Text Reminders & Notifications Are Here

By: Blink Lesson

Attendance is frustrating, isn't it? Music teachers lose money and students lose progress. At Blink Lesson, we are here to help. Today we launched text (SMS) lesson reminders, but we didn't stop there. We have also implemented a notification preferences system, allowing you and your students to control what notifications they get and where they get it.

Students can choose to receive appointment reminders, message, invoice, and homework notifications via email, text, or both. Email lesson reminders are still sent 24 hours before, but text one hour. We've found, this extra sms notification really helps students show up.

And the best part, text reminders and notifications are included in all plans at no additional cost! If you're on the Blink Go plan, now is a great time to upgrade to Blink Pro. Use one amazing platform to help your entire lesson business run smoothly.

The Details

**Currently, text reminders are only available for organizations and Students in the U.S. or Canada.



Setup

At launch, we set every student's notification preferences to receive all email notifications. If you or they wish to receive text (SMS) reminders, they will need to select those:

Students can change their notification preferences by clicking "My Account" at the top right.

Staff users can change a student's notification preference by going to, "Logins for Students", then clicking on the student login to edit.

How do Appointment Reminders Work?

First, appointment reminder emails and text are only sent if the organization has that feature turned on.

Second, reminders are only sent if the user (login) has appointment notifications turned on (email, text).

Third, reminders are only sent for appointments with status = "Scheduled".

Email reminders are sent 24 hours before appointments.

Text (sms) reminders are sent approximately one hour before each appointment.

Messages

Students who have email or text notifications for messages on will receive one when they receive a new message.

Homework

Students who have email or text notifications for homework on will receive one when new homework is added, or a staff user edits/deletes homework and marks to notify them.

Invoices

Students who have email or text notifications for invoices on will receive one when they are issued a new invoice.

Other Info

If your organization has, for example, the invoice feature toggled off, the notification options for invoices will not appear. This way, users are not confused.

The address of your organization in Blink Session must be U.S. or Canada for text (sms) notification to be attempted.

If the student's phone number is less or more than 10 digits, the text (sms) notification will not be attempted.

An unsubscribe instruction is added to every text. Recipients can reply "STOP" to halt all texts. To turn all text notifications back on, they can reply with 'UNSTOP'.