When parents tell you they’d like to be more involved but just have ‘too much going on’, that should be the beginning of your conversation with them, not the end. Let’s face it, today’s parent is more stressed out than ever, constantly multi-tasking, dealing with work and outside issues that leave them exhausted at the end of each day. But it doesn’t mean they don’t want to be involved.
It’s time for school administrators to stop shrugging their shoulders and learn to navigate successfully around the ‘too much going on’ problem. There is a way to reach them and it’s sitting right inside their purses and pockets: their smart phones.
According to the latest 2014 study by Nielsen, U.S. adults now officially spend more time connecting to the internet via their smart phones than their PCs. A typical U.S. adult is spending 1 hour and 8 minutes per day on smart phones. So your target audience is definitely connected; at least to their phones.
Parents are more comfortable than ever downloading apps to their smart phones. School communications tools should be no exception. If you’ve given up the hunt for good mobile communications apps due to price and performance issues, you need to take a second look. Competition has made them better, cheaper and easier to put into action than ever. There are no more reasons to rely on text messaging or even websites and portals. These apps lets parents decide what kind of information they want delivered to their phones and when.
The key to using these mobile apps is to limit communications to small digestible pieces of information, such as parent reminders and quick school announcements that are easy for parents to access and respond to. Providing key information via mobile phones, helps keep parents with ‘too much going on’ stay in the conversation and engaged.
SchoolCues provides smart solutions to help small schools succeed by engaging parents in the mobile generation.