What the actual mechanics look like on a family's phone
An email arrives in an inbox alongside dozens of other unread messages, competing for attention with everything else that hasn't been opened yet. A text message triggers a notification directly on the lock screen, gets a sound or a vibration, and sits at the top of a conversation thread until it's dealt with. That's not a subtle difference in design — it's the difference between a message that has to be actively sought out among clutter and one that physically interrupts whatever the recipient was doing at the moment it arrives.
Different channels, different attention
Email open rates for school communications routinely sit well below text message open rates, and the gap isn't close — most text messages get read within minutes, while emails can sit unopened for days in an inbox already crowded with newsletters, receipts, and other schools' communications. For a time-sensitive reminder, that difference in speed matters as much as the difference in open rate.
Email still has a job
Text isn't a replacement for email — it's a different tool for a different moment. Email is well suited to information a parent needs to reference later: the full schedule, a confirmation with details attached, a form to fill out. Text is well suited to the single fact a parent needs right now: "your slot is in one hour."
Why layering both works better than either alone
The most effective reminder pattern uses email for the initial confirmation, with full details a parent can search for later, and text for the short, time-boxed nudge closer to the event itself. Relying on email alone loses the parents who don't check it daily; relying on text alone loses the ability to convey anything more detailed than a single line.
What this means for cost
Text messages carry a real per-message cost that email essentially doesn't, which is part of why some tools default to email-only reminders — it's cheaper to send, even if it's less effective at reaching people in time. The right comparison isn't cost per message, though; it's cost per successfully-reached family. A slightly more expensive reminder that actually gets read is worth more than a free one that sits unopened until after the event has already happened.
A simple test schools can run
Schools unsure whether the extra effort of adding text reminders is worth it can run a direct comparison: track attendance or response rates for a group that gets email-only reminders against a group that gets both email and text for the same type of event. The difference is usually large enough to settle the question after a single comparison, without needing to guess at industry averages.
Why over-texting backfires
More reminders are not automatically better. A parent who receives three or four texts about the same event tends to start ignoring the channel entirely, which defeats the purpose of using it. The schools getting the best results tend to be disciplined about volume — one clear text at the moment it matters most, rather than a running stream of nudges that trains recipients to stop paying attention to any of them.
What this looks like for a real event timeline
A well-timed reminder sequence for a single event might look like this: an email confirmation the moment a family signs up, a second email a week out with full logistical details, and a text the morning of — or the hour before, for something as time-sensitive as a specific conference slot. Each message has a distinct job: confirm, inform, and nudge. Collapsing all three into a single channel, whichever one it is, means at least one of those jobs isn't getting done as well as it could be.
What this means for school tools
Tools that only send email reminders are solving half the problem. The schools and organizers seeing the best attendance results are using both channels deliberately — an email when a sign-up is confirmed, a text as the moment approaches — which is exactly why smart email and SMS reminders are built into both SignUpGo and SchoolConferenceGo rather than treated as an optional add-on that a busy office has to remember to turn on for every event. Built-in defaults matter here more than they might seem to — a feature that requires someone to remember to enable it, event after event, will eventually get skipped during a busy week, while one that runs automatically doesn't depend on anyone remembering anything at all.