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Remind is now part of the ParentSquare family! See the announcement for details
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Getting started with Remind Hub for your organization

Best practices

If your school recently purchased Remind Hub, congratulations! We have everything you need to onboard your community—including your staff, parents, and students—with a comprehensive step-by-step guide.

Here's what we'll cover:

  • Step 1: Set up your administrator account
  • Step 2: Set up your school account
  • Step 3: Plan your rollout
  • Step 4: Roster your organization
  • Step 5: Train your staff and notify your community
  • Step 6: Launch!

Each section includes how-tos, resources, and other tips that you need to lead a successful Remind rollout as an administrator. Let’s get started!

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Step 1: Set up your administrator account

[Estimated time: 1 hour]

First, get familiar with the basics of your administrator account, from understanding your account settings to exploring the ins and outs of your dashboard.

Now that your administrator account has been created, you can personalize what information is displayed to others.

You can also set how you prefer to receive notifications.

Office hours show students and parents what times you’re available.

If your organization uses Google Drive, Google Classroom, Microsoft OneDrive, or other third-party apps, you can set up app integrations to these tools in your account.

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Step 2: Set up your organization

[Estimated time: 2 hours]

Now that your account is set up, let’s focus on setting up your organization for district, school, and class communication.

[.c-grey-box]TIP: By default, most district administrators won't be part of schools in the district (in order to keep administrators at large districts from being overwhelmed by school announcements). However, you can choose to join any school in the district to directly receive school announcements.[.c-grey-box]

To make sure your teachers, parents, and students can receive messages, password resets, and other communications from Remind, it’s essential to coordinate with your server provider to allow Remind domains.

For an added layer of protection, you can also set up teacher approval to manage who can be linked to your organization as a teacher. This control can be found in the district and school Settings tab. Any user who tries to join your organization as a teacher will be placed on a list of pending teachers to be approved or denied:

Now, you can determine the settings you’d like to apply across your organization. Many of these settings will apply to both the district and school levels; if they don’t, they’ll be clearly marked. To get started, go to the Settings tab on your administrator dashboard to find the following options.

  • Organization settings: Change your school code (school level)
  • Default class settings: Manage default class settings
    • Class visibility - You can determine whether classes are searchable and visible on each class owner’s profile.
    • Require approval to join - Class owners will be required to approve or deny participants who request to join their classes. This a higher level of security for who is in the class.
    • Participant messaging - You can choose how participants message others in a class. Participants can message anyone in a class, only message the class owner, or message other class participants with the same role (teachers, parents, or students).
  • Administrators (can only add district admin at the district level)

[.c-grey-box]TIP: Be sure to have at least two administrators in your organization at all times just in case one leaves your school or district.[.c-grey-box]

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Step 3: Plan your rollout

[Estimated time: 1 week]

We recommend keeping your launch date in mind and working backward to account for all important milestones.

This is also a good time to create a communication policy to set clear expectations and help your community get the most out of Remind. Here are a few guiding questions to help get you started.

When you’re ready to build a policy for your organization, no need to start from scratch—just download and use our template as a guide!

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Step 4: Roster your organization

[Estimated time: Up to 30 days, depending on your organization]

Before you get started with rostering, doing some clean-up work will ensure that the right classes and people are connected to your school.

[.c-grey-box]TIP: Start by first removing classes that no longer belong to your school. This will also remove the people in those classes from your organization’s People list, making it easier to manage later on.[.c-grey-box]

Once you’ve removed the people and classes that are not a part of your organization, you can get started on adding the people who are. Rostering is the fastest, most effective way to roll Remind out to your community. Instead of waiting for teachers, students, and parents to opt in, you can create their accounts and classes for them.

There are two main ways to roster: direct add and SIS sync. Direct add is available to all paid accounts, while larger organizations have the option to purchase rostering via SIS sync, which sends information from your school information system to Remind.

Take a look at this checklist to find the best rostering method for you:

Learn more about the various rostering methods and the rostering process:

If you’ve decided that a SIS sync isn’t right for your organization right now, you can always set it up later and move on to the next step. Just keep in mind that the best times for a SIS sync are when you’re setting up Remind, before a new school year, or during a term change.

If you’re ready to discuss SIS sync rostering, go to the SIS sync tab and click on the blue button labeled, “Start SIS sync setup.”

If not, here are two ways to roster with direct add.

Option 1: To get set up as quickly as possible, add all of your teachers to your organization. Then, have your teachers create their own classes and invite people.

Option 2: If you’d like to be included in every class in your organization, you can create individual classes within your school and add every teacher, student, and parent yourself:

[.c-grey-box]TIP: We recommend adding students and parents to classes instead of the organization—class participants are automatically added to the associated school and district, which saves you the time of having to then manually add users from a school into classes.[.c-grey-box]

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Step 5: Train your staff members and notify your community

[Estimated time: 1 week]

Now that you’ve got a plan in place, help your teachers get started with their accounts and message the expectations you’ve set for Remind usage.

  • Train staff members with some of the PD materials we've put together, including a customizable slide presentation complete with speaker notes.
  • Send teachers and staff members the Teacher Onboarding Guide.
  • Admin, teachers, and staff can learn more about Remind with online courses available in our Learning Center.

Communication is the key to adoption, so let staff members, parents, and students in your community know what to expect.

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Step 6: Launch!

[Estimated time: 1 day]

Prepare your school admins with the rollout plan and let them know how teachers claim accounts and how students can add additional information.

If you've completed a SIS sync, send notifications to rostered accounts and have them configure their accounts.

[.c-grey-box]TIP: To make sure students can get text notifications, let them know how to add mobile numbers to rostered accounts.[.c-grey-box]

Now, you're ready to send your first organization-wide message.

Once your organization is using Remind, you can also keep an eye on engagement by using features like the Statistics tab and engagement reports. By monitoring usage and engagement, you can adjust your strategies as needed to ensure you’re meeting your Remind goals.

[.c-grey-box]TIP: School administrators can also use the classes tab to help monitor engagement by seeing if class enrollment is up to date as well as which classes are sending out announcements.[.c-grey-box]

Model the behavior you'd like to see—organizations with active admins have higher usage among staff and parents.

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You're all set! We can't wait to see what your community can do with Remind.

Looking for more? Please review our Webinar Training options. If you'd like to receive more information or discuss pricing, please contact your Customer Service Manager or email renewals@remind101.com.

Questions on any of the material? Don’t hesitate to contact our Support team at support@remindhq.com for priority support.

For organizations with Remind Hub

Activate engagement across your entire community with Remind Hub for your school or district.