SENDING EMAILS TO PUPILS AND THEIR PARENTS/CONTACTS VIA ISAMS

When emailing groups of pupils and/or their parents, rather than individuals, emails should be sent using iSAMS instead of Outlook wherever possible for security reasons. It reduces the risk of parents’ email addresses being revealed to each other, which would be a data breach. Emails sent via iSAMS can also be tracked in the pupils’ communication history so other staff can see exactly what has been sent to whom
Selecting the Pupils in Pupil Manager

Open Pupil Manager. Select the group you want to email – a Year Group, House, etc. Teaching sets can be selected under the Academic tab, and the Custom Groups tab allows access to groups such as trips. Multiple groups can be selected at the same time using the Mulitple View tab. Click ‘Search’ at the bottom of the window.

This will bring up a list of your selected pupils. You may select a few individual pupils by checking the box to the left of their name, or you may select all pupils in one click by checking the box in the header row above the list.

Emailing Pupils or their Parents and Contacts

From the pink ‘Selected Pupils’ dropdown select ‘Email Wizard’ at the bottom of the menu. If you don’t have permissions in iSAMS to do this it can be set up on request. (The feature is left disabled for staff who have no need of it as an additional security measure.)

A new prompt box will appear – to email the School mailboxes of the pupils themselves, tick the ‘Selected pupils’ tick box, and/or to email the parents and other contacts of the pupils, select ‘Contacts for the selected pupils’ before clicking ‘Next’.

The next window shows the Relation Types that are listed on iSams for your group of pupils – tick the box at the top to select them all.

Then click on the tab “Filter by Contact Type”. Either select Reports or Correspondence, as required, then click Next.

Correspondence filters down to those contacts set to receive day-to-day correspondence, filtering out any aunts, grandparents, etc. listed solely as emergency contacts. Reports filters down to an even narrower sub-set, it will include all parents, primary contacts and some Guardians.

The next window will show you the list of people you have selected. Click Next, and the window to compose your email opens.

Email Subject – There is a character limit, please be concise Merge Template - If you send a similar email repeatedly you can have a template saved for it, or just ignore it Merge Fields - Allow you to personalise your email. For example, using the ‘Letter Salutation’ option which displays as
     Dear {{parent.txtlettersalutation}}
would display to the parent as appropriate – for instance
     Dear Mr & Mrs Smith
The ‘Other,Useful Field’ gives you the option to select pronouns so that the email wizard will use he/she dependent on the pupil rather than having to use a generic ‘they’.