Notifications That Get Results

Talking about saving staff time kind of naturally leads to automation stories. Some of the most dramatic time savings are in New York City, where fast is good, and time is money, and where SchoolMessenger's hands-free automation has saved many thousands of staff hours compared to manual data entry and calling, as well as enabled communications that weren't possible before. Like at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, where SchoolMessenger has made a huge improvement in school-parent communications. And while we're talking about the Big Apple, we're really proud of a recent study showing we improved attendance in New York City schools by an average of 2%, with all the associated benefits of improved academic performance, dropout prevention and more.

New York City is the largest school district in the country, so it's not surprising that it has so many great stories, like the way parents at John Philip Sousa School in the Bronx responded within 15 minutes to SchoolMessenger reminder calls when no one showed up for Saturday tutoring. Or how SchoolMessenger made it easy for parents at Ps/Is 266 in Queens to sign up to help on specific projects, increasing the pool of volunteers by at least 50% and preventing the burnout of the usual core volunteers.

Speaking of responding, consider the time Mobile County Public Schools (AL) used SchoolMessenger's full-featured survey module to gather a baseline of opinions about school climate. Surveys were tailored for six different sets of stakeholders, 30,000 recipients in all. They used the randomization feature to change the order of questions for each recipient, to increase the statistical validity of the survey. This was one more case where our Cisco integration made a very beneficial activity affordable. The information learned from the survey was considered the big win, but the cost savings over other methods of performing the survey were appreciable.