Defining the Alert Message

Step 1: Select the message type template on the main control screen by clicking the specific tab (One Time Alerts, Recurring Alerts, or Email Newsletters) and then click the new alert link.

  Step 2: Define the alert message.

Subject contains the contents of the subject line for the email.

Short Text is used for the cell phone text message. 

The Short Text (SMS) field size limit is 512 characters. 

If our system has never sent a specific cell phone number a text message before, then the initial text message size will be limited to 160 characters. This initial message limit is required by cell phone carriers as a user opt-in is required to receive texts with more than 160 characters.

Some cell phone carriers recommend that text messages by limited to 140 characters for reliable delivery on all systems (longer SMS messages may be broken up into multiple texts on some carriers, not necessarily in the correct order).

Full Message Text is used for the automated Text-To-Speech phone message and email message. 

The Full Message text field size limit is 512 characters for text-to-speech (this limit also determines the max length of a voice message if text-to-speech is used). If a recorded voice message is used, the max message length allowed is 2 minutes.

Note: The Full Message Text field size limit is 12,288 characters when the Email Newsletters template is used.

Optional Spanish messages: SchoolWise provides the ability to add Spanish translations for your alert message but SchoolWise does not provide the translation service. Optional Spanish messages are only sent to contacts if the language in the associated SchoolWise SIS family form is set to Spanish. Spanish messages can only be added for a telephone voice call or email. Cell phone text messages are available only in English because Spanish characters like ñ or accented characters are not supported in sms text messages. However, the full Spanish message for the telephone voice call and email supports all Spanish characters.

Note: Alert messages can include plain text or other information such as a phone number, email address, or html hyperlink to a website or linked document (such as a pdf file saved in Google Drive). HTML formatted email messages can only be sent as an email newsletter. 

One Time Alerts and Recurring Alerts can include html hyperlinks for text and email messages. The alert message dialog is plain text, thus it does not display html formatted links as underlined text with a different color.

Here is an alert message example with hyperlinks: “Please complete the online registration process now by signing into your parent portal account at https://demo.SchoolWise.com and then fill out the required forms. For an online registration walkthrough summary for parents, see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QPpo7QMJQbFThauwu8GcmA7YXR_35qKs/view.”