How I cut 2.5 weeks of progress reports down to a few days with Portant

I'm Desiree Weiche. We're a virtual school program at Grapevine-Colleyville ISD. A lot of what we do is digital. We have about 1,600 students. We use Portant for a lot of different things. It really comes down to bulk communication to parents. At the beginning of the year we create schedules and send out student schedules. All their login info and everything they need to get started in school. We use it for progress reports. We pull data from Canvas. There isn't a great way to send something directly from Canvas. So we pull that data into a spreadsheet and use Portant to create a nice-looking progress report for parents and families. We use it for mass emails. Login information for tools we use. Anytime we're sending out information that's individualized to the student, we typically use Portant. Some of our teachers use it too for invitations to tutorials. We wouldn't survive without the tool.

The problem

A long time ago we had Outlook that did some data merging. It was a lot of copy and paste by hand. Not feasible once you get to the size that we're at. We would also get put in email jail. You couldn't send that many emails out in one day. The work that used to take two and a half weeks. Copy-pasting data into emails for over 1,200 kids. Now it takes a few days. Back in the day we could only do one mass notification per year for required testing. Now we do it twice because we have the capability. So much more communication can be done now because we're not manually doing it. I can tell the system what to do and then move on to something else. Instead of physically doing two and a half weeks worth, I'm just clicking buttons instead.

The feature we can't live without

On the data merge add-on, the data grouping feature. It's still in beta. I couldn't survive without that. That's my favourite feature. It's how we make all of this possible. That feature is how we're able to send out the progress reports. How we're able to send out schedules. Pretty much everything we do. If you got rid of that feature, I'd be like, why are we using Portant? That's essentially the beauty of it. The number one thing we rely on with your product is that feature. Most of the time when we download data onto a spreadsheet, a student has multiple rows. We have to group that data. Without a lot of spreadsheet magic and adjusting, it just wasn't feasible. This has saved so much time. There aren't a lot of tools out there that do grouping of data like that. We also like the document links into spreadsheet. It makes things really easy. But the grouping is the one.

How we run it now

For our progress checks we pull the source data from a spreadsheet. We turn on data grouping so everything combines into one document per student. We create a PDF and send it out. We send in groups sometimes so we don't hit timeouts. It goes faster that way. Every time I'm ready to do a new snapshot, I make a copy of the document. I change what I need to change. I update the source data and hit go. It's pretty quick. Clear communication to our families is really the benefit we get from it.

If you're a school or team sending a lot of individualized communications and you're tired of copy-paste and email limits, try Portant free on the HubSpot Marketplace. See how it fits your workflow.