from scratch.
You can also skip auto-translate for a single broadcast (e.g. a French-only event invitation to a single canton) while keeping it enabled school-wide.
Anatomy of a broadcast that gets read
After looking at engagement data from schools who've shipped 50+ broadcasts each, three patterns separate the ones that get acted on from the ones that get ignored:
- Subject line under 50 characters. Above that, it gets cut off on mobile preview panes. The composer shows a character counter.
- One clear action. A broadcast with one button outperforms a broadcast with three links by a wide margin. If you need to say three things, send three broadcasts spaced over a week.
- Verb-first call-to-action labels. "Book a tour" outperforms "Tour information." "RSVP for open house" outperforms "Open house details." Action verbs read as clear next steps.
The button itself comes from the Action Link field at the bottom of the composer. Leave it blank and the broadcast is a pure information message — sometimes the right call (term-start dates, holiday greetings) but usually you want a button.
Frequency and timing
Median schools on the platform broadcast 1-2 times per month. Schools that broadcast more than weekly see open rates drop ~30% after the fourth week — the audience starts treating you as noise.
For timing: Tuesday-Thursday mornings (your local time, between 8-10am) consistently outperform Friday afternoons and weekends. The audience is parents checking email during their morning routine, not families on their phones over dinner.
Tracking what worked
Sent broadcasts appear in the Broadcasts tab with delivery + open counts. Click any broadcast for per-recipient delivery details — useful when a family asks "did you send me anything?" and you can confirm whether the email actually landed in their inbox.
Common mistakes
- Sending without previewing. The composer's translate-manually view is a preview surface — switch through each locale tab before hitting send.
- Using broadcasts for 1-to-1. If you're addressing a specific family ("Hi Sophie, about your daughter's application…"), that's a CRM reply, not a broadcast. Broadcasts go to lists, never to individuals.
- Skipping the action link. Even informational broadcasts benefit from a button — "View full event details on our site" gets clicks the body copy alone won't.