Founded in 1893, TMI Episcopal is the Flagship private school of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas. Situated in San Antonio, TMI caters to Grades 6 - 12, and is the oldest Episcopal Church-sponsored, college-preparatory school in the Southwest. In this customer story, we chat with TMI’s Director of Community Relations, Stephanie Gish, to find out more about how a Digistorm App has helped improve their communication with their community.
TMI’s current admissions team has three staff members, and Stephanie mostly handles the marketing, branding, and communication herself. When Stephanie was originally searching for a technology partner for the app, she wanted something that could be put in place and that she wouldn’t have to oversee until new content needed to be added or updated. As a small team covering a variety of marketing disciplines herself, having a simple to use, and easy to manage solution was important.
“And that’s been exactly what I got with Digistorm, from the very beginning to where we’re at now, it’s been so seamless, and really provided that extra push that we needed for communications, and really a benefit to our families.” - Stephanie Gish
According to Stephanie the Digistorm App helps TMI by allowing their current families to have access to all of the information that they’re constantly looking for. The app provides parents with a one-stop-shop, allowing students, parents, and faculty and staff to be able to use the app and find out what’s happening in the community.
“So everytime I login to the admin console, I’m able to see how many users have downloaded the app, and we have about a thousand downloads, so that’s a wonderful number for us, in a community that’s small (like our school is). That means we have families and faculty and students who are using the app.”
One of the standout features of the app for TMI was the notification module, which they found useful for pushing out important messages to the community. Not only is the notification module easy to use, but they’re also able to schedule messages so they don’t have to be sent out right then and there. This makes it great for planning ahead to get all the important messages out exactly when you want to.
TMI also valued being able to custom brand their app with their school designs, and that families can easily find them in the app store with their specific logo and branding. Once parents open the app, they’re greeted with TMI’s logo and school colours, so orange and black in particular are very prominent. Their logo is also used as an icon within the app interface, which adds an extra special branding touch for TMI’s community.
As a team with limited resources, a supportive and well managed onboarding process was an important element in deciding on an App provider for TMI.
“I was able to download the prototype of the app, which was really exciting and I could share that with our senior leadership team. So me and a couple other people got to really test the app, and make sure that it was doing just what we wanted.”
Once their app was optimized and ready and school leadership was happy with it, the Digistorm team was there to help guide TMI through the process of launching it to their families and getting it out to their community.
Before their Digistorm App, TMI had a do-it-yourself-app that they were using to interact with their families, and which wasn’t quite cutting it.
Digistorm helped the TMI team with the release of their new app, which seamlessly replaced the old one through a simple update, making it simple for users to quickly become acquainted with the change.
“The customer service is phenomenal. The team has been exceptional from day one. They really helped guide me through the entire process of really making sure that what we were putting into the app was the right thing for us to have in the app, and they guided us through that whole beginning process as the app was being built. Even now, I have no hesitation to call on my contacts whenever I have a question, or when I need something answered about the app, they’re right there.”
School apps are becoming more and more a part of the daily processes of schools, serving to improve the efficiency of staff members. Faculty can deliver real-time updates about important and time-sensitive information with a custom and branded Digistorm school app, helping them to reach their admissions and marketing goals. If you’re thinking about investing in a school app, feel free to check out some of our customer stories to gain insight into the benefits other schools have had with their apps.