With over 450,000 children attending 3,300 primary schools in Ireland, the IPPN needed to find a cost effective, quick and easy way to send information, notifications and alerts directly to parents and teachers anytime, anywhere.

By offering a text alert and messaging service, IPPN could ensure that parents and staff were able to easily keep abreast of important information and notifications such as school closures, cancellation of bus services, crisis events, school tragedies, staff updates, fundraising event support and many other significant reminders and motivational messages in a matter of seconds.

The Solution

Clickatell's expertise helped the IPPN educators develop a service dubbed TextaParent for school administrators to communicate quickly and easily with parents, staff and community services via SMS.

IPPN principals simply access and manage the SMS system by logging onto a website and registering their school community for an account.   Once registered, they simply enter the list of mobile phone numbers they wish to send a message to, type in their message and press send.

Within minutes, heads of schools can notify selected target groups of unpredictable events like changes, closures and cancellations due to severe weather or more happy announcements such as school achievements or sports day victories.

The Results

The TextaParent SMS service has allowed schools in Ireland to deliver important reminders; updates and even motivational messages to better organize and prompt large and often diverse populations.

For schools - who constantly suffer from budgetary constraints - the TextaParent SMS service has become an extremely cost effective and time saving solution. Any message can be sent directly from any PC, laptop or PDA anytime anywhere, and given Clickatell's global coverage, are received on all major Irish networks immediately. And in worst-case scenarios, text messaging may prove to be the fastest, widest and most reliable way to disseminate emergency information during a school or community crisis.