Enhance Parent Communication with Memberhub

Anybody who is a regular visitor to Pre-K Pages knows I’m all about parent communication. Today I’m introducing you to Matt Harrell of Memberhub who is sharing ways to enhance parent communication with technology.

Do you feel like no matter what you do you just can’t get your families to read anything you send home? Sure, you sent an email but you’re not confident they’ll actually read it. You put it on your website, but they don’t visit the site. It’s not the medium we’re using to communicate; it’s the tools we’re not using that are the problem. Technology can improve the way you’re already communicating. Tools like MemberHub allow you to spend less time managing communications and can actually increase parent engagement.

Let’s consider the communication needed to remind parents about upcoming events. Whether it’s a big field trip or a reminder about the Valentine’s Day party; teachers constantly have to remind families about something. What if you could put those reminders on auto-pilot? What if you could populate a calendar for a month and have it automatically send out reminders via email and even text message to families at the perfect time? That’s exactly why technology tools like MemberHub were created! It will save you a lot of time and the email reminders won’t be “just another email” from school…they will be well received notifications that parents can quickly digest and move on.

Another example of a communication need that technology can make more efficient is sign-ups. In many schools, there is so much collaboration that needs to happen among the parents and teachers. It’s certainly the case at my child’s preschool. There are signups for the parents to volunteer for fund-raising events, parent teacher conferences, making play dough, bringing in snacks and more. Before the school started using MemberHub, parents would find a piece of paper taped near the door to sign-up. They’d have to have their schedule with them and hopefully their child is being “cooperative” while daddy figures out what slot to take. I’m sure you’ll agree that sign-up sheets are not nearly as annoying as the “reply-all” email thread where everyone says what slot they’ll have or what they’ll bring to the party. There are so many simple tools that schools can use to create virtual sign-up sheets. A simple wiki-type tool will do…at MemberHub, we call them Whiteboards.

Bio: Matt is the CEO and co-founder of MemberHub.com. He and his father started the company after experiencing the challenges of communication at their church, nonprofit and school. He is the father of a 5 year old girl and 2 year old boy.

Tagged as: classroom, early childhood, education, kindergarten, parent communication, pre-k, preschool