Five reasons why schools are challenged in keeping their parents engaged.

  • Over 75% of small schools are faced with declining enrollment and / or budgets year over year. With limited technology infrastructure and resources, they are constantly in search of that ideal solution to market to and engage with parents. Its a version of an “abracadabra” which either doesn’t exist or it’s called a custom solution!
  • School websites are primarily a marketing tool for new (prospective) parents to find out more about the schools. Existing parents rarely go to their school websites, irrespective of how relevant the content is. Yet schools constantly upgrade, change, knead, and spruce up their web content and spend valuable $$ on SEO and social media, trying to increase their traffic. But research shows that over 80% of a school’s enrollment comes from families living within a 15 mile radius.
  • “Constantly Contacting” the parent is unlikely to get them excited – it’s the Rule of “5-85-2-9” – Five hours to create a newsletter – 85% of them go unopened – less than two minutes spent on those that are opened – attention span of parents is less than 9 seconds to get your message in!
  • Parental engagement typically peaks during auctions, fund raisers and carnivals. Practically, is more of these the solution?
  • With the explosive growth in mobile devices, there has been a rapid decline in web traffic as more users prefer to receive their content and on a mobile device. However, a vast majority of small schools continue to rely on the web as their main engine of ontent dissemination.

Isn’t it time for schools to start thinking about the future trends especially if they are catering to the next generation of parents?