Communication, Communication, Communication

I really don't know what happened there ... no posts in a fortnight?  Outrageous!

So, where were we?  My previous post was a bit of a moan at not achieving much (or at least it was the perception of not achieving much).

This week's focus: Communication

Parent communication, to be precise.  Specifically, our Parent Portal.

Our teaching staff have been using Portal for a number of years now and, since about September last year, we have been planning and preparing for Parent Portal launch.  Which was over a month late, incidentally.

It was officially launched on 27 February 2012 and what was the initial response from many of our parent body?  Marvelous!

In the first week, we have had maybe 70-80 emails from parents (mums and dads) who have all praised the service.  Here are a small handful of quotes:

• I think that the parent portal is very efficient and excellent tool to access my daughter's date and any information from the school on time.
• Just wanted to thank you and St-Chris for an excellent parent website. As a busy Dad this is truly revolutionary
• Congratulations! It is just great, easy to browse and very convenient

OK, OK.  It's not my work.  Our MIS provider did all the work.  But the point is, it isn't necessarily easy trying to improve school communication when you have 2384 'primary contacts' in a school (that's how many Parent Portal accounts we have created).

It provides access to selected areas of your children's data (e.g. attendance, timetable, assessments).  But for us, the breakthroughs are the Notices and Events widgets - inbox and calendar, if you prefer.

We can now deliver messages much more intelligently to each and every one of our families.  Don't have a child in Year 4?  OK, we won't send you any letters/notices/events about that year group.  Our parents now only get the messages they need.

Letters Home, Weekly Newsletters, Notices and Reminders are now all available in the Parent Portal.  In the short-term, we are also parallel-posting these onto our website.  However, this will come to an end at the end of Term 2.  From Term 3, the Parent Portal will be the only place they will be available.

We already have a 1-in-3 login rate and I expect this to rise to 50% within a week.  The incentive to login will increase as we phase out our web-site uploads.

So far, our parents love it!

If you're interested in reading more about our Parent Portal, you can visit our Parent Portal FAQs.