Inviting Parents - Overview

We have several methods of inviting parents to Classlist. Please ensure your school structure has been set up correctly before you start.

• Sync your school MIS database with Classlist
• email invitation via Classlist
• QR code invitation to print or send
• Share a link via school communication methods
•  create an event and parents are prompted to sign up when buying tickets.
• Joining without an official invite (needs approval).

Sync your MIS Database

NEW - Classlist integration creates a secure, automated connection between your school's Management Information System and the Classlist parent community platform. This powerful bridge ensures that your parent directory stays perfectly synchronized with your official school records. This simplifies onboarding new parents, the annual move up and removing leavers. Please get in touch if this is something your school is interested in adding.

Invite by email

As an admin member of Classlist there are benefits to inviting parents by email from the Admin area:

• Parents are pre-approved. So, provided they sign up with the same email address they were invited with, they will be automatically approved when they join. Saving you time approving people.
• Parents will start to receive your announcements and event invites straight away, even before they join. So if you invite everyone, and then need to send them all a message a short while later, you can reach everyone you invited via an announcement.
• Your school can legally help the PTA by providing email addresses of parents: see our GDPR article for more information. Or Schools can assist PTAs by sending email invitations direct to parents.
• You can paste in a list of emails, or if you want to assign classes, upload a csv of parents.
• Email invites will stay active until either someone signs up or they are deleted by the admin team. It is best practice to check through outstanding invites regularly and remove any that are no longer required.

NB: You can also pre-assign admin status to reps when you invite them by email.

Invite with a QR Codes

You can generate a flyer personalised to your school with a QR code that makes it easy to join

• Parents simply point their camera at the QR code and downloading the app register.
• Parents are automatically approved. Ideal for a Welcome meeting that only parents are attending. Please make sure the flyer is only given to parents as anyone with the code will be automatically approved - so you shouldn't publish the QR code on your school website for instance!
• Parents won't receive announcements and events before they join, as we don't have their details!
• See how to generate the flyer in our 20-second video.

Sharing a Link to Classlist

You can also invite parents by generating a link for your school. You may find it helpful to share the link several times across each platform to maximise the amount of parents that sign up.

• Copy and paste the link into the school newsletter, parent portal or new joiners information.
• Use existing social media channels (facebook whatsapp etc) to share the link in any current groups.
• Parents won't be pre-approved with this method so you will need to check and approve parents manually.
• These invitations aren't tracked by Classlist, so the parents invited in this way will not receive your admin announcements or event information unless they sign up.
• This is available on the parent and admin parts of Classlist so any members can help with this.

Create an Event

When booking tickets for an event, parents have the option to sign up at the end of the process. This can be a great way to launch Classlist for PTAs that don't have parents contact details. You can set an event live with a guest checkout for non-members with as little as just 1 person signed up already.

Joining without an official invite

Don't worry if you don't have any contact details for the parents, they can apply to join without an official invite, however, they will need to be manually approved (this method is not applicable for schools using MIS Data).

• You can tell parents to join by downloading the Classlist app from the App Store or Google Play and registering there. 
• On the blue parent side of the app parents can invite other parents via WhatsApp, SMS and iMessenger as well as email. 

In both cases parents can apply to join but must be manually approved by a member of the admin team before they can access the site.

Before you invite anyone

We also have printable flyers that you can give parents to let them know about Classlist before they receive an invite.

How to invite parents

If you would like to sync your MIS database please get in touch, if you are setting up for the first time it is easier to do this from the start.

Otherwise, open the Invite Parents page

On the admin side select the 'Invite Parents' page then click on the red 'Invite New Parents' button to access the options to invite parents.

GDPR and using email addresses 

Inviting parents using email addresses you already hold is covered by the GDPR (data protection) legislation which came into effect in May 2018. Basically, it is OK to use existing lists of email addresses to invite parents to join if the PTA (or school if they are setting up the Classlist site) have contacted parents by email within the past year for PTA or school purposes. However, the PTA/school must give parents advance notice that they may be invited, in case any parent objects. A newsletter insert, notice on the PTA or school website or a sign on a school noticeboard is sufficient to cover this requirement, so don't worry. Find the specific wording, and lots of other GDPR relevant resources here. You will need to log in using your Ambassador email to access the resources. If you are asking parents to give you their email address for the first time, so that you can invite them, you need to record their consent for you (ie the PTA) to use the address to contact them. If you need tips on collecting parent email addresses, we have plenty available.

The really amazing thing about the new legislation is that: where the school is the data controller they can lawfully engage Classlist as a new data processor and enter parent emails directly into Classlist’s invitation system where this data has been used within the last year to contact parents. Reasonable notice must be given as noted above.