Head teacher / Administrator
Registering a sender ID with UCC so texts arrive from your school's name instead of a number.
By default a text from GradeFlex arrives on a parent's phone from a
number. A sender ID replaces that with your school's name, so a
message about a child's absence says ST MARY SS rather than a
string of digits nobody recognises.
In Uganda an alphanumeric sender ID has to be registered with the Uganda Communications Commission and activated on each network. An unregistered one is silently filtered: the school is billed, the message disappears, and nobody is told.
There is a cost, and none of it comes to GradeFlex, it goes to UCC and to the network aggregator. Expect these kinds of charge:
Budget for both networks. A school's parents are spread across MTN and Airtel, so a name registered on only one shows for some parents and not others. A school with mostly Airtel parents can still justify registering on Airtel alone, and be clear about what that means: your name appears for parents on Airtel, and parents on MTN keep receiving the same messages from a number. Nothing fails and nobody misses a message, but the branding is split, and it is better to decide that deliberately than to discover it when a parent asks why their neighbour's text looks different.
It is also worth knowing that a registration is not necessarily permanent. Where a fee repeats and the subscription lapses, your texts quietly revert to arriving from a number, and the first you will know is a parent asking who sent it.
Whether it is worth it depends on how much you send. A school texting a few hundred parents once a term often decides the annual fee is not worth paying; one sending same-day absence alerts to every parent usually decides it is, because those are the messages that get ignored when the sender is unknown.
STMARYSS, GREENHILL,
KYAMBOGOCS.Settings → Your name on the SMS. Type the name you want and save. Nothing changes for your parents yet, this records what you are applying for.
It should state the name you want, that the messages go to your own parents about their own children, and that they are transactional rather than marketing. That distinction matters, marketing traffic is treated far more strictly.
Tell us the name first. Our SMS provider can put the request in on your behalf, and that is usually the quicker route, the cost is still the school's. If you would rather go direct, submit to UCC and to the networks your messages travel through, and tell us the name at the same time so we submit on our side in parallel rather than starting after you finish.
Back on the settings page. It starts the clock and tells us to watch for it.
One to three weeks is normal. Longer is not unusual around holidays.
We confirm it really sends through our provider, then switch it on. Only GradeFlex can do this step, and not out of caution about you: an ID that UCC has approved but our provider has not been configured with is still filtered, and the only person who can know it genuinely works is the one holding the provider account.
Once it is active the settings page grows a Send test box. Put in your own number and look at your phone. That is the only proof that counts.
| It says | Which means |
|---|---|
| Not requested | Texts arrive from a number. Nothing is wrong. |
| Applied for | With UCC. Texts still go out from the default, on purpose. |
| Active | Live. Every message now carries your school's name. |
| Refused | Usually the name is taken or too close to someone else's. Pick another and apply again. |