As education professionals, you know the critical role parental engagement plays in improving outcomes for children, but undoubtedly also know the challenges faced when trying to effectively engage with parents today. Most of today’s parents are millennials and are accustomed to accessing all of their information at the press of a button on their smartphone or tablet. This extends into their roles as parents with many millennials consulting apps for parenting advice even before reaching out to friends or family members.
This digital-first approach to obtaining information can pose a challenge for schools that want to improve engagement with parents but who rely on paper or text-based methods as their primary forms of communication.
Parentapps was founded to help schools and nurseries address this challenge and adopt a digital-first approach to communication. We build affordable, custom communication apps for schools as well as Ofsted compliant websites.
How can a bespoke communication app from Parentapps address the challenges schools and nurseries face in engaging parents?
Over the last 3 years working with schools across the UK we have gained invaluable insight into the challenges faced when trying to improve parental engagement. Our new system Parentapps Connect was built with the help of feedback from our schools and provides solutions to these challenges.
Discover how our app’s features can help solve some of the common challenges faced when engaging with parents.
Communicating with “Hard to Reach” parents:
- Delivery Reports: Enables you to view who has read messages and react accordingly – for instance by following up with a call, email or SMS
- Integrated SMS and Email: Though the vast majority of parents own a smartphone, we do offer SMS packages and free integrated email to ensure you can communicate with all parents
- Individual/Group Messaging: The app lets you send unlimited messages to individuals or custom groups. This means that schools can ensure that they are sending the most relevant information to parents rather than generic school-wide messages only
- Communicate with multiple family members: Ensure that you aren’t only communicating with mums by allowing access to more than one family member
Cost and time required to communicate with parents:
- MIS integration: By seamlessly integrating with all of the major MIS platforms (SIMS, iSAMS, Progresso, ScholarPack, and Arbor, etc.), our apps streamline the admin process and remove unnecessary duplication of work
- Remote Messaging: Enables staff to send push notifications from anywhere, ensuring that they aren’t staying late at work to send out messages
- Send documents: You can upload unlimited pdf letters and documents which saves thousands of pounds a year on paper and printing costs. It also saves a huge amount of admin time
- School Calendar: Our term dates and calendar feature allow parents to have full visibility of important dates. This massively reduces phone calls into the office and frees up valuable time
- Absence reporting: Simplify absence reporting by allowing parents to report their child’s absence directly from the app, resulting in fewer phone calls and fewer parents failing to report absences
Ensuring Communication is secure:
- GDPR Compliant: Paper letters pose a number of risks especially when they have information regarding children. By sending documents through a secure app you remove the risk of letters being lost, copied or seen by unintended individuals
- Full Audit Trail: Control and monitor staff’s use of the app, providing a record of who sent what message and when
- 2-Step Authentication: By utilising a 2-step authentication process, schools can be certain that communications are going to the appropriate person, unlike with paper letters and text messages
- Ability to remove users: Easily remove users if needed to ensure proper safeguarding measures are in place
If you are considering switching to an app for your parental communication, have any questions or would like to schedule a free demo please email us at sales@parentapps.co.uk or call on 0800 195 0279.