How EdSmart made urgent school communication easier for parents

For parents, school communication often arrives as a flood of forms, notices and reminders. The real challenge is not receiving information at all — it is knowing what matters most and what needs action right away. That is the problem EdSmart set out to solve.

Founded in 2014 by parents Fiona Boyd and David Eedle, EdSmart built its School Organisation System to reduce paperwork and simplify communication between schools, parents and students. Today, the platform supports around one million users across nine countries, helping schools automate workflows, capture data and modernise day-to-day administration.

As the platform evolved, EdSmart saw that schools needed more than just digital forms. They needed a better way to reach parents when timing was critical. Important messages could easily get lost among the volume of routine school communications, especially when parents were trying to manage multiple notices, permissions and updates at once.

To solve that, EdSmart built Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) into its multichannel communication model, combining SMS, email and app notifications. Each channel had a role, but SMS through Sinch Engage was reserved for the most urgent messages or for situations where an immediate response was required. That included reminders that an excursion was returning late, notices that a permission form was still outstanding or alerts that a child was absent from school.

That distinction is what made the channel effective. Rather than sending every message as a text, EdSmart helped schools use Sinch Engage SMS with intention, so parents could quickly recognise when something was time-sensitive. In a school setting, that kind of clarity can reduce stress for parents while giving staff more confidence that important messages have actually been seen.

The results showed how powerful that approach could be. Using a combination of Sinch Engage SMS, email and EdSmart’s workflows, schools saw parent response rates of 65% within 24 hours, with some schools reaching 88% in the same timeframe. For schools trying to collect permissions, confirm attendance or get a timely response from families, that speed made a meaningful difference.

For EdSmart, the value of Sinch Engage was not only in response speed. It was also about confidence. David Eedle points to the peace of mind that comes from knowing an SMS has reached the right person and been acted on, especially when one-time tokens are used. Compared with a message sitting on a school portal, a text was a far more dependable prompt for action.

Reliability was especially important because the platform sits at the centre of everyday school operations. Eedle notes that EdSmart users often keep the software open throughout the day, and even a short outage creates immediate pressure on support. That made Sinch Engage’s dependable SMS gateway and API important parts of the solution, not just technical nice-to-haves.

Security also mattered. Because EdSmart’s system can contain sensitive information, including medical details, communications had to be delivered in a way that supported high standards of privacy and control. Sinch Engage gave schools a way to communicate quickly while still fitting into a broader, secure workflow.