Set your own outreach hours, closures and campaigns
Narrow when Elira contacts your families, close specific days, switch individual campaigns off, and list families the office is handling itself — from AI Knowledge → How your outreach runs.
Everything here lives on AI Knowledge, under How your outreach runs.
What the default is
Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM New York time, on the AskElira follow-up schedule. Families in other time zones are also protected in their own — whichever is stricter wins.
What you can change
Click Change these settings and tick Set these myself.
- Days and hours — fewer days, a shorter window. You can narrow this; you cannot widen it. Contacting families outside 8:00–8:00 or on a weekend needs written authorisation, so it is not something a dashboard switch can grant.
- No-school days — tick *Skip the US federal holidays*, and add your own closed days and closure ranges (spring break, testing week, a professional-development day). Nothing goes out on those days on any channel.
- Which campaigns run — seat offers, registration follow-up, waitlist notices, paperwork reminders, IEP outreach, absence alerts, automated calls. Each says in plain words what stops before you save it.
- Follow-up spacing — you can ask for slower. Faster is not offered.
- Wording (emails only) — a short name for your school, a signature, and one extra line in your own words, all on the emails Elira sends. Texts are deliberately not editable. Their wording is registered with the mobile carriers, that registration is shared with every school on the same number, and one school's edit would affect delivery for all of them. Email carries none of that, so it is where your school sounds like itself.
- Families we should not contact — a student, a grade or a campus, with a required reason and an optional end date. It applies to every channel and every campaign immediately, and it survives your next roster sync.
The federal holiday list is only federal
It covers New Year's Day, MLK Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus / Indigenous Peoples' Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas — on the day each is *observed*, so a Saturday holiday is taken on the Friday.
It does not include Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Diwali, Lunar New Year, Good Friday or your own breaks. Those move every year and differ by school, so add the ones you close for. We would rather ask than guess a day wrong and mute your outreach on a day you were open.
Nothing is sent while you are checking
The first time you turn advanced controls on, your settings run in a preview period of up to three days: Elira works out exactly what she would do and shows you, and none of your school's outreach is delivered — answers to families who write in still go out. Press Start sending when you are happy; if you don't, sending starts on its own when the three days are up. Show me what this does gives you the same answer at any time — who would be contacted, on what, and the exact words.
Why did outreach stop?
Almost always one of these. Every change to these settings is in the dashboard activity log, with who made it and when:
- Today is a no-school day you added, or a federal holiday with that setting on.
- The hours are narrower than the time the run happened.
- The campaign for that kind of message is switched off.
- The family is on the do-not-contact list — check the reason and the end date.
- The family has no SMS consent on file, which no setting on this page can override. A family only becomes textable after they text in.
- You are still in the preview period — three days from when you turned advanced controls on, unless someone pressed *Start sending*.
What it costs
Nothing extra. Every paid school has these controls — they are part of the product, not an add-on. On the free pilot the card is greyed and marked Not part of your pilot, because the pilot does not send outreach; it opens once your pilot includes enrollment or attendance.
Putting it back
Put everything back to the AskElira default restores the shipped settings in one click. Your previous settings stay in the history, so you can always see what changed and when.