Administrator

Messages and announcements

Two tools for two needs: messages to address someone, announcements to publish information people come and read.

In brief

The seven ways to target a group send.
What an announcement does that a message does not.
Who gets an email and who only gets a notification.

Writing a message

A message carries a subject, a body of at most 5,000 characters and up to five attachments of 5 MB each (PDF, Word, Excel).

Attachments count against your storage

They come out of the school's quota. For a heavy document sent to every family, prefer a link to your usual file-sharing space.

Group sending

composing a message, with the choice of target — **Figure 1** — The target is chosen before writing. Read it twice: “All parents” and “One group’s parents” sit next to each other.

Reserved to the administrator, it saves composing three hundred identical messages. Seven targets are available:

Target	When to use it
Named recipients	You pick people one by one.
One student's parents	An individual matter: repeated lateness, a meeting.
One group's parents	A school trip, a room change for one class.
All parents	School-wide information: closure, start-of-year meeting.
Named teachers	A specific teaching team.
All teachers	An internal instruction.
One subject's teachers	A departmental meeting, a syllabus change.

In a training centre, "parents" becomes "learners"

When the parent portal is switched off, every "parents" target automatically redirects to the learners themselves. Nothing changes in your habits.

Read the target before you send

A send cannot be recalled. All parents and One group's parents sit next to each other in the list, and the mistake is easily made.

Announcements

An announcement is a school publication: it stays available to read, can carry an image and attachments, and is targeted by group. It is the right medium for a calendar, a set of rules or start-of-year information.

The payment button

With the matching option, you can drop a payment button into an announcement, choosing its address and its label — pointing at your usual payment tool for a school trip, for instance. The recipient's email address can be added to the address automatically.

Kiteba handles no payments

That button is simply a link to your own solution. No money moves between the school and families through Kiteba, and no bank details are stored in it.

Who gets told

Every recipient gets a notification in the app, and an email if their preferences allow it. Someone who has switched emails off will see the message when they sign in, but not in their inbox.

For an emergency, do not rely on messages alone

Nothing guarantees a parent opens the app within the hour. For an unexpected closure, double up with your usual channel.

Message or announcement?

You want to…	Use
Get a reply from someone	Message
Inform without expecting a reply	Announcement
Reach a whole class with an attachment	Announcement targeted at the group
Deal with an individual case	Message to the student's parents