Messages & Communication

Kanri’s Messages area brings together recorded email and text messages to your members, whether it’s a one-to-one reply to a parent’s question or a broadcast to your whole school. It has three tabs: Inbox, Outbox, and Templates.

You’ll find Messages in two places:

• Messages in the main sidebar — the school-wide Inbox for conversations that have received an incoming message, plus the Outbox and Templates.
• The Messages tab on a member’s profile — the same inbox, filtered down to just that member and their contacts. Handy when you’re already looking at someone’s profile and want to see or continue a conversation with them. See Member Messages for profile-specific guidance.

Watch an overview

Conversations vs. broadcasts

These are the two ways messages get sent, and it’s worth keeping them straight:

• A conversation is a one-to-one thread with a single member or contact, by email or by text message (SMS). Conversations behave like an email inbox: you can reply, mark them read or unread, flag important ones, and archive old ones.
• A broadcast is one message sent out to many members at once, targeted at a program, a group, or a custom filter. They’re for announcements, reminders, and newsletters. Each recipient gets an individual message, not a shared group conversation. A broadcast does not bring an archived conversation back into the main Inbox.

See Send a Message for conversations and Send a Broadcast for broadcasts.

The three tabs

• Inbox — conversations with incoming messages. A new outgoing-only conversation remains available in the Outbox and the member’s Messages tab without appearing in this school-wide list until someone replies. Search message text, filter, reply, flag, and archive. See Send a Message and Reply & Manage Conversations.
• Outbox — recorded outgoing emails and text messages, including automatic emails like receipts and invites, plus broadcasts and their delivery progress. See The Outbox. If a recipient did not get a message, see Troubleshoot Message Delivery.
• Templates — reusable subject/body content you can drop into a message instead of writing it from scratch every time, including a drag-and-drop email builder. See Templates.

What you need to send messages

• Email does not need the SMS phone-number setup. Your school still needs access to communications and available email quota.
• SMS (text messages) requires a phone number set up under Settings → Branding → Phone Number. Until that’s done, the SMS option won’t be available when composing.
• You’ll need the View Messages permission to read conversations, and Manage Messages to send, compose broadcasts, or manage templates. See your school’s Roles to check or grant these.

Next steps

Send a message Start a new conversation with a member or contact.

Send a broadcast Message a whole program, group, or custom list of members at once.

Create a template Save time on messages you send often.

Review the Outbox Review recorded outgoing messages, including automatic emails.