Your school’s leadership team is planning the content for your new personalised school app. The whiteboard is full of ideas for content that you could share, messages that you could send and data that you could collect. It’s an exciting time for your school. At this point, it’s important to be sure that your planning takes into account the needs of parents. So, what information do parents actually want to receive from schools?
You could guess the answer but there’s already some solid data on this topic thanks to Web Foundry’s report into school’s digital strategies. Let’s look at the key information that parents want you to share.
70% of parents want information about school holidays
It’s not surprising that parents want to know about school holidays. They need to organise work and childcare around these key dates and, of course, they need to plan their family holidays.
67% of parents want to know about school events
Parents’ evenings, school concerts and sporting fixtures. One of the quickest ways to improve attendance at these events is to make sure that parents have an easy way to find out the dates, times and venues.
66% of parents want to receive urgent notifications
Is there an emergency school closure? Then you want to get the message out quickly. The good news is that parents want to receive this information too. Push notifications about time critical events have proved to have an impact beyond the event itself, even leading to improved pupil attendance in the school day.
51% of parents want to know about homework
Homework diaries are a great tool for teaching students about the importance of organisational skills. They are not, however, the most reliable way of making sure that homework actually gets completed! Parents value being able to access information about homework, especially if it includes suggestions for adding a bit of stretch and challenge.
Give parents the information they want
As school app specialists, Piota develops apps that meet the needs of parents and your wider school community.
We will build your school an app that features a calendar to tell parents about holidays and events. Our push notification system can send instant information to the entire school community. Teachers can even use the news module to keep parents informed about homework and other curriculum information. And that’s just scratching the surface of what’s possible with a personalised school app.
