Head teacher / Administrator

Your school's name on the SMS

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.

Why you cannot simply type a name

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.

What it costs

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:

• A one-off application fee to UCC when you submit.
• An annual fee to keep the ID registered. It is not permanent: if it lapses your texts quietly revert to arriving from a number, and the first you will know is a parent asking who sent it.
• Possibly a per-network or aggregator charge to have the name activated on MTN and Airtel.

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.

Choosing the name

• Up to 11 characters. Letters and digits only — no spaces, no full stops, no ampersands. The limit comes from the mobile networks.
• Most schools compress: STMARYSS, GREENHILL, KYAMBOGOCS.
• Have a second choice ready. Names are first come, first served, and anything close to another organisation's is refused.
• It must be recognisably yours. A generic word will be turned down.

The steps

1. Enter the name in GradeFlex

   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.

2. Gather your documents

   • Certificate of registration, or the school's operating licence
   • A letter on school letterhead requesting the sender ID
   • The head teacher's national ID

3. Write the request letter

   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.

4. Submit it

   To UCC, and to the aggregator or networks your messages travel through. Tell us the name at the same time so we can submit it on our side in parallel rather than starting after you finish.

5. Tick "we have applied"

   Back on the settings page. It starts the clock and tells us to watch for it.

6. Wait

   One to three weeks is normal. Longer is not unusual around holidays.

7. Tell us when it is approved

   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.

8. Send yourself a test

   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.

Reading the status

Afterwards

• Changing the name un-approves it. The network approved a string, not a school, so a new name needs registering again. GradeFlex drops back to the default automatically rather than sending under something unregistered.
• A test that arrives from a number, not your name, usually means one network has it and another does not yet. Tell us.
• A test costs one SMS credit, because it is a real message.