The Connected Parent and how they engage with the school

The emergence of the ‘connected’ parent, new technologies, the impact of mobile as well as social media, are influencing how schools engage with their communities like we have not seen previously. Today’s parents and students expect real-time, personalised information to be available at their finger tips whenever and wherever they are.

Whilst this presents opportunities for some schools, for many it presents confusion and hesitation.

Innovative schools at the forefront of this evolution show remarkable similarities in how they embrace the digital revolution and how they are resourcing change and shifting culture. The results seen demonstrate the opportunity ahead including significant shifts in community engagement, greater perceived relevance and measurable increases in admissions, fundraising and and many other activities.

At our recent keynote presentation at the Educate Plus Conference in Melbourne last year we presented a panel of who we believe are three schools at the forefront of digital transformation and practice; Pymble Ladies College Sydney, Xavier College and Wesley College Melbourne. Their insight draws attention to a set of unpublished laws that guide any school wanting to embrace the digital space:

• The insight and belief that change is necessary and inevitable as a result of behavioural change in parents
• The need to ‘champion’ the cause and bring others on the journey, starting with the Principal
• The embracing of data in supporting the business case
• The realisation that digital transformation is more about people than technology
• To view all digital touch-points in a school as parts of an overall digital ecosystem
• To understand that we are now in a time of ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ communications

OnDigital has developed and introduced in 2014 a new model to meet the challenges faced by today’s progressive and innovative schools. The model is based on research across real-time community behaviour or how people are relating, using and socialising from new technologies and devices.

We have called the model The ‘Digital School Ecosystem’, a platform that integrates with existing school IT infrastructure as well as providing a single and unified voice across multiple touch points in the community. Key to the ecosystem is how it formats news, events and other sought after content across multiple devices.