While most small and private schools dedicate thousands of dollars each year to make sure their classroom technology is up to date, that same dedication is less common when it comes to deploying technology to communicate with parents. The gap between what today’s mobile parents expect and what they are delivered is widening.
Below are some sobering facts about parent communications you may not know.
- 85% of newsletters remain unopened.
- The 15% who open the newsletters will spend less than two minutes viewing them. Reason? They are not relevant specifically to their child.
- 10% of the parent body contribute to policy changes. They are the ones who are engaged and/or donating.
- Once the school year has started parents will rarely access school websites to retrieve information. If you want to keep them engaged, you need to ‘push’ information to them.
- Parents still continue to call the front desk with questions regardless of whether or not they have installed a portal.
- Annual fundraisers are great, but the time and dedication needed can defocus administrators and parents from day-to-day needs, such as strong parent communications tools.
- The vast majority of parents are mobile and expect information at their fingertips.
The question is: What are you doing to improve your communications? It’s never too late to put a plan together to keep parents engaged every day of the school year. Easy to use apps such as SchoolCues don’t need months of preparation. They can be deployed in time for 2015. Maybe now is the time to take action.