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SMS Lesson Reminders

Teachworks Support avatar
Written by Teachworks Support
Updated today

The SMS Lesson Reminders add-on allows you to send lesson reminders to teachers, students and families on their mobile phones via text message.

Enabling the Add-on

  1. Click on "Account & Settings" and then click on "Integrations & Add-ons".

  2. Use the "Search" field on the right and enter "SMS Lesson Reminders".

  3. Click on the "Enable" link.

Settings

Once you have enabled the add-on, click on "Manage" to customize the settings. You can customize the following:

  • Teacher Message - This field allows you to customize the message template sent to teachers.

  • Student Message - This field allows you to customize the message template sent to students.

  • Family Message - This field allows you to customize the message template sent to families.

  • Lead Time Hours - Use this field for each message template to control how many hours before the lesson starts SMS reminders are sent. SMS reminders are sent every hour on the hour. If you set your lead time to 1 hour, the reminders sent at 3pm will include all lessons from 4:00pm to 4:59pm.

  • Balance Alert Level in Dollars - This allows you to select a dollar level in which an alert will be sent to you when your credit balance drops below the selected level. The default is $10.

NOTE: SMS messages are limited to 160 characters. If you use merge tags, the substituted words may use more characters than the merge tags and may go over the limit. If you go over the limit your message will be split and you will be billed for each message.

NOTE: When using foreign languages in your message templates such as Chinese, Korean or Japanese, these are considered non-GSM characters, so they use UCS-2 encoding and messages are limited to 70 characters. This article has more details: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223134307-Unicode-messages-are-being-split

Purchasing SMS Credits

In order to send SMS lesson reminders, you will need to purchase credits beforehand. You can follow the steps below to purchase credits SMS credits:

  1. Click on "Account & Settings" and then click on "Integrations & Add-ons".

  2. Click on the "Buy Credits" option under the SMS Lesson Reminders Add-on.

  3. Select the amount you'd like to purchase in the "Purchase SMS Credit" field.

  4. Enter your credit card details.

  5. Submit the form to save your changes.

SMS Prices

The prices of SMS credits depend on the country of the recipient. You can view the price of SMS credits based on country following the steps below:

  1. Click on "Account & Settings" and then click on "Integrations & Add-ons".

  2. Click on the "Buy Credits" option under the SMS Lesson Reminders Add-on.

  3. Select your country in the "SMS Rates by Country" field.

NOTE: When SMS messages are sent to your clients, the cost is not always known immediately. In a case where it isn't known immediately, the cost is set to $0.0220 by default. Once the recipient's mobile carrier has determined the cost of the messages, this cost is sent to Teachworks and is updated in the SMS logs.

Enabling SMS Lesson Reminders on User Profiles

You can find a check box that will be displayed under the "Notifications" section on employee, family and student profiles. You can check the box and submit the form to enable SMS lesson reminders for that user's mobile phone.

The mobile phone field on the user's profile must have a valid phone number in order for SMS messages to be sent.

NOTE: SMS Lesson Reminders will only be sent to Students/Families whose status are set to "Active" or "Prospective"

Mobile Phone Number Format

Outside of North America

You will need to enter mobile phone numbers on student, family or employee profiles using the E.164 format which begins with the country code including the "+" symbol at the beginning. As an example, phone numbers in the UK would begin with +44 followed by the subscriber number.

In the UK and many other countries internationally, local dialing requires the addition of a 0 in front of the subscriber number. However, to use E.164 formatting, this 0 must be removed. A number such as 020 7183 8750 in the UK would be formatted as +44 20 7183 8750.

In North America

The SMS service will automatically convert US numbers to the correct format. As long as the number on the customer profile has 10 digits, you will be able to send text message notifications.

If you need to check if the format for a particular phone number is valid, you can check using the following link: https://www.twilio.com/lookup.

SMS Delivery Statuses

  • Sent - This status indicates Twilio has received a confirmation from the mobile carrier of the recipient advising they have accepted the message.

  • Delivered - This status indicates Twilio has received a confirmation from the mobile carrier of the recipient advising the message has been delivered.

  • Other statuses include Undelivered and Failed. Some messages may also stay as "Sent".

NOTE: Due to the frequently changing requirements and message filtering by mobile operators in China, our SMS provider, Twilio, will only send messages to China on a “best efforts” basis. Messages may be delivered with a generic signature appended in the content and/or with arbitrary local phone numbers as the Sender ID.

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