Messaging is how the school speaks to everybody at once without becoming a telephone tree. Write a text once, choose who should receive it, pick the channels it travels on, and Ekati delivers it — while keeping a record of what happened for every single recipient.

Three screens. Broadcasts is the workbench: you write a title and a body, attach an image, pick the audience, choose the channels, and either send now or schedule the send. Message Templates holds the texts you send every single year — the start-of-term notice, the holiday reminder, the fee deadline — so next year you are editing two words instead of writing the whole message again. Delivery History is the audit: one row per recipient, with the channel, the address, the status and, when something failed, the reason the operator gave.

The channels available are WhatsApp, Email, Push Notification and the in-app message. Choose at least one — a broadcast with no channel cannot be sent — and choose deliberately rather than ticking everything. A fee deadline is worth an SMS-style message and a phone call; a change of classroom is worth a push notification and nothing else.

Put the action in the first line

The title is the first thing a parent sees in a chat list, and the body is often read on a phone with no time. Write the title as the instruction itself — “Second term fees due 15 March” — rather than as a label like “Fee notice”. If there is one action, put it in the first line of the body with the date and the amount, so nobody has to scroll to discover what the message was for.

Write in the language the family reads

A broadcast title and body can be written in both English and French, and the recipient reads theirs. Every school in Cameroon has families who read one language comfortably and the other reluctantly. Filling both fields costs a minute and removes the reason a parent ignores you.

Attach a link, not a paragraph

Link To turns a button on the message into a page of yours — the admission form, the booklist, the fee history in the learner app. Families act far more often on a link than on an instruction to log in and find something. If you add an Image, keep it simple: a plain picture of the notice or the school logo, not a poster full of small text.

Then choose the channel deliberately

Tick at least one channel or the screen refuses the send. WhatsApp reaches almost every parent and can carry a document; Email suits a long message with attachments; a push notification is right for something urgent and short that a learner or a parent will see on their phone the same day. Two channels on a short announcement is generous; four channels on everything trains parents to ignore all of them.

Target a role, a class or the whole school

On a broadcast, the audience is chosen from what the school actually knows: the roles its members hold, the learner groups — classes — it runs, and the whole institution. Targeting a role is how a school says “all staff”; targeting a class is how it says “all the parents of second year”. Both are drawn from live records, so a message to first year reaches the parents of first year and nobody who has already moved up. Choose deliberately: “Send to everybody” is rarely the right answer to “the second term fees are due on 15 March”.

Send now, or schedule for the morning

Leave the schedule empty and the broadcast goes out as soon as you confirm. Set a schedule time and it waits, which is the correct choice for a notice that should arrive at eight in the morning rather than at ten at night. A schedule in the past is refused, so if you need it gone now, clear the field.

Each broadcast keeps its own numbers

The list keeps the figures that matter afterwards: Recipients matched at the moment of sending, Sent, and Failed. These three numbers together are the honest measure of whether a message landed, and they are the ones to read when a parent tells you they never received anything. A broadcast can be cancelled while it is still waiting, and a sent one cannot — so check the schedule before you confirm.

Auditing afterwards

Messaging > Delivery History lists every attempt, newest first, and is the screen to open when the count of failures is not zero. Each row names the broadcast, the channel, the recipient address, the member it belonged to, the status and the error text the operator returned. Filter by channel or search a single phone number to answer a specific parent without reading the whole list.

The platform already tells people things

When results are published, every learner with a result is told. When an application is approved, the applicant is told. When a payment clears the fee in full, the family is told and the learner’s file shows as settled. When a store order is validated or a transfer changes state, the person who placed it or requested it is told. These messages are generated from the event itself, which means a family never has to be informed manually because someone forgot.

What still needs you

Everything that is not an event: a fee deadline before it is overdue, a change of classroom, a holiday, a lost book, a meeting, a request for documents. That is what Broadcasts is for, and that is why a school that sends nothing by hand still reaches every family — because the automatic messages handle the moments that matter most and your broadcasts handle the ones only a human knows about.

Templates make the second year cheaper

Once a text has proved itself, save it as a template with its title, body, optional image and link. Next year you open the template, change the two words that carry the date and the amount, and send. This is the single cheapest habit in the whole portal: it guarantees the school sends the same clear message every year instead of a fresh, slightly different one.