Parents: Email Best for School-to-Home Communications

Parents: Email Best for School-to-Home Communications

Eighty percent (80%) of parents say personal email is the most effective way for schools and districts to communicate with them, according to Speak Up data released by Blackboard Inc. and Project Tomorrow in their latest trends report, Trends in community engagement: Text, Twitter, email, call—new expectations for school-to-home communications.

The new report analyzes feedback from more than 514,000 K-12 students, parents, educators, and community members who shared their views between October 2016 and January 2017 as part of the annual Speak Up Research Project for Digital Learning, facilitated by Project Tomorrow.

Parents value email messages, auto phone messages and text messages for receiving non-student specific information such as announcements and alerts. For general communications, principals also identify auto phone messages and email as effective tools, but place a much higher value on school and district websites and social media tools like Facebook than parents do. Nearly half (45%) of parents want information texted to them; only 19% want to have to go to a website to find the same type of information.

When it comes to social media, this disconnect is large. Almost five times as many district communications officers (78%) as parents (16%) identify Facebook as an effective way to communicate school and district information.