SMS Notifications — Overview
SMS notifications let your studio send short, practical text messages to families — weekly lesson reminders and news announcements. They are transactional notifications, not marketing texts. Sending uses prepaid Octavia
What SMS Notifications Are
SMS notifications are short text messages Octavia sends to the mobile numbers of families in your studio. They are meant for practical, operational communication — a reminder that a lesson is on tomorrow, or an alert that you have posted an important news item. They are deliberately not a bulk-marketing channel: the wording stays in the "notification" frame, and families choose whether to receive them.
There are two notification categories:
- Weekly lesson reminders — an automatic text the day before a lesson (see Weekly lesson reminders)
- News announcements — a text you send by hand when you publish an important news item (see Sending news by SMS)
The Three Things That Must Be True to Send
An SMS only goes out when all three of these are in place:
- SMS is enabled for your school, and the category is switched on (see Setting up SMS)
- Your school has an SMS credit balance to cover the send (see SMS credits and top-ups)
- The recipient has opted in — they have saved a mobile number, granted SMS consent, and turned on that category (see Family opt-in and consent)
If any one of these is missing, Octavia simply does not send to that recipient. A saved phone number on its own is never treated as permission.
How Billing Works, in Short
SMS credits are prepaid. You buy a top-up, and each message deducts credits from your balance. How many credits a message uses depends on the recipient's country and the length of the message, so a top-up does not equal a fixed number of texts. If your balance is too low to cover a send, the send stops rather than going out half-finished.
Where to Find It
Open School Settings → SMS notifications. From there you can enable SMS, choose your categories, set a sender label, see your current credit balance, and buy top-ups. Each family manages their own opt-in from their Family Hub settings.
Next: Setting up SMS