For administrators with advanced messaging, a premium feature is only available with Remind Hub. To learn more, please contact your Customer Success Manager or our Support team. 

Remind gives you the ability to upload a list of student numbers and privately reach those students and their parents to notify them of absences, lunch money balances, missed assignments, or other important updates that impact their child's academic progress. Check out our guide here to see examples of the kind of custom messages you can send via the admin dashboard.

Once you upload a list of student numbers from your Student Information System (SIS), we'll match those student numbers to rostered students in your district within Remind. You can then choose to send an announcement to those specific students, parents, guardians at the district or school level.

This article contains the following sections:

• Tips
• Message a custom list of students and parents
• Solving common troubleshooting issues

  • Error uploading CSV file

  • Unidentified students
  • Student numbers

Tips

• Disable replies to your messages prior to sending your custom message if you do not want to receive responses to your message. 
• Make sure you've established a CSV or Clever sync with Remind within the last 90 days before you try to message a custom list of students or parents. Click here to learn more. 

Message a custom list of students and parents

1. Log in to your Remind account.
2. Click on New Message on the left menu navigation. 
   • Note 1: You cannot send a message to a custom list of students and parents as an urgent message.
   • Note 2: The maximum number of students you can send a message by student ID is 8,000.
3. Click the Upload list of student numbers tab on the Message pop-up box.
4. Click the Organization dropdown menu.
5. Select the district or school your custom list of students and/or parents are members of to ensure the correct participants receive your message.
   • Message recipients will not see who else received your message.
6. Click Download a template.
   • Use the downloaded CSV file template as a guide to create your own custom file.
   • If you decide to use the template provided, replace the data in the student_number column with your students' unique student number.
7. Save the student_number spreadsheet as a CSV file on your computer with a unique name.
   • Examples of file names: absentnotices.csv, librarynotices.csv, or lunchbalance.csv.
8. Upload or drag or drop your CSV file onto the Message pop-up box in Remind.
   • If you get an error uploading your file, go to our CSV upload error section for troubleshooting help.

   • If any student numbers don't match students in your school, the student numbers will be highlighted in yellow at the top of the list of recipients. Go to our Unidentified students section for suggested next steps.

9. Under the Selected section on the right, check who you would like to receive the announcement - Students, Parents and guardians, or both. 
   • If you select Parents and Guardians on the message pop-up box, every parent and guardian associated with the matched students will receive your announcement. 
   • Some students may not have parents or guardians connected to them. The number of missing parents will be highlighted in red. You can continue and send your message without linking parents or guardians to these students. If you do want to connect a student to their parent(s) or guardian(s), follow the steps below to add them manually or add them to your SIS sync data. 
   • To manually add individual parents and guardians:
     • Under the Parents and Guardians column, click the plus sign next to the student missing their parent or guardian.
     • If the parent or guardian is in Remind, their first and last name will populate. Select their name, and click Add parent.
     • If the parent or guardian is not yet in Remind, but you know their phone number or email address, you can add them to Remind by clicking Add parent or guardian to Remind at the bottom of the search results.
10. Click Continue.
11. Compose your Announcement.
12. Click Send.

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Solving common troubleshooting issues

Error uploading CSV file

If you run into an error uploading your CSV file, and/or see the error messages shown in the images below, confirm the following:

• Your file is a CSV file.
• Your file contains one column with the header student_number.
• You can open and view your CSV file on your computer.
• You selected the right school from the dropdown before uploading your CSV.
• You uploaded the student_number CSV file for the correct district or school.

Unidentified students

You may see Unidentified instead of a student's name as well as an error icon next to their student number. This means there isn't a student with that particular student number in your SIS data for your CSV or Clever sync in Remind. We recommend sending your message to the successfully matched students, and then resolving the unidentified student numbers.

To fix this error, go to your SIS, look up the students, update your SIS sync files with their correct student number, and then upload all required CSV files to Remind for your rostering type. If you have an automatic sync established between your SIS and Clever, any updates you make directly in your SIS will be pushed to Remind via Clever on a nightly basis between 11pm and 5am PT.

Student Numbers

All of your students may not have a student number associated with them in Remind. If this is the case, you'll see an error message box that lets you know the percentage of students that you can send a custom message to. For example, if 35% of your students have student numbers on Remind, you can send a custom message specifically to those students. You can send a regular announcement, individual, or group message to the other 65% of students. If you see 0%, as shown in the image below, you will not be able to send a custom message to anyone in the district or school. 

To fix this error, go to your SIS and update your CSV files with all of the students you want to have a rostered account with a student number in Remind. Then upload all required files to Remind. If you have an automatic sync established between your SIS and Clever, any updates you make directly in your SIS will be pushed to Remind via Clever on a nightly basis between 11pm and 5am PT. See our Guide to SIS Syncing with Remind for more information. 

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