Back to School with ParentSquare: 5 Innovations for 2023-24​​

ParentSquare Marketing: All right. This is Paula from Parents Square.

ParentSquare Marketing: If you’re joining welcome welcome we’re we’ll get started in just a couple of minutes watching when we hit the hour, but we thought we’d open it up early and let everybody in. Hi, Hunter.

ParentSquare Marketing: Feel free to say hello in chats if you’ve just joined, check out your zoom controls, we do have QA. If you have a question

ParentSquare Marketing: you’re welcome to use that. But we’d love it. If you just let us know

ParentSquare Marketing: who’s here? Where are you coming in from? And how is your back to school going so far? How’s it been let us know.

ParentSquare Marketing: That would be great.

ParentSquare Marketing: Alright great. I see a few people chiming in. Nice to see you.

ParentSquare Marketing: Alright, and we are. We’ll get started right on the hour.

ParentSquare Marketing: And this is the back to school, webinar. We’re gonna go through some innovations and some back to school tips. My name is Paula. And we’ve got some good stuff for you today.

ParentSquare Marketing: So yeah, but please say, Hi, in chat, if you’re joining and how is it going? How is back to school? Going for you? For your school, for your families? Let us know.

ParentSquare Marketing: In. I know some people have are already fully launched and back in the classroom, and others not there yet still in prep mode. So

ParentSquare Marketing: yeah, how’s it going for you?

ParentSquare Marketing: Alright. Still, have a minute. Oh.

ParentSquare Marketing: here we are, where it’s time to start.

ParentSquare Marketing: So alright.

ParentSquare Marketing: we’re gonna get going. My name is Paula from ParentSquare. Here, and today we have 3 of us speaking. and thanks for joining. Check out QA. And chat. If you’d like to chime in, we’d love to hear what’s going on with you as well.

ParentSquare Marketing: And the agenda today. First, I’m gonna share some back to school resources and examples from some of the districts that we work with.

ParentSquare Marketing: And then Jay is gonna give us a little bit of an overview. What’s Parent Square? We know that not everybody here is familiar with Parent square. So we’re just gonna give you a bit of bit of context.

ParentSquare Marketing: And then we’re gonna get into 5 innovations, 5 innovations that schools and districts are enjoying this year that are really helping with their communications home and with staff.

ParentSquare Marketing: This is what they are. So that is our rundown.

ParentSquare Marketing: And first we thought we’d start by asking you all a question, and I’m going to put up a poll. A simple poll question.

ParentSquare Marketing: what’s your perspective? I’m gonna launch this poll. Now.

ParentSquare Marketing: we have some interesting options here. Let us know if one or more of these are something

ParentSquare Marketing: that you would need for this school year.

ParentSquare Marketing: Yeah, we’re just really curious to see which kind of things are on your list of priorities for this back to school. So

ParentSquare Marketing: alright. I see people are chiming, are posting and choosing things takes a second to absorb these answers that we have set up.

ParentSquare Marketing: But yeah, interesting to see. All right. I’m gonna leave it for another 20 s here.

ParentSquare Marketing: and then we’ll end the poll, and I’ll show you the answers. And, by the way, I hope you’re all looking at the poll. But we have make visually appealing messages that people will open.

ParentSquare Marketing: setting up staff and educators with the access to tools that they need

ParentSquare Marketing: updating your school and district website content for the year.

ParentSquare Marketing: understanding if your communications are successful or not.

ParentSquare Marketing: and then getting oversight into conversations with families, even via phone. Those were the 5 options we had.

ParentSquare Marketing: Alright, I’m gonna end the poll. And I’m gonna share the results. Let’s see, can you see.

ParentSquare Marketing: are you guys seeing the results? Jay, Matt, can you not? If you see them alright doesn’t show for me.

ParentSquare Marketing: Great. So the top, the top 2 there

ParentSquare Marketing: visually appealing messages, messages that people want to open

ParentSquare Marketing: that makes sense

ParentSquare Marketing: great. So we’ll we’ll keep this in mind as we go through some of the innovations later on. So thanks, thank you very much for that.

ParentSquare Marketing: Okay.

ParentSquare Marketing: let me close this poll.

ParentSquare Marketing: Okay, 1 s, I’ve got all these zoom little windows in front of me, and I just have to close them to get back to my slides.

ParentSquare Marketing: Alright

ParentSquare Marketing: a few minutes now. What’s working? Here’s some tips and examples that I wanted to go. We wanted to share with you here as part of this

ParentSquare Marketing: webinar, so let me take you through them first off. Have you all run across our back to school communications checklist? I hope so. We have a QR. Code up and we’ll post and chat a link to our checklist. This came out of public information officers working in districts. Ashton’s on our team, and she was at Danville. And it’s it’s a really useful tool, if you wanna is there anything I’ve forgotten? Is there anything really that I should do to set this Europe

ParentSquare Marketing: for success, so that all my staff and all my families are really engaged, and we get everybody and and connected right away and excited about school.

ParentSquare Marketing: So we’ll put the link in the chat and feel free to grab that. There’s wonderful resources about, you know, writing good messages and district communications.

ParentSquare Marketing: crisis coms, lots of stuff in there for you.

ParentSquare Marketing: So one section is all about launch activities. Have you tested your emergency?

ParentSquare Marketing: Have you tested your emergency communications? Yet you know, how are you welcoming staff. And then families as well.

ParentSquare Marketing: Office, do you wanna welcome them? You also wanna gauge? Who’s who’s what field contact details do you have? So those are the kind of tips we have for you in that document.

ParentSquare Marketing: And next I’ll just spend a few minutes to shout out a few districts and some wonderful examples we’ve seen. This is Rockwood in Missouri. They have

ParentSquare Marketing: this infographic that they put out to really drive the technology adoption with all their new families. I thought we thought they did a beautiful job with this infographic describing, you know, what do you need to do? And what will this? What? What’s the platform. We have for you, for communications. The check out the QR code to. They have

ParentSquare Marketing: fabulous social media thread.

ParentSquare Marketing: They are welcoming their new teachers to make them feel really part of the community. They have a really beautiful warm feel on their social. So we’d suggest to check that out.

ParentSquare Marketing: And then next Natomas.

ParentSquare Marketing: California. They’ve been doing a countdown every day for their back to school, and each one of these posts that they’re putting out. This is the social screenshots. Each post has one asset for families and students to click on day 2 is the calendar. A few days, few days before that was you know, tips for students on how to get ready for the school

ParentSquare Marketing: year and they also have done some personal videos on their technology and what they really want families to do to stay connected all year.

ParentSquare Marketing: All right. That one more example.

ParentSquare Marketing: some examples back to school nights, you know. Really, wanna everybody is, of course, gonna have some sort of an activity to get people face to face, to get all the families and students and teachers connecting face to face. These are some examples we wanted to shout out at Alexandria, of course, having a communicate a table with your communications team helping families get set up. Is a great tip.

ParentSquare Marketing: and we definitely love Greg. Tisha shared this with us from Rachel, too, where they had this gorgeous little girl walking around with a giant billboard to to drive the behavior they needed from families. And of course, Parent Square.

ParentSquare Marketing: Our app, even before people have install, have set up their login. You can get them out. A calendar appointment. It goes straight into their calendar. They get a reminder. They can. Rsvp, there’s a lot of tools in the platform that help

ParentSquare Marketing: really drive participation and make it easy for people to remember to go to these nights and not miss them.

ParentSquare Marketing: So that

ParentSquare Marketing: that is my little piece of showing some examples of what we’re seeing out there that we love.

ParentSquare Marketing: And now I want to hand it over to Jay to give you a little bit of background on Parent Square before we get into the innovations handing over. Sure.

Jay Klanfer: So my name’s Jake Lamper. Fun. Fact.

Jay Klanfer: My children’s school was the first school they ever had parents square about 11 or 12 years ago, so like I could say that I was, I was so impressed that I joined the company.

Jay Klanfer: And Paris Square is kind of on. It was like a a a labor of love that became a business, you know, just a quick snapshot of the background, and then we’ll tell you why and what Parent Square is. And

Jay Klanfer: so Parisquare is a tool

Jay Klanfer: that takes your, did. It impact student outcomes. And how we do that is, we’d like to say, we take your district

Jay Klanfer: from mass communications to mass engagement. And what does that really mean? So on this screen, right here we are not here to punch holes in anything about

Jay Klanfer: what people may feel is competition.

Jay Klanfer: We are here to talk about and frame up, and everyone on this call

Jay Klanfer: work to school.

Jay Klanfer: But a lot of people on this call are also parents. So I want you to kind of put that hat on a little bit during this presentation. So if you think when you went to your first back to school, light your children’s school

Jay Klanfer: all the different things you were asked to do. You know, it’s no fault of the school districts. There’s all these wonderful tools available.

Jay Klanfer: But I think there’s people have lost sight on who the real customer is. And it’s nobody on this phone call.

Jay Klanfer: The real customer is that parent guardian.

Jay Klanfer: If we don’t make it really easy for them to engage, it doesn’t matter how wonderful the technology is. And of course we want to give you the toolkit, so you can do your job better and easier and more efficiently. But again, that real customer is that parent. So when they come in. And you’re telling them all these great tools to download. We want to diminish this screen. We call this our Nascar slide to really

Jay Klanfer: just a couple of things. Let’s make it easy for them to engage. Go ahead, Paul.

Jay Klanfer: So every district we work with has something look like what you just saw.

Jay Klanfer: a lot of different tools all over the place.

Jay Klanfer: parent squares in the collapse of it. The majority of those tools to get you from here

Jay Klanfer: to get you here.

Jay Klanfer: take all these pairs of systems, put them into one secure platform, and make it easy for all different stakeholder groups to not just communicate which we consider one way, but to truly engage. And then what we need, what we need by engagement is that to create dialogue?

Jay Klanfer: Go ahead, Paul.

Jay Klanfer: So in a Nutshell parent Square. Does your math com. Every school district in the country has their version of their all call system. hit one button, communicate with many have to have that. That’s like your utility bill. Have to do it.

Jay Klanfer: Parent score does that? We do that? Very well. Moving beyond that into engagement

Jay Klanfer: is the ability to create dialogues, whether that’s at the classroom level, the site level or at the district level, to send out communication to a secure group that you have the right permission to speak with and allow them to respond back and make sure we’re capturing all the data that goes along with these communications.

Jay Klanfer: Third bucket is school services. And this is all the things that you send home in the kids backpacks that you never see again.

Jay Klanfer: Or somebody said that a 2% response rate should be celebrated. It shouldn’t.

Jay Klanfer: We should feel a big spike in engagement. When you ask people to sign up for this complete this survey. Raise your hand to volunteer, whatever that may be, communicate with groups that have graduated out. My kids are. I’m I’m a new empty nester. My school is trying to keep me in the fold so I could stay informed. I can now opt in to receive continued messaging from my my children’s school.

Jay Klanfer: so empty out the backpack.

Jay Klanfer: Put send these forms directly to that end user, the parent guardian and keep them engaged.

Jay Klanfer: And then school websites. If you want a website as part of your platform, we would not ever just sell you a website by itself. And that’s a little unique to Parents Square. If you called us up and said, I just need a website.

Jay Klanfer: We would say, we can take care of you. But let’s talk about the greater scheme, the whole communication plan. Because we see the website is an important integrated part with the entire platform.

Jay Klanfer: One unified platform.

Jay Klanfer: Okay.

Jay Klanfer: just, you know, something we’re really proud of. This just happened for us. There’s a thing called Essa. Every student succeeds at. I’m sure we’re all aware of that in various shapes and forms. But basically, this is a third party that comes in to really look at how impactful your tool is on the communities you’re trying to reach. We’re very proud to say that we reach S level 3, and that means that

Jay Klanfer: Parents Square is verified to positively positively affect student outcomes by enlightenment engagement. That’s not verbatim. I just said that word enlightened, but it basically is, verifies our tool. We have a press release around this. We’ll share it out with you. But this was a big deal for us. This isn’t something like we’re paying for an award in some magazine. This is a government agency that comes and verifies how impactful. Your technology is

Jay Klanfer: our culture is really important. And it’s one of those kind of fuzzy grey areas. But it’s important to know something about the company. You’re potentially gonna be working with, because Parent Square has been doing this for over a decade, and it ha! It has not changed from that first conversation that I have with our founder after we have volunteered in a class. And she said to me, Jay, have an idea.

Jay Klanfer: and I didn’t know better. I was just a dad, you know I didn’t, really. I never thought of engagement. I just thought public school was a place. You send your kids volunteer as much as you can, and hope for the best.

Jay Klanfer: What I didn’t realize, but what she realized is that if she, if we can make it easier

Jay Klanfer: for parents that are distracted have language barriers have technology barriers make it really easy for them to get connected to the classrooms, to the school, to the district that is going to impact student success. We are a product driven company. And you know, customer focus is just part of our DNA.

Jay Klanfer: Because of that, we like to say we listen, which I’m sure you’ve had. Many companies say that, too, but we have the proof. We have a continuous feedback loop

Jay Klanfer: coming with all of our customers. And it’s not just the good stuff we want to know that you know. What are the tough questions, too.

Jay Klanfer: So the different loops we have with our with our community is, we do annual surveys, nps, feedback. We obviously have our support tickets and enhancement requests, customer interviews and conferences.

Jay Klanfer: We have an advisory council that’s made up

Jay Klanfer: of our customers different stakeholder groups, whether it’s a technology person or communications person or superintendent or assistant superintendent from different parts of the country. Because we know different parts of the country have different needs, different laws. We wanna make sure we have this voice coming back to us

Jay Klanfer: monthly product updates. And then, of course, we have social media user groups. They’re a wonderful resource. They they more often than not provide the answers to our customers before we get a chance to do so.

Jay Klanfer: Criteria for innovation.

Jay Klanfer: So a little window into this years ago, there was a customer in New Jersey who is using a different piece of technology. And they said to us, There’s II love everything you’re telling me about Parent Square. But there’s one thing that my current provider does, that it can’t live without.

Jay Klanfer: What we do is we looked at that, and we said, A does this benefit all of not just this one district

Jay Klanfer: 2. Do we have the skill set

Jay Klanfer: to build it? And if so, can we do it better?

Jay Klanfer: And if it checks off all, all, all 3 of those boxes. There’s a very good chance. It falls into our development. Pipeline.

Jay Klanfer: the good bad about that is, you’ll learn parents Square is a feature dense platform. If we do 15 things, someone’s gonna always find the 16, because we do have those feedback loops. And we do listen. And we do want to continue to improve and take dollars and reinvested into our into creating innovative.

Jay Klanfer: So having said all those things, I’ve set the stage for what you’re really here to learn about. And these are the 5 innovations we see for 2023. They’ll hand us over to Matt.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright. Thanks. Jay, yeah, I’ll I’ll piggyback off of what Jay said. So

Matthew Miquelon: the engagement team is technically responsible for engagement customers ensuring that they’re using the platform correctly, but it’s also a feedback loop for us. And as we are working with customers to ensure, they’re using the platform, we bring these ideas and feedback back to the product team. And again you see a full circle very similar to what Jay was just outlining there. And you know, one of the first things I wanted to

Matthew Miquelon: call out today is our canva partnership so parent squares constantly developing partnerships. So we have numerous partnerships with Sis vendors to ensure. When you launch parent square, you have really tight data, integration and expertise on our side. But we’re also always looking for third party tools that can provide value. Actually, go back. One more slide. Paul, please.

Matthew Miquelon: Okay, yeah. And so.

Matthew Miquelon: as you know, canva is a wildly popular platform. Teachers really appreciate all the design assets available to them. Tailored for K. 12. And over the summer we did share our new partnership with canva that provides access to curated templates

Matthew Miquelon: you and your teachers can use to graphically enhance posts. I know we didn’t go into the platform too much but again posts and alerts, and any of the messaging that you send out. It’s always great for teachers to have access to, you know. Spruce those up. Make those a little bit more engaging and you go ahead to the next slide, Paula.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright. So again, this is just gonna show a little bit about it. But what what we’ve rolled out here, basically is, teachers can sign up for a free account on canva page. They navigate to the education section and if they get to the promises, what are you designing today? They can search for parents where we have over 50 pre made templates, including post headers, video thumbnails and other school related content

Matthew Miquelon: teachers can customize that chosen template with specific details. Basically, it’s a great design tool. Lets people who don’t have a lot of creativity really, kinda you know, spread their wings. And really, really, you know, design some really engaging content here so once they do that they can customize that template, and once they’re satisfied, they can rename that graphic and then download that to their hard drive via the share button

Matthew Miquelon: on Parent Square. They can easily incorporate this graphic into their posts. Using the insert image button. Again, graphics, especially colorful or animated ones enhanced posts from the parents perspective, making stories more engaging, because, again, this is all about family engagement and student success. It’s driven by that engagement. So again.

Matthew Miquelon: you’ll see parent squares always looking for additional tools to make family engagement more accessible and easier for our customers. So again,

Matthew Miquelon: amazing partnership with camera. We we’ve got a number of free accounts that we’ve we’ve pushed with this partnership and been rolling it out. And

Matthew Miquelon: as far as back to school. Teachers can now come in the fresh set of graphics and design tools for their year and kind of really start the school year off fresh.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright, Paula.

Matthew Miquelon: alright inform! Don’t annoy now. That sounds pretty simple. but with hundreds of staff members in some case send you messaging, and or it’s all through the platform. There’s definitely a sweet spot.

Matthew Miquelon: Parent Square is always offered insightful dashboards and feature based reporting at the district and school level metrics such as contact ability

Matthew Miquelon: which staff are sending the most posts are actually what staff are not using the platform. What sort of messaging of parents? Square features, so you’ll see here, some of our standard dashboard offer you a 10,000 foot view of your district and schools. You can drill down into each school site to see again those contact ability, the staff sending the most posts, basically activity and make sure that they’re using the platform.

Matthew Miquelon: You can also see what’s being communicated, and for those with super user permissions. Insight into direct messaging from school to home is also available. That oversight and transparency are key for you to manage this platform both on your launch and also moving forward. So again, we wanna make sure we provide that

Matthew Miquelon: really insightful data there for you to help drive that and measure that successful engagement.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright, Paula.

Matthew Miquelon: Now, one of the coolest things that we just released. Is the notification, activity, dashboard. I’ll give you a little story about what? What were the drivers for this particular feature?

Matthew Miquelon: So, as you know, as many of you know. Implement. A communications platform is a major commitment, and we want to help you manage your adoption and your return on investment

Matthew Miquelon: the primary benefit of the notification, activity. Dashboard is to gauge internal adoption and usage. Now we all have power users and early adopters. But what about those who take a while to adapt

Matthew Miquelon: you can id those and work with staff to train and adopt to your new system

Matthew Miquelon: a secondary benefit of this is to help manage what has become known as over messaging, and I’ll go back a little ways actually, about about a year and a half ago we were meeting regular with customers learning about their experiences, you know, with the full move to remote learning, and so called message fatigue was starting to really pop up, and when we sat down with customers and showed them some of the messaging that was going out in their district. They were just flabbergasted. They had no idea that certain parents were getting 30, 40, 50 messages a day from

Matthew Miquelon: from various people in the left hand, and know what the right hand was doing. So again this direct feedback and close collaboration with our customers drove the development of this feature

Matthew Miquelon: and best practices to manage message, fatigue, and procedures. So one of the cool things about this dashboard. You can drill in and see at each school. What features and what channels are being sent. The most messaging. And that second point you can also drill in and see which parents are receiving the most. And who are those coming from? And then there’s best practices, such as our digest and other things that help manage that and make sure that non urgent messaging

Matthew Miquelon: is in delivered in a form that isn’t overwhelming. But can you know, be reviewed at at the parents, you know,

Matthew Miquelon: best time. So again, another example of really listening to our customers and developing features to help them help their communities and role parents square out in the best possible way.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright, Paul.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright. Virtual phone.

Matthew Miquelon: Now, virtual phone is about reaching families

Matthew Miquelon: on their phones quick and easy, all from within. Parents where you know, as you know. You know, byod bringing on devices scenarios where teachers are walk on coaches are are communicating

Matthew Miquelon: directly with students, you know, we know that’s really, really not what we need to have on campus. So if you look at this. Some of the problems that we’re solving here is, you know, calling home today, or at least over the past few years desktop phones, you know, during the pandemic people weren’t even in the office and had to use their cell phones. It takes time to reference. A directory. Find that contact information. Make sure you have the right phone number for a parent.

Matthew Miquelon: keep track of what calls were made completed, and why they were needed. And then, like, I said. Sometimes they resort to using their own cell phones, which we all know is major. No, no. So this leads to data, privacy concerns, unmonitor conversations and then potentially unwanted contact from parents as well.

Matthew Miquelon: So how we solve this was virtual phone. Virtual phone is completely integrated with the parents where platform and that means your data, your contact data. So your contact data is, you know, syncs every night into Parent Square. And with that provides a you know, one touch

Matthew Miquelon: call to any parents from staff. Basically, what they can do is call parents with a simple tap or click. It’s supported on both web and mobile. There is contact. Verification ensures. Those phone numbers that you’re calling are the most up to date that you have.

Matthew Miquelon: And then the call logs and documentation which is really where this starts to show it’s true colors, is it? Automatically documents and saves each call record recordings and transcripts which are optional and talk track analysis is available. So again, if you imagine this teacher needs to call parent looks in their directory.

Matthew Miquelon: If there are students in their class. They click a button. Call that parent have the conversation, or, if not, you know, we have a message, but during that call they can actually be leaving notes and reasons for the call and classifications. Alright, Paula!

Matthew Miquelon: And then a dashboard, really powerful dashboard at the school and district level.

Matthew Miquelon: to kind of see what those calls are, and again provide that oversight, both at the individual teacher level, but also the administrator level.

Matthew Miquelon: So again, they’re provided their own unique virtual phone number. This is their phone number. For as long as they use the system, we don’t change it every year they can make a call from the desktop or mobile, as I mentioned. Notes families can return call and leave a voicemail outside of office hours. We have a great feature called office hours, that if if you receive a call back after schools out, they’ll get a voicemail, and they can leave a message as well. And again, that call log, searchable, call logs exportable. Call logs really help. You

Matthew Miquelon: have oversight and report on any call needs that are necessary as well.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright. So virtual phone, amazing. I really, really, implore you to check that out and request a demo of that.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright. So school websites, I mean, you know, how can we? How can we have a parent engagement platform without content management system? So a little background in January of 2023, we released smart sites a full grade. Fully integrated. Cms solution for quote for K, 12 when we say integrated, we don’t mean that you can simply sso from Parent Square into the Cms.

Matthew Miquelon: we’re really focusing on integrated features that leverage your parents where content, such as alerts, staff directories and content and push to your school websites. Let’s dive a little bit deeper here. So

Matthew Miquelon: so you know, your website needs to be visually engaging to express your brand, you know, as the same goes people buy with their eyes. So we wanna make sure we give you a beautiful branded website and capabilities to, you know. Improve that branding and manage that branding.

Matthew Miquelon: you know, we have amazing designs and other things to get started with. But also it’s also very, very easy. It’s a straightforward, lightweight Cms with really powerful features. And as you can see by the slide there, it’s a very intuitive. Ui very straightforward. It’s easy, like, first, easy for your users to make updates to the site and easy to manage your permissions and roles so ease of use. Anyone knows Ms word, Google Docs can easily come in and create content. Got a number of components.

Matthew Miquelon: sliders staff focus help components a lot of things staff directories. So the really cool, integrated features are like, I’ll take the staff directory. So your your data comes in through the Sync nightly. We have a staff directory. That staff Directory is now auto populated on the public facing smart sites and controllable as a component on that side. So anytime you open

Matthew Miquelon: or or update that staff directory that update will get pushed automatically and update to your website. So again, we’re constantly finding integration opportunities to

Matthew Miquelon: to push parent content back into smart sites

Matthew Miquelon: alright. And oh, all right. And you know what I’m getting at. There is, you know, your training.

Matthew Miquelon: content or messaging. And parents were, why would you need to go recreate that on your website? So wherever it’s applicable, we will provide a create once published everywhere. So that means, if you create a post and elect, push that to your website, you can do that. If you have an alert something. Maybe there’s something urgent or critical going on. You can opt to push that to your to your website. So again, really trying to look for opportunities to where, if you’re managing and creating content, and parents were happily help you leverage that quicken and and automatically

Matthew Miquelon: in smart sites. So again, very, very

Matthew Miquelon: you know, we basically have created a full platform. Now we we all not only have the communications platform, but now your external and and a community facing website. So we’re really really excited. And II again implore you to get a demo and see what smart sites can do for you today.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright, so powerful permission. So you know, let’s say you’re rolling out Parent Square for your your first time this school year.

Matthew Miquelon: and you know it’s a big lift. There’s a lot of features as as Jay mentioned so one of the things that you know we’ve always worked on is continuously refine our permissions workflows. So you can provide customers with a powerful yet flexible

Matthew Miquelon: role-based permissions workflow which we can provide to you today. While. This makes, you know, managing permissions in Parent square. Very intuitive. This also helps new customers launch Parent Square in a way that fits your needs. You’ve got all these new users. You can easily review roles. And yeah, we’ll show you a little bit more of that here on the next slide

Matthew Miquelon: alright. So flexible, role-based permissions.

Matthew Miquelon: So

Matthew Miquelon: what this provides, you know again flexible. So you can roll Parent square out the way that you want. But again. It does require a lot of work. So once your dad and your staff come in and and users come in from a sink, those are assigned primary roles. That’s automatic. So really, you know.

Matthew Miquelon: it’s not a lot you have to do off the off the initial launch, but

Matthew Miquelon: but roles and permissions that mirror the way you work and not the other way around, is really our goal. So you know, you can launch this flexible. You can create roles that allow you to limit features or provide access to certain features, basically roll it out the way that you want to. So the right people have the right access at the right time.

Matthew Miquelon: And again, part of that is efficient role and user management. We have customers with several 100 students up to several, you know, over 100,000 students. So again, we had to design something that is flexible and can work in a, you know, large scale environment or small school as well.

Matthew Miquelon: and that provides clear role and permissions hierarchy. So you can manage and and have a 10,000 foot view of who has certain permissions across the district and school.

Matthew Miquelon: There’s also custom roles that allow you to provide tailored access, such as an administrative assistant role that you could apply to every role across your district, to every school with one click. So again, very, very powerful, yet flexible.

Matthew Miquelon: And there’s also the ability to control the permissions at the individual user level, or, as I mentioned, at a bulk role assignment. So again, lots of flexibility here to work the way that you want to enroll out the permissions and the parents were implementation. The way that you would like to.

ParentSquare Marketing: Matt. I thought I’d chime in. I think you gave a really great example, too. So you know, back to school you have a bunch of new teachers, some new administrators as well. It’s really a simple click of a button to set them up in Parent square with the proper permissions using the system. And and if you need to phase them in. You can do that, too, where you

ParentSquare Marketing: you were talking about that where sometimes. you know, maybe

Matthew Miquelon: one of our customers, very large customer, wanted to roll out parent square, but wanted to pull back on the direct messaging feature just for one role. So again, this allows them to actually, if they wish come in, create a custom role and kind of control that specific feature set and roll that out again in the way that they’re comfortable in a way that they want to roll it out, because again, you know, if you roll out everything all at once, you know your support needs. So again. We wanna make sure that it’s flexible.

Matthew Miquelon: and that you can roll it out the way you want. And you know we’re in the middle of back to school right now, and new customers that are using the system have just been very thankful and very appreciative that you know. That was one less thing that they had to really be concerned about, and we provided a really easy management tool for them to get up to speed with Parents Square.

Matthew Miquelon: And again, I think if you you hear the underlying theme here, and it is true we do have a hard earned dep reputation of listening, and you will hear customers, you know.

Matthew Miquelon: Be amazed when we roll out a feature and say, Hey, I requested that. And again, we only make great products with great feedback. So again, amazing innovations. This year, we’re continuously innovating. We’re continuously releasing software. A lot of our competitors may release software quarterly, maybe monthly. We release multiple times during the week, so we are constantly constantly improving the system and listening to you. As our customer.

Matthew Miquelon: Alright!

Matthew Miquelon: Alright, alright! That brings us

ParentSquare Marketing: to the end. We thought we’d open it up for some. QA. If anybody has any questions, please post them in the chat

Matthew Miquelon: or in QA. Yeah. See, there’s a question about virtual phone. I believe virtual phone is an add-on feature

Matthew Miquelon: role-based permissions. That’s that’s provided with you. can have a partnership. That’s a value. Add smart sites, obviously, is an additional component of the system. So we can just wanna provide that background for room for the innovations that we provided.

Matthew Miquelon: Yeah, well, yeah, we’ll share the webinar as a recording after the fact as well as the deck. Is that right, Paul?

ParentSquare Marketing: Absolutely. We’ll be sharing them, Jean Marie, tomorrow morning. Look for them in your inbox

ParentSquare Marketing: and Betsy, let me. We have Betsy from Parents Square here, too, on our from our team and Betsy, any questions that you think are worth discussing?

Betsy @ ParentSquare: We had one question pop up, talked about translation. Some other questions had to do with, you know. Translation, whether it was canva designing in canvas, and parents wear, or even translation in direct messaging 2 way. With parents.

Betsy @ ParentSquare: so one question was, you know, will it be translated into their home language automatically.

Matthew Miquelon: Yes, I mean, I’ll I’ll go ahead and take that. Yes, most definitely. We you know, we support well over 100 languages, both either as a text-based language and text to speech. so yeah, we can generally support most of the languages that are customers

Matthew Miquelon: need to support for their communities. Direct message translation is really amazing. It’s real time. So again, if you, if I’m a teacher and I’m messaging an ell parent the El Apparent will respond, will receive my message in their language, respond back in their language, I’ll receive it back in English. There’s also a nice little button that allows you to see the source original as well, too. So you know, translations always been a core

Matthew Miquelon: really foundational part of our platform and ensuring that we so definitely, I think probably one of the best translation support suites out there in the market.

ParentSquare Marketing: Yeah, I’d say to, we have built, there is capacity for a human translator to go in and

ParentSquare Marketing: sort out translations in a lot of lot of different places, whether it’s forms or alerts. But the yeah, the automatic neural translation is, there is always there.

ParentSquare Marketing: So it’s pretty flexible.

Matthew Miquelon: Yeah, I see a question. Currently, our room parents use Facebook pages to communicate with each other.

Matthew Miquelon: It would be preferred by many parents not preferred by many parents. Pardon me, we would like to have a Facebook ish forum that parents in a classroom can use to communicate with each other regarding classroom stuff. And you know, I you know to me that sounds like the classroom feed direct messaging group messaging Jay Pauling you easily. I had that for the marching band in high school. We did that with all the parents that were Conf.

ParentSquare Marketing: you know, just just a place for us to communicate securely in the platform and not just using chat or email threads. So

Jay Klanfer: yeah, when when you, when you send out a message in Perrin Square.

Jay Klanfer: Now, again, it’s gonna go to the group you have the permission to communicate with. They’re gonna be able to respond. The default setting is that only you, the author of that message, will see the responses to come back.

Jay Klanfer: You can set it up where everyone sees everything going back and forth. That’s at your own risk. A lot of people don’t want to do that or you could turn that off on the social media side. We only allow you to attach the official for this example, the official Facebook

Jay Klanfer: page for that school. So if you’re a district and you have 10 buildings, you’d be able to attach 11 Facebook accounts, one for each building and then the district Facebook account

Jay Klanfer: and that kind of again, keeping things secure. Make sure the these are the official groups.

ParentSquare Marketing: Chris. that’s a great question. So

ParentSquare Marketing: Jay is talking about what we call a post, which is media rich, you know. Communications out where the teacher would put something out, and then the room parents can all communicate around it in chat if you enable that in a thread.

ParentSquare Marketing: And then I was talking. I was thinking, from my high school. My experience with my high school was more direct messaging where you set up a group. You allow you allow folks to communicate within that group. So there’s there’s a few options there, I think.

Matthew Miquelon: Yeah. And also add to the you know, if you look at our feed, it’s called a feed. So it’s very comfortable for for parents who are used to Facebook and other social media tools. So I think you’d they’d find it very comforting and easy to adapt.

Jay Klanfer: and the net result of that is when. whether it’s casual communication or urgent communication.

Jay Klanfer: When when you build the trust of having a unified platform, and the community knows if it comes from Parents square, it is us. It is us, the district. If it is not in your parents. Square. You don’t have. Course you don’t have to play whack-able, especially when things are going sideways, because your community will know that this is the trusted resource, and you know, not having to listen to all these other. You know, kind of rogue groups that pop up around our school communities.

ParentSquare Marketing: Yes.

ParentSquare Marketing: great. And we have a question in chat. Sorry. QAQA. We have a question from Tanisha, and she asked if she, if I create a flyer in canva.

ParentSquare Marketing: will Parent Square translate to the family’s native language when I send it out? That’s a great question.

ParentSquare Marketing: Matt will let you answer, even though I,

Matthew Miquelon: yeah. So most of your camera gr our graphics, right? So we can’t.

Matthew Miquelon: Currently there’s there’s technology emerging that would allow us to do this. But and we’re always looking at new technologies and and new improvements. But you know, that’s a static image. Now, all the message, and all the content that you attach, or or actually

Jay Klanfer: to which you attach that graphic would be automatically translated. But currently, right now for a for a camera graphic. You’d most likely need to to leverage additional translation resources for that. Not going to translate. You could attach our home districts. Sometimes we’ll attach a graphic in both English and Spanish, because we’re like 53. But the Graphic itself doesn’t translate.

ParentSquare Marketing: Yeah. So it’s really how you download it. How you, how you create that flyer, you know whether it’s actually still text, or if it’s all been merged into one graphic is sort of the answer, there’s definitely ways we see folks doing it. But yeah, if it is text.

ParentSquare Marketing: even if it’s designed in ParentSquare, it will. It will translate to their you know, automatically to their preferred language through the platform. So if the text is recognizable, I think I would say.

ParentSquare Marketing: Alright.

ParentSquare Marketing: okay. I think that brings us

ParentSquare Marketing: to a close. I’m not seeing any more questions. But just wanna say, thank you very much to everyone for joining us today. I hope you got something useful out of it. A bit more info

ParentSquare Marketing: that that of insight into our company, or some back to school examples. and reach out to us anytime. Look out for our next webinar next month. We’re gonna be doing a webinar on attracting and retaining

ParentSquare Marketing: teachers and staff, and really talk about

ParentSquare Marketing: ways that we’re seeing. So some really innovative ways, people are trying to reach their community to find staff.

ParentSquare Marketing: And also then how do they make lives easier for teachers once they are part of the network and make sure that they don’t have too much administrative overhead and a lot of family support.

ParentSquare Marketing: So that’s next month. Look out for that invite which will be going out in a couple of weeks

ParentSquare Marketing: and have a great rest of your day. Everyone

Jay Klanfer: have a good rest of your year buckle in. Thank you for the work you do.