True reach
True reach is the share of families a communication actually reached on at least one channel, counted per family rather than per message. It is the honest version of the number most platforms report.
| Metric | Counts | What it hides |
|---|---|---|
| Messages sent | Rows the system created | Everything — a family with four channels counts four times |
| Accepted by carrier | Handoffs the carrier acknowledged | Silent filtering, unregistered traffic, dead handsets |
| Delivered | Confirmed arrivals per channel | Families with no working channel at all |
| True reach | Distinct families reached on ≥1 channel | Little — this is the number that matters |
Why "sent" is close to meaningless
Consider a district of 5,000 families sending one early-dismissal notice across SMS, email and push. The platform creates roughly 15,000 delivery rows. A dashboard reporting "15,000 messages sent" is arithmetically true and tells you nothing about whether anybody found out school was closing early.
Worse, the count is inflated precisely by the families who are easiest to reach. A family with three working channels contributes three sends. A family with one stale email address and a disconnected mobile contributes two failures and a bounce — and is invisible in a "sent" figure.
Counting distinct families reached inverts that. The metric now goes down when contact data rots, which is the behaviour you want from a number you are meant to act on.
Why "sent" should never be reported as "delivered"
There is a specific and common reporting sin worth naming: treating carrier acceptance as delivery. A carrier accepting a message means it took responsibility for attempting it. It does not mean a handset received it, and in the case of unregistered 10DLC traffic it very often means the message was filtered without further notice.
An honest delivery rate is computed over settled messages only — those that reached a terminal state — and excludes anything still queued. Including queued messages in the denominator drags the rate toward whatever you want it to be depending on when you look.
A question that separates vendors quickly. "Does your delivery figure count carrier acceptance as delivery, and does it include queued messages in the denominator?" Both have one-word answers, and both change the number materially.
What to do with the number once you have it
True reach is only useful if it produces a worklist. The families in the gap are a finite, nameable set, and they cluster:
- No working channel at all. Every number disconnected, every email bouncing. These families are unreachable by any message you send and no amount of sending fixes it. This is a phone call or a front-desk conversation.
- One channel, and it is fragile. A single mobile number shared across an extended family, or an email address checked twice a year.
- Reachable but wrong language. Technically delivered, functionally not communicated.
- Opted out. A legitimate choice that still needs an emergency path.
The useful product shape here is a clearable worklist rather than a dashboard: a finite list of families with a specific defect and a specific fix, that shrinks as you work it and re-validates on the next roster sync. A percentage on a chart informs; a worklist changes the number.
Questions people actually ask
What is the difference between reach and delivery rate?
Delivery rate is per message per channel — what proportion of attempts succeeded. True reach is per family — what proportion of families were reached on at least one channel. You can have a 97% delivery rate and still be failing to reach several hundred families, because the failures concentrate.
What is a good true reach figure?
Districts with well-maintained contact data commonly reach the high nineties. The more useful question is the absolute count in the gap: 2% of 5,000 families is 100 households who did not find out school was closing, and that is a list you can work rather than a percentage you can accept.
Is contactability the same as true reach?
They are closely related and often used interchangeably. Contactability is a term ParentSquare coined and uses across its case studies, generally describing the share of families with a usable contact route. True reach as used here is measured against actual sends rather than data completeness — a family can be contactable on paper and still not be reached.
How do you improve true reach?
Fix contact data rather than send more. Work the unreachable list directly, verify at enrolment and at every front-office interaction, keep language preference current, and make sure roster sync updates contact points rather than only names. Sending the same message again through the same broken channel does nothing.
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