Notifications
When an officer scans a learner’s badge at the gate, MySentinel records the check in or check out immediately and then notifies that learner’s verified guardians. The record at the school is the source of truth; the notification is a best-effort courtesy on top of it. The product never blurs that line — the officer’s screen says “Recorded at the school. Guardians are notified on their verified contacts.” It never claims a guardian read the message.
The channel ladder: push → email → WhatsApp → SMS
Each guardian’s message walks an ordered ladder, highest-trust and lowest-cost first:
| Rung | Channel | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | App push | Free and instant, lands on a guardian’s installed phone app |
| 2 | One branded per-school layout, in your colours with your logo | |
| 3 | The channel South African parents actually use — included, on MySentinel’s own business account | |
| 4 | SMS | Last resort: short, always-delivers, paid per message |
How the ladder behaves depends on the message type, and this is a deliberate per-school policy:
- Routine check in / check out uses the school’s chosen mode. The default is to reach every channel the guardian has enabled; a school can switch to a first-confirmed-and-stop mode instead. Either way, each guardian’s own channel choices and quiet hours still apply.
- Emergency, safety mode, and late-pickup messages always reach every eligible channel and bypass the per-child routine preferences — a safety message is not something a parent can accidentally mute. (The one deliberate exception: a guardian who explicitly turns SMS off keeps it off even in an emergency, because SMS spends real money on their behalf.)
Guardians control their own mix — channel preferences and quiet hours — from the tokenised parent portal, with no login required.
Channel honesty: the app never shows a fake “sent”
Every attempt is recorded with a truthful status. There is no path that writes “sent” for a message that was not actually handed to a provider. A guardian is only counted as “notified” when at least one channel genuinely confirmed. If nothing confirmed, the system reports the message as not delivered rather than inflating a success number — and in the admin and operator views, each channel carries its real, computed state for that school, so nobody mistakes a channel that is still being switched on for one that is already carrying messages.
Privacy is built into the same plumbing: delivery logs store a hashed recipient address, never a parent’s raw phone number or email.
Quiet hours and the emergency bypass
Each school sets a notification sending window (quiet hours) — routine check-in alerts are held outside that window so families are not pinged at unsociable hours, and each guardian can set their own quiet hours in the portal too. But emergency alerts, safety-mode notices and late-pickup alerts always get through — they ignore quiet hours and per-child preferences. The portal states this plainly, so a parent is never in any doubt that a safety message will reach them.
What’s included, and what the school still does
- App push and branded email are included, everyday channels. Email is the dependable backbone once a school’s sending domain is verified. App push lands instantly on a guardian’s installed app (on iPhone, the parent taps “Install MySentinel” — add to home screen — first).
- WhatsApp is included too, and it sends from MySentinel’s own WhatsApp business account. The message templates are approved once, for the whole platform. That means a school does not register with Meta, does not submit templates, does not wait on a review, and never sees a conversation bill. Two things do still happen, and the product is honest about both: a school admin switches the channel on, and each guardian confirms their own number before anything is sent to it. Until a guardian has confirmed, their WhatsApp stays silent and their messages travel by email — a real fallback path, never a fake send.
- SMS is the one channel a school arranges for itself, by connecting a provider. Until it does, SMS is simply not used and the other channels carry the message.
What it costs
| Channel | Per-message cost to the school | How it’s handled |
|---|---|---|
| App push | None | Included in the per-learner fee |
| None | Included; sends on a verified domain | |
| None | Included in the per-learner fee. MySentinel holds the WhatsApp business account and pays the conversation fee | |
| SMS | Per-message carrier fee | Bring your own account — connect your own SMS provider and pay them directly — or platform-provided pass-through, metered per confirmed delivery with a disclosed handling margin |
Only genuinely confirmed SMS deliveries on a pass-through arrangement are metered for billing — bring-your-own and failed sends are never metered. Because SMS costs the school real money, it sits last on the ladder and is suppressed once a higher channel has already confirmed for that guardian and event, so a family is never messaged twice for the same event on a paid channel. Admins see channel-usage metering in Settings for full transparency. For the pricing model, see Pricing.
The bottom line
Across many campuses, a system that refuses to over-promise parents is the one that keeps the school’s trust. The app never paints a fake “sent”, each channel shows its real state for that school rather than a generic label, recipient addresses are hashed, and an unconfirmed send is reported as not delivered. That restraint is the point.