Why Is It Important To Shift To a Digital Tool?
The transformation from traditional to digital tools will make a deep impact on your school community, including, staff, parents, and students. Using the power of digital tools helps open up the window into schools and enables you to communicate with families more frequently and accurately. Digital tools enable you to provide updates in real time — which engages stakeholders more than traditional methods, especially by opening up two-way communication. By using digital tools, you’ll notice transparency, flexibility, and accessibility.
Why Is It Important To Find a Consistent Tool for Everyone?
Like many schools, you may be a variety of tools to communicate with parents. We hear it every day, from weekly newsletter, website, flyers, email, class dojo, and many more. While these tools are great on its own, when you have 10 tools that schools are using to communicate with parents, it becomes very confusing to parents and very time consuming for staff and teachers. Maria Sanchez, a parent says, “It’s difficult as a parent when you don’t know where you should be expecting information or where to pull information from. And every year I’m signing up on a new site since every teacher is using a different product.” Parents want a central place where they can go for school and class information.
How Do Your Parents Want To Be Communicated To?
It’s the age of technology, everyone is on the go. It’s important to be able to reach your parents in the way that they prefer. Many parents may prefer email, working parents may prefer text, and some tech-savvy parents may prefer an app notification. Have you tried asking your parents what way works best for them? We’ve seen that schools who reach parents in the way that they prefer, see at least a 20% increase in parent engagement.
Building a Stronger School Community
Consistency, communication, and collaboration! A school-wide consistent digital tool can help everyone grow and connect like never before. When a message is posted, notifications are pushed to parents in the method they prefer and they can engage with that information right from their phone or computer. Parents feel more valued and connected + teachers see an increase in parent engagement + student achievement increases = more engaged and connected community 🙂
Using a Digital Tool To Share Positive News
Digital tools help provide opportunities for stakeholders to share targeted information more frequently. No more crumpled papers in backpacks. Going digital allows schools to request online volunteer sign ups and item requests, online teacher/parent conference sign ups, event rsvps, online payments, online permission slips and forms, share messages out to your social channels and website, track volunteer hours, daily attendance notifications, fundraisers and provide safety and school logistic alerts. Rather than only reaching out to parents about negative news, teachers and school administrators can share positive news and regular classroom or school updates.
A tool to support digital leadership: ParentSquare helps more than 1,000 schools and districts improve parent engagement with its parent engagement app & platform. See a quick demo of it here.
