To inspire the best in their students and community, Flinders knew they needed to be a school with efficient, professional and reliable communication. They landed on a plan to declutter their messaging and craft an app that would act as the school’s sole voice.
The challenge
Like many schools, Flinders Christian Community College had been communicating with its community via multiple channels. Not only was this challenging in terms of upkeep from the team, but it created the risk of messages getting lost and ignored.
“When we started to investigate a communication app, we lovingly called the whole project Project Pandora,” shares Monica Wulff, Head of Marketing and Enrolments at Flinders. “The reason why is there are so many channels and avenues that parents and families get and receive information from the school. From websites, emails, text messages, newsletters, printed material, and everything, and we really wanted to find something that can bring it all together for them.”
That’s where a school app stepped in, allowing Flinders to push out notifications to reach all families at once, ensuring important and time-sensitive messages reach all intended parents.
Launching the app
Monica and the team at Flinders launched their new school app with realistic expectations, understanding that people take time to adjust to change.
“In the first couple of months, we allowed our families to just get used to the app; get into the whole thing,” explains Monica. “We just tracked how many families installed it. We wanted to get to at least 80-90% and then eventually all the way to 100%. At the moment, we’ve got all our families, about 98%, installed!”
The Flinders College app launched with a comprehensive plan that ensured adoption within the college from administration, IT, and the teaching staff. They knew that to get their wider community onboard, they would first need their internal teams onboard.
“It doesn’t help if you launch an app and one department is just sending out emails the whole time because that’s counterproductive. We closed off the channels like emails, newsletters, and print, and we focused on Flinders Connect,” shares Monica. “I’ll say allow yourself a good six months. Monitor it, and track all the users; don’t just think they’re using it, make sure that they’re using it.”
Using the app
Now that Flinders Connect app is up and established, the school can confirm it has reached its goals. “It definitely is a central place to communicate for all our families and students, whether they’re on the parent app or the student app,” Monica explains. “All the information that we now flow out to our families is via the Flinders Connect app. It will just be in an emergency that we actually send a text.”
Internally speaking, the team at Flinders has found the app’s CMS simple and easy to manage, with various admins set up with different user levels. “Everybody’s got their functions and things they can do,” says Monica. “It’s easy to track information that’s gone out, easy to edit. When you’re sending out a thousand plus emails and you have to send them and you go ‘whoops, something went wrong’; you never have that with Flinders Connect because you can just go in, update, and edit the information.”
