Any contact linked against a student in Enrolments has the potential to be utilised as a communications contact in Messaging. Whether the contact/s belong to a household or not does not affect whether the contact will be available in Messaging.

Enrolments Module

On the Associated Contacts page, users are given the ability to add contacts against a student as well as order the contacts according to priority. The ordering will be important as it plays a part in determining whether the contact will be automatically selected as the 1st or subsequent communications contact. Contacts also will require the Receives Absences permission selected against them to be eligible for use in Messaging.

Messaging - Student's Contacts

In the Address Book the student's available contacts should be listed in the same ordering as configured in Enrolments. For example:

Messaging - Setup

There are 2 potential settings which will affect whether contact/s for a student are chosen to be the communication contact/s for scenarios such as sending Late Arrival notification to parents / guardians.

Preferred Contacts Selection Sequence - This setting controls how many contacts in order should be considered as eligible contacts for notifications. E.g. if set to '3', then it would tell Sentral that the first 3 contacts are eligible for selection.

Automatically Selected Preferred Contacts Sequence - This setting controls how many contacts in order Sentral would automatically suggest and select to send notifications to. E.g. if set to '2', then Sentral will pick the first two eligible contacts to be the communication contacts.

Messaging - Scenario Example

Based on the example data provided above, the following scenario explanation will involve attempting to send an absence notification for the student.

Email Section

Sebastian and Helen are selected by default as Sentral can validate the TWO contacts are ranked first and second respectively out of THREE eligible contacts. Should the school need to add Oli has the communication contact as well, the school is able to do so as Oli is ranked third out of the THREE eligible contacts.

SMS Section

Despite Messaging config set to find TWO contacts out of THREE eligible contacts, Oli is selected as the only contact as he's the only contact with a mobile number. Attempts to manually add Sebastian and Helen wouldn't work either as no mobile number is available.