Improving parent engagement with a school app

Ambrose Treacy College is a Catholic College for boys, located in Indooroopilly, Queensland. In search of a more effective and streamlined way to communicate with their school community, Ambrose Treacy College partnered with Digistorm in 2016 to develop a parent communication app. We sat down with the team to learn more about their experience since implementing the app. 

The challenge

Before implementing a Digistorm App, the school primarily relied on email to communicate with its parent community, leading to email fatigue and little engagement. The Ambrose team determined that a single channel of communication was not optimal, and needed a way to communicate with parents without saturating their messages.

“We're a very busy boys' school, with lots of activities going on in the co-curricular departments, as well as across all of our learning. So, parents were bombarded with emails, and their natural response to that was not to read them.”

- Rhonnie Sparksman, Communications Officer

How does your school app help you to better connect with your community?

We have over 7,500 downloads (of the app) at the moment. Anything that we have a tag for on the app, we can target a message to parents and feel completely confident that they will receive that message. From the user's perspective it's very easy to set up or edit notices in an instant.

What's your favourite feature of the Digistorm app?

Being able to communicate with all of our families is the real game-changer for us in having the Digistorm App. From a back-end point of view, it's very simple for us to queue up, add content, and send out notifications with the click of a button means that our community can get the timely information that they need, on the right schedule. 

Is there anything exciting in the pipeline that you're working on?

One of the new and exciting things that we're doing with our app is adding our parent authentication module. So, that's going to allow parents to login and really interact with some of the core features that our system offers, like signing up for tours and excursions and doing it with two or three click – Sebastian Tabulo, Director of IT.

How has the Digistorm app helped to organise your family?

The features of the app that I find most useful for our family are; sport schedules, weekend schedules, assessment results, and feedback. The boys like have the app on their phones -- it helps them get organised for sport schedules on the weekend. Around assessment time, they're very keen to try and find their marks – Jodi Rivalland, Parent & PA to the Principal