How quickly do we need to respond to students?

When considering response time to student messages, think of when you text a friend on your personal phone. When do you expect a response? While it is polite to respond to an email within a day or two, it is more common for texts to get a response within a couple of hours. If you respond right away, the student you are talking to is more likely to still be on their phone and you can have a back-and-forth conversation in the moment. So do your best to respond to students promptly by logging into the platform at least once a day and set up notifications to let you know when you have new messages.

Now, we know how busy you are and that is is impossible to respond to every message as soon as it comes in. One thing you can control is when you send out messages to a large group of students. Whenever you schedule a message to be sent out, make sure it will be at a time when there are counselors ready to respond as soon as the responses come in. You’ll see most of the responses come in within the first hour or so, so it’s important to be ready to receive an influx of messages whenever you send a message out to a large group.