Communicating with your Customers via the Portal (versus Email)

Since customers do not always read email announcements sent to them, Jackrabbit offers several ways to ensure you have effective communication about important information. In addition to the three text boxes covered in the "Setting up your Portal" section, here are additional ways to provide improved and personal communication from your organization to your customers.

For sending personal notes or reminders to a parent, such as "Suzie is doing great on her routine - remember to send her ballet shoes to the makeup class this Friday", you can send Suzie's parent a private note that they will see when they log into their portal.

To send a Private Message to a specific Family:
1) Go to the Family page.
2) Select the MISC tab.
3) In the Customer Portal Login Message - enter your message in the text box.
4) Choose an Expiration Date - the message will appear EVERY time the customer logs in until this date is passed. (If left blank, the message will auto-clear after ONE viewing by the customer). Save changes.

If you have information that you would like to make known to all your portal customers, you can post it on your Portal NEWS TAB. When customers log into their Portal it is the first screen they see. This is an excellent way to announce deadlines, reminders, cancellations, etc.

To place a public Message to all Portal users in the Portal NEWS TAB:
1) Ensure the NEWS has been enabled on your Settings page - first box in upper left menu.
2) Select the News and Announcements Tab.
3) Select the small Edit link in the upper left. Enter your information, and SAVE. Use the icons to edit your fonts, colors, add hyperlinks, etc. See the next section for more information.
4) Remember to delete out Announcements once they have passed.

Email and Portal News: How to insert images and link to documents

Jackrabbit provides a Rich Text Editor (often called a WYSIWYG editor) in our Email screens (HTML mode) and also in our Portal News and Announcement page. For a complete definition list of all the available buttons in the Jackrabbit editors: View html buttons.



All images, documents, files, etc must be located on the internet and have a "URL" address from which to link to (usually starts with http://....). It is likely that the images and documents that you will want to use are already uploaded to your website, thus they already have a "URL". This is the recommended place to upload your documents. If you do not have access or clearances to edit your company's website to upload documents, you can upload the images or documents to any cloud file-sharing service. Most are free and very easy to use - just drag and drop your image or document to the site and it will provide an instant "URL" http link to copy and share. You can Google "easy free file sharing sites", or, some great ones are listed on this internet blog.

Do you need to know more about Character Limitations, Inserting an Image, and Linking to a document? Check out this Editor Helpful Hints and Examples document.

See the above steps in action by viewing this short video which shows you how easy it is to Link to a webpage or document.