It is so important to make sure that Parents and Guardians at your school understand the value of engaging with Satchel One and know how to get the best out of the platform!
Sometimes it can be tricky to encourage these users to create their Satchel One accounts initially, so we wanted to share some resources that can really help with this.
Introduce Parents / Guardians to Satchel One
When you first start using Satchel One at your school, you'll need to generate Parent Codes to allow Parents and Guardians to create their accounts.
When they use the codes you've provided, they will automatically be linked to their children and be able to oversee their Satchel One activity as well as receive notifications and reminders about their school life.
We have a range of 'Getting Started' resources you can use to help Parents and Guardians engage with Satchel One and often it can help to use these during your initial rollout of the platform; please follow the link below to access.
You can explore the articles below to learn more about generating Parent Codes in bulk for use at your school.
Check Parental Activity Levels
It's handy to check in regularly on your user activity statistics for staff, students and parent users too.
Data shared by Satchel:
To help with this, the Customer Success team at Satchel will provide Administrators with your most recent user activity rates on a monthly basis; you can find these by visiting the 'Reports' area of Satchel One. Click here to go there now!
Obtain your own data:
You can explore the User Activity Report to track when your users last logged in. Click here to learn more about using this report.
Remember that you can:
Apply filters at your discretion to focus on specific user groups / individuals
Export your report to XLS and manually consolidate your data
Schedule this report so that it's delivered to you automatically at time intervals of your choice - perfect for long-term tracking!
Identify Parents Without an Account
⚠️ Please note ⚠️
Generating new login details in bulk will cause any unused PINs / codes to expire.
In Satchel One, click on Admin > Login details.
Select an individual year group, registration group, or the whole school. Once you've made your selection, click Continue.
Select Mail Merge File. Under ‘Users to include’, ensure that both Students (All) and Parents/Guardians are ticked.
Click Generate. This will generate an XLS spreadsheet containing the students and any linked parent accounts. Download the spreadsheet.
Scroll across to 'Parent/Guardian 1 Last Active' (column O). If you see a date, the parent has created their account and this is when they last logged in. You'll also see the name and the email address they entered when creating their account (columns K-M).
However, if the cell is blank, the parent hasn't created an account yet.
Column K contains the Parent Code, which the parent needs to use in order to create their account and link themselves to their child.
Remind Parents to Create An Account
Now that you have your mail merge document containing Parent Codes, you can merge it with our reminder letter!
Download our 'Create Parent Account - Reminder Email/Letter' file and merge with your spreadsheet.
This letter references all of the Satchel One apps; if your school does not use some of the apps on this letter, please amend the wording on the letter once you've downloaded it to suit your needs.
If you're unsure of how to mail merge documents, you can read our guide here.
Send out your letters and keep the momentum going!
Provide Parents with helpful resources:
Inviting Individual Parents / Guardians
You may well need to introduce new guardians to Satchel One throughout the academic year; the best way to do this is to generate login details for them individually rather than trying to do this in bulk.
Go to Admin > Manage Users and locate the relevant student.
Look in the 'Actions' column at the far right of the student
You will see a range of icons, including a PDF letter icon (Print letter) and a padlock (Get codes).
You can choose to:
📝 'Print letter': This will generate a PDF 'slip' style letter showing login details for both the student and their parent / guardian. It also includes instructions about how to access / create their respective accounts.
This is a nice introductory format for users who have not previously been introduced to Satchel One.
🔒 'Get codes': This will very simply surface student login details and the current Parent code on screen; you can share these directly with users as necessary without needing to generate a full letter.
This is a quick and easy way of supplying parents / guardians with a new code if theirs has expired.
Keep Parents Engaged and Supported
Add our 'Parent Welcome Pack' to the school website so it's easily accessible
Make use of the Notice board on Satchel One to send non-homework based communications - if there is an announcement or event you want to share, they will be notified of this!
Remind parents that they can upgrade to 'Satchel One Plus' if they need further support
Upgrade your school's account to include Satchel Essentials: Premium Support; this enables parents and guardians to have access to our in-app chat support. If they ever need guidance or help, they can reach out directly to the Satchel team!
Why not host a Parents Evening and use some of our 'Getting Started' resources for Parents / Guardians to talk about Satchel One? We have video guides, presentations and flyers that you can use and adapt to meet your needs.
Conduct a survey with your users! We have 'Homework Satisfaction Surveys' that you can use freely within your school to assess the impact Satchel One is having at your school.