Parents want to know what’s happening at your school – what’s the best way to tell them? In the past it was crumpled sheets of A4 hastily stuffed into folders and rucksacks, to hopefully be handed to parents a few weeks later. Luckily, your website lets you manage this in a much easier way. Two ways, in fact! This week we’ll be looking at email newsletters, and next week we’ll cover news items.
Part One: Newsletters
Newsletters are emails you can send out to your subscriber list. Setting them up couldn’t be simpler either.
First, you’re going to want to create some Newsletters in your Jotter Site backend. Log in, visit your homepage and click on the Manage tab, then click “Newsletters”.
You’ll see the following screen, showing a list of any emails you might have created – by default though, this will be blank. You’ll notice two options at the top: Add Newsletter and Subscriptions.
First, we’ll look at the subscriptions area, this is where you manage who the emails will go to.
We’ll go through the buttons at the top in order now:
- Add subscription – Allows you to manually input a username and email
- Download spreadsheet – Lets you export your subscribers to a CSV file
- Import spreadsheet – Lets you import a CSV of names and email addresses
Additionally, you can edit and unsubscribe individual addresses manually by using the Edit and Unsubscribe links to the right of each field.
Please note, you can only have the one address book, so we recommend using it for parents and interested parties.
Now we can go back and look at the Add Newsletter dialogue
To anyone who’s used an email client before, this should be pretty straightforward:
- Title: The subject line of the email you want to send
- Description: The text and content you’d like to include in the email
- Date: When you plan to send the email
- File attachment: Used for things like images or PDFs
Once that’s filled in and saved, all you need to do is click “Email to subscribers” on the main newsletter screen (the second image), and confirm you want to send it. And that’s it, you’re done! Next week, we’ll be showing you how to embed newsletters into your site, for a self-updating page.
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