Messaging your families

Messages is your studio inbox: a list of conversations on the left, the thread you are reading on the right. There is one thread per family, so the whole history with them stays in one place no matter how long ago it started.

How a message reaches a family

A message you send lands in that family's portal, and Encore emails them to say it is there. They read and reply from the portal, and the reply comes back into the same thread.

If a family has no email address on file, or has turned portal notifications off, the message still lands in their portal — but nobody tells them it arrived. The composer says so before you send rather than after, so you can pick up the phone instead.

Starting and replying

1. Open Messages and pick a thread, or start a new one and choose the family.

2. Write the message and send it.

3. Replies arrive back in the thread, and the count beside Messages in the sidebar tells you how many conversations are waiting on you.

Opening a thread clears its unread count. Finished with a conversation? Archive it from the thread header — it leaves your active list without deleting anything, and a new reply is still yours to read.

Merge fields

You can drop a family's own details into the text rather than typing them:

• {{first_name}} — the billing contact's first name.

• {{last_name}} — their last name.

• {{student_first_name}} — their student's first name.

• {{studio_name}} — your studio's name.

The composer only offers fields it can actually fill for the family you are writing to, and shows you the message as they will read it. Anything it cannot resolve is flagged rather than quietly sent as raw text.

This is one-to-one

Threads are for a conversation with one family. To tell everyone something at once — a closure, a recital date, a policy change — use Announcements, which is built for one-to-many and lets you check who it reaches before you publish.

Teachers have their own threads

Teachers message the families they teach directly, from the teacher portal, and families reply from theirs. Those conversations are between them — a teacher can only open a thread with a family whose child is on their own roster. They do not appear in your studio inbox.