This article is for administrators of a group of services on a 'network' account. 

You can send a community post, visible to all teachers and parents in a community, or a teacher-only post to any or all of your services through your Multi-site Management messaging tab. This article is about sending community posts. Learn more about teacher-only posts here.

You can choose to either post directly in your selected services’ community areas, or display it as a pending post for each service's admins to approve.

Note: Messages will be posted to the main community area of each service. There is no option to post to a room community area.

Network messages are great for:

In Multi-site Management, click on the 'Messaging' tab.

You'll see something that looks very similar to a service's community area. At the top is your message composer and below, is a list of all posts sent through your network messaging area.

Click the dropdown that says 'No services selected' and select the services you wish to send your message to. If you've previously created groups, you can select one of these to save you time. When you're ready, click 'Save' to save your selection.

The composer works in the same way as any other community post. You can write a message, attach photos, videos or documents.

'Send as an Announcement' is for urgent or important notices and overrides a parent's notification settings. Ticking this checkbox will send an email to each person in the community in addition to the notification they receive within Storypark, even if they have community posts turned off in their notification settings.
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​As they override parent's settings we recommend only using announcements for very urgent or time sensitive matters.
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When you click the 'Send' button you'll see two options:

Publish without approval will post your message directly in each of your selected services’ community areas, bypassing the need for admins at these services to approve your post. This will act in the same way as if an educator at the service had posted the message except that it will show as coming from you, displaying Created by _Your name_ from _Your network name_. All members of each community (educators and parents) will receive a notification, as they do with any community post.

Submit for approval will send an email notification to all admins of your selected services that there is a pending post waiting for them to approve. Your post will not be published in each service until it is approved. From here, admins can review your message and either approve it, or edit and post under their own name. They also have the option to delete the message if they wish.

Any message that you've posted will display beneath the message composer. You can click on any message to view it in a window. What you see is exactly the same as what members of each community will see with the addition of a yellow status bar that displays the status of your message in each service. The options are:

Clicking on any of these options will open a window that lists the services that have performed that action.

Services that approve your message with no further action will display here, along with the comment count on your message in each service.

Each service has the option to open your post and edit it in any way they wish before posting it in their community area. This might happen when services want to add additional context, to supplement it with information specific to their setting, to make it multi-lingual, or they simply want to put in their own words. The message will show as coming from that teacher rather than you, displaying Created by _Teacher name_ from _Service name_. Services that select this option will display here, along with the comment count on their message.

When a service hasn't approved or posted the message they will show as pending. After a time, if there are still services that haven't yet approved or posted your message you can click the 'Send reminder email' button which will send a second email notification to admins at those services.

If any services delete your message without approving or posting, they will be displayed here.

When people respond to your post in their own communities, their responses won't display in your network messaging area. You can see what kind of engagement your message has received by clicking 'Approved' or 'Posted with edits' in the yellow status bar at the top of your message and viewing the comment count for each service. 

If you do want to read the comments, you can click on the name of the centre to visit their reports page and then join the centre as a teacher. Then you can navigate to the service's community area to read the responses to your post.

You can retract any sent message by clicking on the small dropdown arrow in the top right of your network message, and selecting 'Retract'. This will remove any messages from any of the communities where your message was previously posted, even those that have been approved or posted with edits.

Please use this feature sparingly because each member of these communities will have received a notification of your original post, and clicking on this notification will take them to a page that tells them that this post does not exist.

Visit this article: What services see when you post a network message.