Who this is for: School Admins, Attendance Staff with custom Attendance-level roles (e.g., attendance clerks)
🆕 Coming soon! This feature will be available in Spring 2026. 🌷
Overview ✨
TalkingPoints Attendance partners can now save time and stay on top of attendance outreach by sending multiple automated messages each day.
You can now schedule messages to send automatically based on attendance patterns (like absences or tardies). This helps ensure families get the right message at the right time — without manual follow-up.
Why this matters 🎯
Managing attendance communication can take a lot of time — especially when attendance messages vary by situation.
With Multiple Auto Messages, Attendance partners now can:
Send the right message for different attendance situations
Schedule messages in advance
Reduce repetitive daily tasks
Keep families informed and engaged with different messaging at different parts of the day
How it works ⚙️
Follow these steps to set up automated attendance messages:
1. Create a custom segment
Set up an attendance group based on your needs
⭐ New: Use the new Consecutive days option to target patterns like repeated absences.
2. Create a message series
Start a new automated message series for your segment
⭐ New: You’ll be prompted to create a message series right after creating a segment.
3. Craft your message
Write your message using:
Rich text
Merge fields
Message Mentor
Attachments
Select your audience in the To field (attendance segments)
⭐ New: You now have full access to all messaging tools when creating automated messages.
4. Schedule the message
Choose:
Day and time to send
Optional end date
⭐ New: You can schedule messages with or without an end date.
5. Review automated messages
View all scheduled messages in one place
Check:
Send cadence
Last sent date
Any errors
⭐ New: If a message fails, the system will retry automatically:
5 minutes after send time
10 minutes after
15 minutes after
Existing messages 📨
If you already use automated attendance messages, they will be moved to this new system when the feature is released.
When planning automated messages, check with your institution to find out when data is shared with TalkingPoints. For best results, schedule your messages 30 minutes after the district shares data to ensure that your messages are timed with newest data and that the right families receive the right messages.
Ex. If your district is sending a data update to TalkingPoints at 8:30, schedule your message for 9am.
Important notes 📌
Automated messages send from the school attendance inbox
Recipient lists are created automatically based on a selected, created attendance group. There can be no manual edits to automated attendance messages.
With these updates, you no longer turn messages ON or OFF
ℹ️ Note: With this update, users can no longer turn attendance messages ON or OFF. To stop a message series, simply delete it. We recommended saving deleted messages as templates for future use.
Best Practices for Automated Messaging ✏️
Timing matters ⏰
Automated messages depend on attendance data updates.
For best results:
Schedule messages 20–30 minutes after a data sync
Example:
Data sync: 8:30 AM
Message send: 9:00 AM
Behind the scenes:
TalkingPoints checks for new attendance data every 10 minutes on the ):05 (e.g., 00:05, 00:15, 00:25)
Additional Details 💬
School-level: Automated messages are created and managed at each school.
Automated recipient list: This feature creates a message recipient list from the parameters set in the related attendance segment (formerly called "attendance view"). Recipient lists are generated dynamically and cannot be manually edited for each send.
Resending messages: To resend a message, Click Edit message then Send now.