The ParentSquare Blog

Where Our Community Stays Connected

News

Thanks For Reviewing Us! Here’s How We Did in 2020

Designed by Katherine Engel

It’s official! The results of our 2020 Customer Satisfaction Survey are in. We know this year has been busier than ever for districts and schools, which is why we were blown away by the 2,800+ educators who sent in their answers to our annual survey—thank you for taking the time to provide us with your honest feedback.

Each year, we use customer survey feedback to drive key decisions within our company, gauge whether we’re on the right path (or need to forge a new one) and prioritize future product and process improvements.

We thoroughly reviewed and analyzed the customer satisfaction survey, and we’d like to share our findings with you. Let’s take a look.

Who Filled Out the Survey?

More than half of our survey respondents were teachers, followed by school, district and parent administrators. Participants who did not categorize themselves made up the remaining 1%.

How Satisfied Were Our Customers?

We are pleased to report an NPS of 45! NPS measures customer satisfaction and is calculated by asking our users, “How likely are you to recommend ParentSquare?” on a scale from 1 to 10.

We feel this year’s NPS is a positive reflection of our hard work to provide a quality experience to our customers amid the pandemic and something to be very proud of within the edtech industry.

The Features Most People Requested & Loved

Here is a highlight of our most popular features and some memorable customer comments.

Alerts & Emergency Notifications

Our “Smart Alert” feature delivers alerts to all of your contacts in case of an emergency or important update. Districts and schools can preload and access alerts from the ParentSquare app and send alerts with three taps on your phone (or with Siri on an iPhone).

Emergency alerts & notices cannot be disabled since they are of utmost importance, but parents can personalize how and when they receive general district/school announcements and messages, opting for a daily digest or immediate notifications, and selecting email, text, and/or app notifications. In this age of pandemic message fatigue, this feature puts the control in parents’ hands to determine how and when they receive school comms, so they stay in the loop without being overwhelmed.

“ParentSquare is quick, easy, reliable, and effective. It has transformed my emergency and routine communications into a quicker and less stressful process.” — Maggie Kelly, Estacada School District

“It is the best school to community communication tool out there. The options for sending posts, messages, or emergency alerts are right at your fingertips. It takes seconds to create a post and our community gets it instantly (or in a Daily Digest). Our parents love it as they can text message back to us with any questions. The platform looks almost like Facebook, and each building can have it’s own main page. We use it daily!” — John Fisgus, Oakfield-Alabama CSD

Classroom Communications by Teachers

We’re so glad teachers continue to love communicating with parents through ParentSquare. With so many different learning scenarios this past year, teachers increased the need to share important information with parents more frequently than usual. We have seen teachers engage with families in new and exciting ways through the platform.

You can post to an entire class or grade with photos, attachments, newsletters, sign-ups, volunteer requests, payments, and more. Our direct messaging capability also provides a secure place for private one-on-one messaging or group chats—with instant translation and administrative oversight to protect all platform users.

“ParentSquare is an efficient and effective tool for communicating with students, parents, and our community at large. It is a way to keep our entire school connected in a meaningful way. Even better, ParentSquare helps educators keep track of their communications, as well.” — John Cain, Copenhagen CSD

“ParentSquare is a great way for teachers to communicate directly with families, as well as giving them the ability to communicate in a broader sense as well. Families love seeing pictures and videos, and having the peace of mind that they have an open door into the classroom.” — Natalie Pavone, UConn Child Development

Forms & Permission Slips

With so many students in remote learning scenarios, it’s nearly impossible to hand out physical paper, plus making eco-friendly choices is a big priority for districts and schools across the country. With our Forms & Permission Slips feature, districts and schools can say goodbye to paper flyers once and for all. Using digitized forms and permission slips is not only better for our environment, but it also eases the burden of staff printing, collating, labeling and distributing (or in today’s case, mailing) wasteful paper announcements.

Parents can conveniently fill out forms on a computer or phone, and districts can even create templated forms for individual school sites to ensure district consistency. One of the best things about this feature is the ability to pull a report of who has or has not signed a form or permission slip and send a follow-up reminder with just a few clicks.

“Parentsquare is a wonderful solution to communicate with parents and guardians of all kinds. Communicate through text or email for the tech savvy, or the app for those who need more support. We appreciated the add-ons as well, allowing our district to head towards going paperless, collecting forms, permissions, and volunteer lists easily and much more quickly than before.” — Sarah Gautam, Delhi Unified

“It has been very useful in receiving immediate updates and notifications. I really enjoy it! Especially, when we need to sign forms, we can easily pull them up on ParentSquare! Great function!” — Valerie Villanueva, Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD

Parent/Teacher Conference Sign-Ups

Last year, most schools were not able to provide in-person parent-teacher conferences. We were so happy to help teachers schedule remote conferences instead, through Conference Sign-Ups in ParentSquare. Teachers can easily set up conference time slots (allowing for a buffer between each meeting, if needed). Parents can conveniently book a parent-teacher conference on their mobile device.

Due to the pandemic, we saw new use cases for this feature, including schools and districts using Conference Sign-Ups to schedule on-campus pick-ups and drop-offs safely. This feature allows for an easy way to book parents in for curbside technology pick-ups, library book drop-offs, course material pick-ups, etc. Utilizing this feature helps make sure you don’t have long waiting lines, so you can keep the number of people on-campus low. It also helps staff more easily manage distribution processes!

“ParentSquare is my lifeline to parents. I am teaching 100% virtually this year so I send out weekly updates to let parents know what we are working on in each subject. I also use ParentSquare to send and reply to private messages with parents. This was the first year I used ParentSquare to schedule conferences. It was so easy! I love that you could schedule 5 minute breaks in between conferences to allow for overage, and that parents signed up directly and I didn’t have to send out separate confirmations.” — Toni Lyn Vidro, Tuckerton Elementary School

“The easiest way to communicate with the families of our students. For the first time ever I was able to conduct ALL parent teacher conferences.”— Alexander Esquivel, Madera Unified

“ParentSquare is very user friendly and an effective way to communicate with all families. It is so nice having everything in one place. I am able to switch back and forth between my school and my daughter’s school. Scheduling parent-teacher conferences was easier this year than it has been the past 20 years of my teaching career thanks to ParentSquare.”— Lorri Losee, Crestview Elementary

Social & Web Sharing

It’s been exciting and encouraging to see so many districts and schools share their stories and showcase their successes with our Social and Web share feature. But more than that, last year, we saw this feature used to post about critical resources such as free meal programs, mental health services, and activities to promote community engagement and SEL.

While the ParentSquare platform is private to districts and schools, those who enable the social and web share option can quickly and easily share posts to Facebook, Twitter, or school websites.

“Anything that goes out in the public on ParentSquare generally goes to our social media accounts as well. Parents know to look in multiple places for information.”— Dr. Rachael George, Principal Sandy Grade School

Secure Document Delivery

Secure Document Delivery was again a popular feature, thanks in part to supporting district and school’s green initiatives, helping save time, and reducing costs related to printing and mailing physical documents to families.

Schools can electronically deliver secure documents such as report cards and progress reports directly to parents—eliminating the time-consuming tasks associated with snail mail. With Secure Document Delivery, schools can create their templates, attach pre-written or customized messages to documents that can be translated into 100+ languages, alert parents via preferred modality of communication, and more.

“The possibilities are endless. I love how I can send secure documents and see when they have been delivered and viewed.”— Elizabeth Espinal, Family Life Academy Charter School 3

“Easy to use and an effective means of communication, secure and confidential.”— Cheryl Willis, Louisiana Key Academy

Health Screening Forms and Workflows

The August 2020 launch of our health screening form delivered an easy-to-use solution for schools to enable student and staff daily health screenings.

This feature allows parents, staff, and high school students to electronically submit a health screening form indicating if they are exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19. They immediately receive clearance to go to school or instructions to stay home, matching school or district policies. For school bus or on-campus health screening scenarios, teachers and staff can easily use ParentSquare to record students’ results.

All identifying information about the student or staff member is pre-populated from data the school already has to the ParentSquare platform, so it’s always secure and private.

The health form results are immediately available in ParentSquare’s dashboard for the student’s homeroom teacher, authorized staff, or on-site health screeners—with a clear indication of missing responses or if anyone is exhibiting symptoms. To date, we have surpassed 6 million health screenings, and this feature continues to be a great success in helping mitigate COVID-19 transmission on school campuses.

“Parent Square has become an essential resource to our school, especially in the current COVID times. The Health Screenings have been crucial in our daily routine. Once again ParentSquare, you have streamlined the communication hub with our parents!”— Jacqui Reseigh, Inland Leaders Charter School

“Fast and convenient health screener with daily reminders sent via text and email.”— Lindsay Wiegand, Wayne Central

“Easy to use, safe health tracking system for parents and staff.”—Emily Carpenter, Seneca Falls Central School District

ParentSquare Support Satisfaction

Each year we ask customers to rate us on various aspects of our support. Here is how you rated us!

“But the one part of ParentSquare I love the most is the customer help line. Without a doubt they are always quick to respond and friendly. I have reached out several times and they always solve my issue in about five minutes or less. I appreciate you making ParentSquare so user friendly!” —Tiffany Lizer, Katherine Edwards Middle School STEAM & Dual Immersion Academy, Whittier City School District

Where We Are Making Improvements & Things To Look Forward To

We are always grateful to our detractors who spent the time to provide us with detailed feedback and suggestions, so we have a better understanding of where we need to improve. We will continue to expand on our Help pages, and training modules, and introduce ‘micro’ training and tips over email.

Here are some existing areas where we have prioritized improvements, as well as some things to look forward to in 2021:

Improvement Priorities: Direct Messaging, Forms & Permission Slips (translations & payment integrations), Conference Sign Ups, and Secure Docs.
Things To Look Forward To: More Support for Community Members & Website Integrations for Community Groups, and More Partnerships & Integrations.
Introducing Pure Contact: We know we need to improve upon parent contactability, so we launched our most ambitious project to date: Pure Contact. This is a comprehensive solution to bad parent/guardian contact data, which directly affects contactability rates. Our new contact data management feature keeps data in sync with your SIS at all times and performs contact verification to ensure confidence in data.

We look forward to making many exciting improvements to our platform offerings to address the on-going communications needs of districts and schools nationwide.

Our Sincerest Thanks To Everyone Who Filled Out Our Customer Satisfaction Survey!

If you’re an existing ParentSquare customer and have questions about any of the features mentioned above, or if you would like to turn on a particular feature to help your school further optimize its communications, please login to your account to contact our support team!

Not a customer? Learn how our unified school-home communications platform can help your district or school.

Schedule a Demo