Accessibility is Key to Family Engagement and Student Success

You think you are reaching all the families in your district – but are you? (Hint: you’re not!)

Traditionally, trying to connect with families has resorted to three, unreliable channels of communication – email, robocalls, and most recently, texting solutions. With little success and the added challenges of remote learning, districts needed a communication solution that was easily accessible to every family in their schools.

Email communication is only as effective as the ones who use it.

Even before the pandemic, reaching families via email had been tough. According to HubSpot, education emails only have an average open rate of 25%, which means your communication is only reaching a fourth of the families it needs to reach.

For someone to open an email, they have to receive it first – but school districts have always struggled to collect and maintain email addresses. One of our larger districts only had contact information for 46% of their guardians before using Snap! Connect, and that’s not even considering those who have an email account but don’t regularly check it.

A principal in an elementary school in NYC states that “For many of our families, their sole device for communication is their cell phone.” May continues, “The fact that they can reach us by using Snap! Connect on their phone has served the school and the community immensely.” By creating an inclusive communication platform, we are blowing the doors wide open on engagement opportunities between educators and families. “I’ve had conversations with parents I would normally never talk to,” says Vicki, a teacher from Jefferson County Public Schools.

Snap! Connect TIP – See how direct, two-way communication can help connect school to home and everywhere in between.

Robocalls and text messages are useless when linked to the wrong phone number.

These methods of communication are as equally problematic as 9% of all U.S. consumers switch mobile phone numbers in a given year, according to Gallup. Although that number may seem small, the impact is huge.

When you send out a robocall or text message, you are given a delivery rate that focuses on the phone numbers, not the individuals. So if a guardian changes their phone number and you continue to reach out to their old number, you have no way of knowing if you’re connecting with these families or not.

This is why an app-based solution is a more successful communication tool. As one partner teacher, Maggie, says, “Snap! Connect is an app, so families can download and log into it without having to go through me to update contact information.” 

Snap! Connect TIP – Learn more about how Snap! Connect can help you keep up-to-date contact information by scheduling a demo.

Data tracking is the only way to know who you’re already reaching and who you still need to connect with.

Even if you think you’re reaching the majority of your families, don’t you want to reach all of them? At a district-wide level, it’s tough to keep track of all the families you need to be engaging with. Some families are missing the critical information that district leaders so diligently developed to keep them informed.

With the insight and data from Snap! Connect, districts can successfully build family engagement. One elementary principal, Jack, says, “I can easily access all Snap! Connect data in one place to see which teachers are actively posting and messaging their families. This has made it easy to target and grow engagement.” 

The simplistic access Snap! Connect provides is ideal for reaching families where they are by connecting home to school, boosting engagement, and closing the communication gap.

Interested in what Snap! Connect can do for your school or district? Click to connect!