As a director of school communications, have you ever been asked this question by the superintendent: Do we have a healthy connection with at least one family member for every student? Like many districts, you may use a host of disparate tools to communicate with students and their families. Teachers use various classroom apps, school sites within the district use separate emails and the district uses yet one more broadcast platform app. You get the picture, right? Different tools lead to a few key challenges, such as parent disengagement, miscommunication, and student privacy concerns.
Without a unified platform, parents have trouble keeping up with all the different communication tools and apps needed to access accurate and timely information. And without a holistic understanding of the various communications taking place between the district, schools and families, the ability to develop strong, engaging and long-lasting family bonds is severely hampered.
1. Use Weekly Admin Snapshot Reports to Your Advantage
At the end of each week, school administrators receive a Weekly Admin Snapshot email that outlines how many posts were created, the top authors of posts, and what your reach has been in the past week. This information is useful in a variety of ways and can be utilized not only to target improvements to your communication, but also to highlight your accomplishments and strengths when it comes to engaging families. For instance, if your weekly report shows that you have reached 90% of your school community, that’s something to celebrate! It also means that you know that there’s still the last 10% of families that you haven’t been able to reach. A convenient link in the admin snapshot email takes you directly to contactibility reports, where you can identify who those unengaged families are and make a plan to improve parent engagement connections.
2. Clean Up Contact Data and Family Information
Fixing student records and updating parent contact information can help you engage the remaining families at your school. When you update the contact data for a parent, you engage them across every method of outreach, since the information is all managed through ParentSquare. This means that families with up-to-date contact information will always receive messages from different school departments, including administrators, teachers, coaches, the cafeteria, and districtwide communications, too. Administrators can track their progress in cleaning up data throughout the year by looking at contactibility history and reach and deliverability reports, which are all available on-demand in the platform.
3. Know When to Provide Professional Development
Analytics and reporting can help you see exactly how teachers, coaches, and other system users at your school are using the platform––and how they aren’t. When you are not reaching the usage and teacher engagement levels that you’re aiming for, it may be time to initiate professional development on the platform. This can help platform users learn how to use ParentSquare to accomplish what they need and learn how to use a wider variety of functions that are readily accessible. Get the most out of ParentSquare by learning how to leverage more of the platform’s functions and features to reach your school’s parent engagement goals.
Using weekly and ongoing data reporting and analytics helps administrators and communications leaders close gaps that were previously hard to track. ParentSquare provides significant parent engagement gains and helps schools connect with families more effectively than before.
In this webinar, Jeremy also addressed several other ways that ParentSquare can help improve parent engagement and help schools protect student data. To view and listen to the conversation in its entirety, check out the webinar recording here.
In a recent webinar, ParentSquare’s Jeremy Tignor explored how ParentSquare’s robust communication platform can help improve parent engagement using reporting and analytics gathered directly in the platform. Here are three tips Jeremy shared during the webinar for using data to improve parent engagement:
