This is just a brief overview on how a staff member can send an email through FACTS. For a complete rundown on all of the options and settings, check out the Send an Email Message article on HubHelp (that link probably won’t work unless you are already logged into FACTS).

After you are logged into FACTS, start off by choosing “Communications” from the hamburger menu in the upper left or “Email” from the waffle menu on the right.

1. The type menu will initially say Students. Click on it and choose whichever options seems like your best bet. You can mix and match by selecting one type, adding them to your recipients and then selecting another type and add them (or just more of the same type). I’ve listed the most likely ones below
   • Classes will let you chose people one class at a time
   • Classes: Activity will let you chose people one activity at a time. If an activity is also a class (like band), it will be listed under Classes. There are a few other groups in Activities as well.
   • Communication Groups will let you pick from groups that someone has already setup. If you have a group that needs to be added, ask Jeremy.
   • Staff will let you pick from groups of staff members or individual staff members. If there is a group that needs to added or updated, contact Jessica. Note that there is no way for staff members to Reply-All to an email from FACTS, so if you would like some discussion on your email, you should send it via Gmail instead.
   • Students will let you pick students by grade or individually.
2. The field below Type goes by various names, depending on the type you picked above. In any case, it will let you narrow down your selection. This is optional.
3. Move the people you want from the people list on the left to the recipient lists on the right with the blue button. You can repeat steps 1-3 as often as you like until you get the people you want.
4. Choose who will be sent the email. This will typically be Custody Parents, Correspondence Parents, and maybe Student. But you might sometimes choose any of the other family relationships or include some staff members.
5. NOTE: Clicking the Staff checkbox does not do anything unless you explicitly add one or more staff members to the recipients list.
6. NOTE: checking “Email me a copy” will result in every email send being CCed to you. This could be a lot of emails. (This might only happen if the emails have data fields in them.)

7. Choose a Template if one exists for the email that you are sending.
8. If you might send this email again in a week or next year, consider saving it as a template.
   • Personal: You are the only person who will be able to see/use this template. Pick this one if you might use this email again, but you don’t think anyone else will. NOTE: it would be better to set a signature in your preferences rather than create a template for your signature. By setting it in preferences, you can have the same signature no matter which template you are using.
   • School: Everyone at the school will be able to see/use this template. Try to pick a good name. They are sorted alphabetically, so make the first word the most important, like “Attendance:”, “Discipline:”, “Praise:”, and their ilk. Your name will automatically be added at the end of the template name.
   • District: Everyone at the district will be able to see/use this template. For us at Lincoln Lutheran, this is the same as school because there is one school in our district.
9. You have all of the normal text editing tools at your disposal, but note the Tag icon. The Tag icon gives you access to a wide variety of email variables that you can use to personalize your email so that it can start “Dear John,” instead of “Dear Parent,”. There are a lot of options here, for instance, you can insert the name of the student into an email to the parents.
10. You might expect the Send Email button to be at the bottom. It is at the top. It took me a while to figure that out. See the previous picture.