How Teachers can Email Parents of Students from Google Forms

“Learn how teachers can automatically send emails to the parents of a student on behalf of the school after they submit a Google Form”

Students in high school are given email accounts by their school. The school has made a Google Form available, and any student can fill it out to request access to an email address. 

In Google Sheets, look up the data for your parents.

The key point here is that an email should be sent to the student's parent. This information is not available in the Google Form, but the school keeps a Google Sheet with the parent's information, and we'll do a lookup to get the parent's name.

When the Google Form is submitted, a new row with the form response is added to the Google Sheet. 

We'll add two new columns to the form response sheet that will query the parent records sheet for the parent's email address and name. After a new form response is submitted, it uses ArrayFormula to instantly fetch the parent's data in the form sheet.

=ArrayFormula(
    IF(ROW(B:B) = 1, "Parent's Email",
    IF(NOT(ISBLANK(B:B)),VLOOKUP(B:B, Parents!$A$2:$C$100,3, FALSE),))
)

If the Row Number of the current row is 1, we set the column title which in this case is Parent's Email. If the row is not 1 and there’s form data in column B, we use VLOOKUP to get the matching data from the parent records sheet into the form response sheet.

Send an email to the student's parents 

The first step is to download Document Studio from the Google Play store. Next, navigate to the Google Sheet where the Google Form responses are stored and select Extensions > Document Studio > Open to launch the add-on. 

Make a new workflow and name it something descriptive, such as Send Consent Letters to Parents. Create a new Email task on the task screen and select the Parent's Email field from the "Send Email to" dropdown.

Here’s how the final email template will look like:

To include form answers and values from Google Sheets formulas, use placeholders enclosed in double curly braces. 

Switch to your workflow's Save screen and enable the Run on Form Submit option. This will enable the form submit trigger internally, and your workflow will run whenever a new form is submitted

However, parental permission is required. When a child submits the request, an email confirmation is sent to the child's parent, requesting consent before the student's email address is created. 

Go to your Google Form and submit a sample response to see a copy of the consent email that was sent to the student's parent. 

In the same workflow, you can also include a Create File task to generate a consent document in Microsoft Word or PDF. This can be attached to the email message automatically, and the parent can email the signed copy.