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Group Messages

By Trio Team · Updated

A group message is one message that you send to many families at once, for example a snow-day closure or a recital reminder. Only owners and admins can send group messages. If you are a teacher or a staff member, ask an owner or admin to send it for you.

For a conversation with one person or a small group, see Messages and Conversations.

Reach families who have no Trio login

A new group message has only In-App ticked. In-App reaches only people who have a Trio login, so families with no Trio login get nothing. To reach families who have no Trio login, tick Email / SMS per preference.

Send a group message

  1. In Messages, open the Group Messages tab and select New Group Message.
  2. Under Audience, choose the Recipients:
    • All families - every family in your studio
    • Filtered by criteria - the families of one teacher, or the families that have a lesson on one day of the week
    • Custom selection - families that you pick. Everyone in a family who can get messages is included: each guardian, and each student who has their own Trio login.
  3. Select Preview recipients to see how many people will get the message, and how many have no Trio account.
  4. Under Compose, choose the Delivery Channels: In-App, Email / SMS per preference, or both.
  5. Enter a Subject and write the message.
  6. Select Preview Message to check it. Then select Send Group Message and confirm.

How each person gets it

  • In-App - each person who has a Trio login sees the message in their Messages, as a studio announcement. They cannot reply to it.
  • Email / SMS per preference - Trio emails each person who has email turned on. It sends a text only to a person who has email turned off or no usable email address, and who has texts turned on. So most people get a group message by email. To see how the message reads as a text, select Show plain-text preview (SMS).

With Email / SMS per preference, the recipient preview also tells you why some people are left out, for example "2 have texts turned off" or "1 have no email or phone on file". Two of these lines come from email problems: "have an email address that bounced" and "marked a past email as spam". Trio skips those addresses. See Email problems for how to find the family and, for a bounce, try the address again.

When a family replies to the email, the reply goes to the email address on your teacher profile, not to Trio. If you have no teacher profile, the reply goes to Trio's no-reply address, where nobody reads it.

The monthly text limit

Trio blocks a group message that uses Email / SMS per preference when your studio has used all its texts for the month. It also blocks it when the texts used so far, plus every recipient outside Trio, would pass the monthly limit. This counts people who would get email, so it can happen while texts remain. Send In-App only, or send to a smaller group.

For the limit on each plan, see Text Messages and Replies.

After you send

The result shows how many messages Trio sent and how many people got the in-app message. A warning shows when nobody got the in-app message.

To see the delivery report, open a sent message on the Group Messages tab. It shows Recipients, Delivered, Failed and Suppressed, plus Pending while some messages are still being sent. Below the totals, a list shows each person, the channel, the address and the status.

Get help writing a group message

The Ask Trio button does not show on the Messages page, on any tab. Help me reply is only in conversations. To get help with a group message, open Ask Trio on another page first. The panel stays open when you go to Messages, and Ask Trio knows which group message you are writing.

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