Confirm that the student you are messaging has an active record in August Schools. If a student has been archived or is inactive, their contacts may not appear in the messaging interface.

Check that the parent or guardian's email address is on file in the student's record. If the contact information is missing or incorrect, messaging will not be available for that contact.

If you are trying to message a staff member, confirm they have an active user account in August Schools.

Refresh the page and try again. Temporary session issues can occasionally cause send failures.

Check your internet connection — a dropped connection mid-send can cause the message to fail without a clear error.

Try composing the message in a different browser or clearing your browser cache before retrying.

If the error persists, note the exact error message and contact August Schools support.

Navigate directly to the Messages tab in August Schools rather than clicking the notification link. The notification may have been triggered by a message that was sent and then updated or retracted.

Try refreshing the page. In some cases, the message may still be loading.

Check whether the message appears in a different section of your inbox (e.g., All Messages vs. Unread).

If you consistently receive notifications with no accessible message, contact August Schools support — this may indicate a sync issue with your notification settings.

Check your email's spam or junk folder. Message notification emails come from notifications@[yourschool].augustschools.com.

Confirm your notification preferences are enabled. Navigate to your profile or account settings in August Schools and verify that message notifications are turned on.

If you recently changed your email address, confirm the update has been made in August Schools as well.

Only users with an active August Schools account can be added as participants to a message thread. Confirm the person you are trying to add has been invited to August Schools and has accepted their invitation.

Participants can typically only be added at the time the message is created. If you need to loop in another staff member after a thread has started, consider starting a new message thread and referencing the prior conversation.

If a colleague's name does not appear when you search for participants, check with your administrator to confirm their account is active and their role has messaging access.

Contact your August Schools system administrator to request SMS activation.

Your administrator can enable SMS by navigating to Instance Settings and enabling the SMS messaging option.

Once enabled, staff with the appropriate role can send SMS messages to contacts who have a mobile phone number on file.

Confirm the recipient's phone number is correctly entered in their contact record in August Schools — including the correct country code if applicable.

Ask the recipient to check whether the message was filtered as spam by their carrier.

Verify that SMS is enabled for your instance and that you have the required role permissions to send SMS messages.

Confirm the parent's email address is correctly recorded in the student's contact information.

Ask the parent to check their spam, junk, or promotions folder for emails from notifications@[yourschool].augustschools.com.

Verify that the parent has previously accessed the portal — in some configurations, messaging is only available after the parent has activated their portal account.

Navigate to the Messages tab and check the All Messages view — the reply may have come in under a thread you haven't opened recently.

Refresh the page to ensure the most recent messages have loaded.