Do You Have Trouble Communicating with Your Family?

Are you shopping at the grocery store with a basketful of groceries, only to realize you are supposed to pick up your child from school across town in 5 minutes?  Have you found yourself watching your child’s school play wondering where your husband is and if he remembered it was tonight?  Do you find yourself nagging  reminding your children a lot about different things such as chores, remembering to call you when they get home or to a friend’s house, or remembering to go to dance practice right after school? 

If you said yes to any of these questions – or could think of other scenarios like it, you will be interested in a new website called CasaBlast.com.  CasaBlast.com just launched and they are hoping to help you and your family to “stay organized and in touch virtually…..anywhere.”  They do this through the use of a personalized CasaBlast phone number, your computer, and your family’s cell phones.  When you go to CasaBlast.com you can sign up for a free account and add everyone in your family who has a cellphone into your family profile. 

Features

Now you are ready to begin communicating more easily with your cellphone toting family.  Here are some of the features of CasaBlast.com:

Family Blast

Once you have your family members and their cellphones assigned, you can begin “blasting” everyone at once with important messages.  Let everyone know you’re running late and want them to start making dinner.  (hey, I can dream, right?)  Let the family know that you’re having a special guest come for dinner and you need them to be on their best behavior.  Alert them that you are tied up and won’t be able to pick the kids up until 20 minutes later.  Lost at an amusement park?  Blast everyone to find out their whereabouts.  The list goes on and on.  I found that as soon as I sent out the blast, my two cellphones immediately received the message – so it works fast.

Calendar

Everyone can add their personal calendar events so you can keep track of important dates and meetings.  You can set reminders to send alerts to everyone to remind them of the event automatically.  Phew, do you see how you can dramatically cut down on your nagging time?  🙂  You are not able to upload your calendar, however, you if you use Outlook or a similar program, you can “invite” your CasaBlast.com account by sending your calendar event invite to invite@casablast.com.  I tried this and the event was added very quickly and visible on our calendar at CasaBlast.com.   Unfortunately, it does not automatically text everyone in the family that the event has been added — so they can add it to their personal calendars.  Hopefully this will be an option in a future upgrade of CasaBlast.com.  You can, however, edit the event in your CasaBlast.com calendar to set a reminder to go out via a blast to family members.

Group Blast

I really like this feature too.  You can upload your contacts if they are in Google or Plaxo.  If not, you can manually add in your contacts (though I don’t like manual labor!) and then create groups so you can send a blast message out to various groups.  For example, I created a Group for a group of our friends that we all like to get together every so often.  Luckily, they all like texting.  So now I can blast a message to them all at once about the next gathering we have at our house.  Nice.  Casablast also does a nice job of tracking all outgoing and incoming messages that come in so you can keep track of them.

To Do Lists

You can keep lists within your profile at CasaBlast.com.  These lists can be used for your personal use or you can create a list to send out to your husband or child.   After creating a new Task List (on the left) and entering in my list items (on the right), you have the option of sending the list to one family member or all family members.  Send your child a To Do list so s/he always has it right at hand. 

Grocery List

OK, I like the Grocery List better than the To Do Lists.  When I sent a list of 12 things to my cell to buy at the grocery, it arrived on my cell nicely formatted with each item listed separately in a vertical list.  Nice and easy to follow.  I had the option of sending the list to one family member or all family members.  I like this feature but the downfall is that you need  be near your computer and have your CasaBlast account running to enter your grocery list.  Sometimes the old fashioned written list works better.  However, if you need to send a list to your husband, this would work out well.

Voicemail

Once you sign up you will receive a free CasaBlast phone number.  This number is used to give you the ability to send text messages out to everyone all at once.  A family member then has the choice to text back everyone or leave a voice-mail by calling the CasaBlast number.  The voice-mail will be sent to your CasaBlast.com account and you will be notified by e-mail or text that a voice-mail is waiting to be heard.  This options works well for children – who may not have texting on their phone.

A Mom’s Perspective

All in all, I love the idea of being able to blast everyone at once with reminders or important news.  If you have a family of teenagers, this will come in handy as they tend to view text messages as soon as they come in.  Finally, you’ve got their attention! 

The calendaring feature would be powerful once they progress further on the ability for everyone to have the option to upload their calendars to CasaBlast.  However, to import your calendars and keep them sync’d up would be a challenge. 

If you have a soccer team you coach, the PTA Leadership you need to stay in contact with, a girl scout troop where you need to be in constant contact with your girls’ parents, then CasaBlast would be extremely helpful for communicating out and managing incoming text messages.

To be totally effective, you need to ensure you can easily sign-in and use your CasaBlast.com account.  Commitment to making it one of your main communication systems will allow you to reap the benefits.  I believe the beefed up calendaring section with syncing would be the crux that would make this tool indispensable in your life. 

Unfortunately, if you have young kids, without cell phones, CasaBlast.com won’t help you communicate with them.  However, I’ve been told that adding your kid’s nanny or grandparent to the family blast is a great way to keep them in communication on family events.

For those of you with an iPhone or BlackBerry, I asked CasaBlast.com if they will be coming out with a program button for your phones.  The answer is yes!  I believe this will make it easier for you to update your account and send out text messages in the future.

Go to CasaBlast.com and sign-up for your free account now and tell me what you think.  There are a lot of innovative ideas you can come up with in using CasaBlast.com.  But wait!  Here’s more good news — CasaBlast.com will donate $10,000 to help Haiti if they can obtain 10,000 subscribers by March 31st.  So go check it out and support a good cause at the same time.

The concept is great and the price is right!  CasaBlast.com is offering their service for free for the first 10,000 families who join.  Go have a blast with it!  🙂