If you change your email address, then you should re-subscribe on your school's website. If you still have access to your old email address, then you should unsubscribe from receiving emails on this account (see quesiton below on unsubscribing). If you don't have access to this email address anymore, then you don't have to do anything. School Enews will delete it automatically from the schools list over time.

When you subscribed via your school's website, did you receive a confirmation email with an "Activate Now" link in it? Did you click this link? After you subscribe on the website by entering in your name and email address, you are sent an email to confirm your email address. You confirm your email address by clicking the "Activate Now" link inside the email. If you didn't receive this email, you probably made a mistake typing in your email address. You should try subscribing again or you can also call your school as ask them to manually add your email address. Your school can easily add in new email addresses - they should know how to do it.

There is a chance that the school's email is ending up in your spam folder or being blocked by your ISP / email account provider. If a school is writing a (short or long) message in the Body of the email (like that should be), then this is extremely rare. Please check your spam in your email program or contact your ISP / email provider to "whitelist" emails using @schoolenews.com.au email addresses. If you have another email address, you could also subscribe using this email address and see if the problem still exists. Some ISPs and email account providers have email accounts that are not "perfectly reliable".

Your school should send all attachments as a PDF file. You need to have the free "Adobe Acrobat Reader" software installed on your computer. You can download it here. If you can still not open the attachment when clicking on the link in the top left corner of the email from your school; you can click on the statement "Having issues with this email? Click here" or "If you cannot view the email below, please Click Here" which is in small writing above your schools logo in the email. Then try clicking on the attachment again in the top left corner. If you are still experiencing problems, then there is an issue with your computer.

Sometimes schools send home emails with multiple attchments. All attachments should be in the PDF format. Sometimes schools send home Word (.doc or .docx) and Publisher (.pub) files which can only be opened if you have certain software on your computer. Schools should not do this - all files should be in PDF. Please contact them by email or phone and ask them to convert all the files to PDF. If both files are a PDF file and you can open one but not the other, then there was most probably as issue that happened when the school created the PDF file. Also please make sure you have the most recent "Adobe Acrobat Reader" installed on your computer. It is free and you can download it here.

Please phone your school and ask them to manually add your email address to receive the newsletter. Your school can easily add in new email addresses - they should know how to do it.

At the top and bottom of the emails you receive from your school, there is a link to unsubscribe. You should first try clicking on this link. If this doesn't work for you, please contact your school (email or phone) and ask them to take you off their list. Your school has the ability to manually delete email addresses. The schools contact details can be found at the bottom of every email that you receive from them.

School Enews welcomes feedback and is constantly working to improve the School Enews system for both parents and schools. It is one of our highest priorities to make sure parents can open and read the school's newsletter. The number of parents that have trouble is a small minority, although still an important one! We often phone and help parents if they are having trouble and their issue has come to our attention usually from the school. However, we don't have the resources to assist all parents free of charge. Our main role is to assist schools in using School Enews. Therefore, you should try asking a friend or computer professional for support.

When sending the bulk email (which also updates the iPhone / iPad app), schools should also attach the newsletter PDF file and not just link back to their school website. This allows users / parents to open the PDF file directly inside the School Enews app without having to open the website in Safari and then click on a link in the webpage. Please contact us and we will follow this up directly with your school. Schools are allowed to link back to their website (for photos and files), however, they should also attach the newsletter PDF file.

School Enews is a solution that allows you to manage lists of parents and then effortlessly send bulk emails to these parents. You still create your newsletter as you have always done in Microsoft Word or Publisher (for most schools) and then instead of printing it, you simply send it out via email. See question 4 for the benefits. We are continuously improving School Enews and you receive these updates free of charge.

There is a once off cost and also an ongoing cost. The ongoing cost of School Enews depends on the number of subscribers that you have for your newsletter. A subscriber is anyone that has signed up to receive your newsletter via email (eg. parents). We offer three plans starting with our $0 plan which is $0 per year for up to 1000 subscribers. See the Pricing page for more information and contact us.

We offer both phone and email support. Our office hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00am till 5:30pm (NSW time zone). We offer phone support 52 weeks of the year (except weekend and public holidays). Please call - we are happy to answer your questions.

General benefits include:
  1) Saves paper, time and money at your school ($1000s per year for most schools)
  2) Newsletters can be in full colour
  3) Newsletters can't be lost or forgotten
  4) A parent that doesn't live with their child/childen can still receive the newsletter

School Enews benefits:
  1) You send one email and School Enews sends it up to 6000 email addresses within seconds
  2) Automatic list cleaning of old and bounced emails to reduce the time it takes managing your list
  3) Professional - School Enews automatically adds your school logo and contact details to each email
  4) When an email is sent, it can automatically update your website, Facebook Page and iOS app
  5) Easy for office staff to use - if they can send an email then they can use School Enews
  6) Subscribe Form for your website so parents can subscribe themselves
  7) Unsubscribe link added to your emails so parents can take themselves off your list
  8) iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad app for parents, teachers and students (other platforms coming soon)
  9) Can be used by multiple people from multiple computers / devices
  10) "Signed emails" which are much less likely to end up in parents Spam folders!

In our free "How To" guide to implementing email newsletters at your school (which we will send you when you sign up), we discuss how to handle this scenario. In short, we recommend offering a printed copy for parents that don't have internet access at home or work. Parents who don't have an email account are a very small percentage of the population (after all 10 million+ Australian's have a Facebook account and the number with an email address is higher than this). It is impossible to wait for 100% penetration before moving forward with progress and better ways of doing things.

Most certainly! Although you must send out your school newsletter using School Enews and not just notes and reminders etc.

Yes, however, School Enews has unique features that you might wish to consider. See question 4 above in the "General" section. In addition, a distribution list won't work if you have over 100 email addresses.

No. Even though you are sending out just one email via School Enews to all the parents/people on your list, each parent still can not see the email addresses of the other parents. School Enews automatically stops this from happening.

Yes. This allows the parent to click the "Reply" button and send an email back to the school if they wish to do so.

Yes, most certainly. Multiple authorised staff can have access to your School Enews account so you all have the ability to manage your account and send bulk emails to parents.

So that your parents can download and read your newsletter as quickly as possible, it is important to compress your images before creating your PDF file. After compressing the images, you usually can't see any visual difference. You can call us for assistance or for Microsoft Word read this artcile and for Microsoft Publisher read this article.

Your newsletter and any files that you send to parents should be saved as a PDF file. The latest versions of Microsoft Word and Publisher allow you to save PDF files directly. If you are using an older version, you can install and use Primo PDF which is free. You may contact us for assistance. Saving your files as a PDF is VERY important (and more important than most people understand). A PDF file can be opened using free software called Adobe Acrobat Reader which is free for parents to download and install. If you send out a .docx (Word) or .xlsx (Excel) file, only parents who have purchased Microsoft software will be able to open these documents.

Yes. We have already setup and registered all emails from @schoolenews.com.au to use SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys / DKIM. This helps to improve the delivery of your email without the hassle of your having to setup authentication yourself on your own account. This is why all emails from School Enews are sent using @schoolenews.com.au email addresses.

Every time you send an email to the School Enews system, it must come from an authorized account and have a matching PIN / password in the Subject field. The addition of the PIN / password stops people from being able to spoof your account.