BrightArrow is our mass-communication platform.
Brightarrow will be gone next year, probably replaced by ParentSquare. In the meantime, it can be used by Office staff for mass communication.
Your login will be provided by the Tech Dept. and shared with all the office staff at your school.
You can send out mass Text messages, emails, or phone calls
Text Messages are sent one-way only. Users are first sent a "Please respond with YES to opt-in to receive texts" message. If they respond, then they'll get the real message. This only happens the first time.People can respond to emails, and it will go to whatever email was set as the "From" email when creating the message. Responses do not appear in Brightarrow.
Calls can be either an AI generated voice, or a recording.
Everything can be automatically translated to the user's language.
Lists of contacts are populated based on data from Synergy.
Parent and student data is quite good. Staff data is a mess.
Parent lists do NOT contain emergency contacts. Only parents/guardians, based on what the parent entered into Synergy during registration.
Emergency contact info has never, ever, at any point been accessible to BrightArrow. It is thus technically impossible for Brightarrow to send messages to emergency contacts.
That has never happened, nor will it ever happen.
Head to https://target1010.brightarrow.com/ and login:
This is what the dashboard looks like. Go ahead and click "My Lists"
The lists you can see will depend on which schools you are in.
Please do not try to modify the existing lists. They are populated automatically with data from Synergy.
If we look at the PES Staff list, we can see all the users associated with this school.
The data is sourced from Synergy, and Synergy staff data is a trainwreck, so there will likely be people in here who do not belong.
Parent and student data is pretty good.
You'll notice on the left, all the users are selected with a
checkmark by default. If we want to send out a mass email, all we need to do is click the "Create Message" button near the
top left:
The rest of it is relatively self-explanatory. When sending an email, don't forget to set the "From" email to wherever you'd like mail to come in when anyone responds.
You can set this to "No-Reply@philomath.k12.or.us" if you don't want to receive responses.
One interesting bit is the Mail Merge Field, this lets you replace bits in an email or text with custom data, like the parents name:
When the message is sent out, it will replace the [[firstName]] part with the actual first name of whoever you sent it to.
When you are finished, you can choose the proceed tab, and you'll have options to send the message now, preview it, schedule it, or save it.
You are welcome to create custom lists and fill them with whoever you like.