The RideAmigos Schoolpool tool gives households the ability to discover and coordinate with other nearby households to better facilitate alternate transportation for students. As a Schoolpool Manager you're given the responsibility of keeping your designated school(s) up-to-date. You may also be tasked with creating and sending programming to the households at your school. With the communication tools available to Schoolpool Managers, you are able to message any of the households of your school with invitations, updates, and downloadable match lists.
RideAmigos can support both households signing up via the web or managers uploading households via CSV file. Once your households are created, many features and workflows are available to facilitate the management of your schoolpool strategies. Cluster maps, custom PDF generation for snail mail, and private registration are some additional features available for Schoolpools.
As a Schoolpool manager, you can
- View and edit your specified school(s)
- Share your school's join link with your households
- View the school roster and import, edit, and create members
- Email households with claim links, match lists, and custom messages
- Generate and download match PDFs for paper distribution
Creating Households
Consent Disclosure:
When uploading households via import or manual creation, it is imperative that you have received prior consent from the household(s). Generally this is done by having parents or guardians indicate interest in participating in schoolpooling as part of registration for the coming school year.
You can alternatively make your schoolpool program entirely based on web sign-ups, which means users enter their own data after you share a school-specific sign-up link through your official school communication channels.
If you are uploading any user data on their behalf, make sure that those have permitted their data to be used in this way. By default, the welcome email for new schoolpool households includes an opt-out link, so that users who have previously expressed interest can leave the program at any time.
There are three primary ways that you can create new households for your school:
Importing Households
Importing households allows you to create multiple households at once using parent/student data from a CSV. You can download a Sample CSV to see how to format your spreadsheet. Your data will be validated upon submission to make sure there are no structural errors.
Manually Create New Household
You can manually create new households one at a time by clicking "Create New Household". Manual creation takes the same info that importing does, but is made clearer with our standardized management interface.
Self Sign-Up
For this method, share your school's join link (available on the School Information tab of the manage page) so users can create an account and enter all of their household's information.
Editing Households
You may edit information about existing households for your school by clicking the "Edit" button from the household management page. Here you can update all information, like parent info, student info, home address, and you can share the household claim code from here as well.
Additionally, you can delete households here by clicking the red delete button on the right-hand side of the page.
Emails and PDFs
A large part of managing households is sending relevant communications to your users. To create these communications, you can edit your school's PDF and Email content from the school edit page. After creating the content, you can send them by using the "Select" tool on the household list. After selecting the appropriate households, a new button called "Actions" will appear. Clicking on this will allow you to generate PDFs for each household, as well as send them customized emails.
Generating PDFs can include the cover-letter content you specify, as well as schoolpool matches in the household's area, and the household claim code so that parents can manage themselves.
When sending emails, you have the option to link to the PDF you've formatted and include a household claim link and an opt-out link.
Finally, you can use the Map feature to choose email recipients based on their geography. The map will display all households you manage in relation to the school itself, making it easy to choose which households to send updates to.