Announcements & Email Blasts

Each channel has a different reach and feel. Use the one that matches your intent:

Announcements, email blasts and texts all offer the same four audiences, and who each one reaches is not always obvious from its name:

• All members — every active adult member of your co-op. Student sign-ins are never included.
• Board / admin only — members holding the Owner or Admin role.
• Teachers & admins — your staff: Owners, Admins and Teachers. It does not include families who have claimed volunteer shifts.
• Selected families — the households you pick by hand.

To reach the families covering your shifts, use Selected families. To reach any other hand-picked group without broadcasting to your whole co-op, start from the Families page rather than the Announcements or Email screen directly.

Announcements post to your co-op’s shared feed and email recipients who haven’t opted out. They’re the fastest way to get information in front of everyone.

Every announcement also shows up in each recipient’s notification bell, and anyone with the HomeschoolGo app on their phone gets a push notification. There’s nothing to turn on. Each member can switch those notifications off for themselves under Co-op announcements in the Communication preferences card on their profile. That switch doesn’t stop the announcement email.

Members see announcements in their Announcements feed. They also receive an email unless they’ve unsubscribed using the link at the bottom of a previous announcement or blast email.

An announcement can carry a short text message alongside the feed post and the email. It is for the few times neither of those is fast enough: a cancellation an hour before you meet, a room change on the morning of.

Nothing on your Announcements screen changes until an admin turns this on. Go to Settings › Programs, find the Announcement text alerts card, and check Let admins add a text alert to an announcement.

It also needs text messaging working first: the Plus plan, a co-op based in the United States, and an approved carrier registration. Until all three are in place the composer shows what is still missing and a link to Text Messaging instead of the option. The SMS setup guide covers getting there.

The two deliveries are kept separate on purpose. If the text fails, the announcement is still posted and still emailed, and you get a warning telling you the text did not go out so you can resend it from Text Messaging. It will never republish the announcement to get the text through.

On a scheduled announcement your message allowance is checked when it goes out, not when you schedule it. If you are short at that point, the announcement posts and the text alert is recorded as failed.

Email blasts go straight to inboxes, with no in-app notification and no feed post. They’re the right tool for newsletters, longer updates, and anything where how the email looks matters.

Blasts respect your co-op’s configured time zone when scheduled. Members who have unsubscribed from marketing email won’t receive them. System emails still reach everyone.

By default a teacher who needs to tell parents what to bring next week has to ask you to send it. The class message thread doesn’t fill the gap: it sends no email, so a post sits there until each family next signs in.

You can hand that job to teachers instead. With class updates on, a teacher can email the parents of students enrolled in a class they teach. They can’t reach anyone else at your co-op, and nothing else about what teachers can do changes.

A teacher then opens one of their classes under Teaching and writes the update on the Updates tab. If they run several sections of the same class, they can tick all of them and write it once. Every family gets a single email, so a household with two children in two sections isn’t emailed twice.

Before it sends, the composer says how many families it will reach, and names any it can’t. Before giving up on a household it checks the contact email on the roster record, then the email on a parent’s login, then the household’s own address, so a family is only listed as unreachable when all three are empty. That short list is worth a look the first time: it is usually the fastest way to find the households with no address anywhere.

One thing this reaches that the message thread cannot is an adult with no login. Co-parents and grandparents are often listed on a household with an email address and no account of their own, and they are frequently the person who actually packs the bag.

You can read everything teachers have sent under Admin › Communications › Class updates. It is a record, not an approval queue. Nothing waits for you and nothing needs your sign-off.

Admins and owners can send a class update whether or not the setting is on, since you can already email these families through a blast. The setting only decides whether teachers can.

Announcements and email blasts can both be scheduled to go out later. You can write and queue everything in advance, then let HomeschoolGo handle delivery.

Every email blast you’ve sent is saved on the Email blasts tab. Each entry shows the subject, sent date, recipient count, and how many were skipped (opted-out or undeliverable).

Click any entry to open a full preview of exactly what was sent. If a blast failed to deliver, a Resend button appears on that entry. Click it to retry without recreating the message.

How do members opt out of announcement emails or email blasts?

There’s no profile toggle for this. Members click the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of any announcement or blast email. It’s a single setting that covers both channels together, so a member can’t opt out of one and keep receiving the other. Direct messages (from the Inbox) are not affected.

Class updates are the exception. Those carry their own narrower link that switches off class updates and nothing else, so a parent muting supply notes from one teacher doesn’t accidentally stop your closure notices too. The general unsubscribe still covers everything, class updates included.

You can see who has opted out, and undo it. Admin › Communications › Email has an Unsubscribed tab listing every address that has opted out of your co-op’s email, with the reason and the date. Click Resubscribe next to anyone who did it by accident. The change is recorded in your audit log. Addresses that hard-bounced or reported an email as spam show as Protected and can’t be resubscribed, because sending to those again damages delivery for everyone else at your co-op. Members can also undo it themselves: the page they land on after unsubscribing offers a Resubscribe link.

Who does an email from us look like it’s from?

Your co-op. Announcements, email blasts, event and volunteer reminders, digests, waitlist notices, balance reminders and event signup confirmations all show your co-op’s name as the sender, so a family scanning a full inbox can tell at a glance who wrote. The name comes from your co-op’s name on Admin › Settings, so renaming your co-op there changes what families see on the next send.

Only the name on display is your co-op’s. The address behind it hasn’t changed, so nothing about whether your mail arrives is different. Replies are handled separately, and the next question covers those. Mail from HomeschoolGo itself about your subscription or your account still comes from HomeschoolGo, because that’s us writing to you rather than you writing to your families.

What happens if a family replies to an announcement or a blast?

It goes to the contact email on Admin › Settings. Announcements, email blasts, event and volunteer reminders, and balance reminders are all sent from an address that can’t receive mail, so the reply address is what carries the conversation back to you. Announcements also carry a “Questions? Email …” line at the bottom with the same address. If you haven’t set a contact email, a reply bounces back to the family and reaches nobody, which is the one thing worth fixing before your next send.

A class update is the one exception: a reply to that goes straight to the teacher who sent it.

How do automated reminders work? Do I have to send those manually?

Two kinds of reminders send themselves once they’re set up: event reminders (see the next question) and volunteer shift alerts, which go out about a week before a shift and again closer to it. How close that second one lands is set per shift on the shift form, and a shift can have its reminders turned off entirely. Members control whether they receive these under My Profile › Communication preferences. A payment reminder works differently: you send it by hand, per family, from the Send reminder button on their ledger in Admin › Billing, whenever you want to nudge someone about a balance. There’s no automatic email when a registration window opens or closes either. If you want families to know, send an announcement or a targeted message when you open one.

Can I set up event-specific reminders?

Yes. When editing an event in Admin › Events, you can add timed reminders that go out automatically to all registered attendees, for example 1 week before, 1 day before, or morning of. Those send via email and in-app notifications.

How do I get a headcount for an event, and track who didn’t show?

Open the event in Admin › Events. The signup list shows a breakdown of Registered, Waitlist, Cancelled, and No-show counts at a glance, handy for sizing catering or room setup. After the event, click Mark no-show next to anyone who RSVP’d but didn’t come (or Undo if you marked someone by mistake). This is separate from a family cancelling their own RSVP ahead of time.

A family says they’re not getting my announcements. What should I check?

Start with the Unsubscribed tab in Admin › Communications › Email. If their address is listed, they clicked Unsubscribe at the bottom of a past announcement or blast, which opts them out of both channels together (see the first question above), and you can resubscribe them from there. If the tab shows their address as Protected, their mail provider rejected a previous send or they reported one as spam, and they’ll need to contact you another way. If they’re not on the tab at all, ask them to check their spam folder. Occasionally a first-time message from your co-op lands there until they mark it as not spam.