Five channels, switchable from settings
In-app (Supabase Realtime), push (OneSignal), email (Resend → SendGrid → Postmark), SMS (Twilio + Africa's Talking), WhatsApp Business — switch providers, no code deployment.
Communication is the nervous system. Every event in every cluster potentially triggers a notification. This cluster doesn't just send messages — it's the delivery mechanism for the entire platform. Without it, parents don't know grades are published, teachers don't know about leave approvals, students don't know about deadlines.
What this cluster carries
8 signature capabilities
Multi-child consolidation
Parent with 3 children gets ONE daily summary instead of 15 notifications. Urgent items (absence, discipline) still arrive individually.
Targeted announcements
By role, by class, by program, by campus. Scheduled publishing. Cloudinary attachments. Delivery stats: sent / delivered / read.
Threaded parent-teacher messaging
Persistent conversations, read receipts, file uploads. Each parent has one thread per teacher, not 50 unread WhatsApp messages.
Social feed with moderation
Class feed, club feed, school-wide. Admin approval queue. Cloudinary media. Comments + reactions.
Emergency broadcast — sub-60 seconds
Pipe burst, early closure: all channels fire simultaneously. SMS + push + email + WhatsApp for every parent and staff inside one minute.
Digital permission slips
Parents sign electronically through the portal. Real-time tracking: 28 signed, 7 pending. No more paper slips lost in school bags.
Notification preferences per type, per channel
Parent picks: SMS for absences, email for newsletters, push for grades. Each user controls their own inbox.
Real-world use case
“Sunday evening, 8 PM. Water pipe burst at the school. The principal opens the emergency broadcast. Targets: all parents + all staff. Channels: all. Message: « School closed Monday — water emergency. Updates to follow. » She clicks Send. 60 seconds later, every parent has been pinged on SMS, push, email, and WhatsApp. The next morning the principal handles the cleanup; not a single parent calls asking 'is school open?'.”
What makes Communication Hub elite
The receipts
WhatsApp Business integration — the channel African parents already use.
Multi-child consolidation — one parent, three children, one daily summary.
Sub-60-second emergency broadcast across all channels.
Threaded parent-teacher chat with read receipts — not WhatsApp chaos.
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