Buzzmob School Communications Platform, ISTE 2014
A real communications problem exists in many schools and many school districts across the country. Schools use automatic voicemail, texting solutions, Facebook, and even notes home to communicate with parents. Typically all of these solutions are from different service providers sans the notes home, that’s old fashioned print outs, putting the responsibility of getting the message home, in the hands of the student.
Unfortunately, the need for schools to communicate with parents all at once, and in a hurry has become a real need.
Buzzmob provides a unified solution for not only the school but the teacher as well.
Buzzmob allows parents to decide what their preferred method of communication is. They can download the Buzzmob app and choose to get a notification on their smart phone. They can choose to get a traditional text message or an email. Whatever way the parent prefers will be the way that the Buzzmob platform provides information.
On the school side, teachers can use Buzzmob to communicate to parents about tests, assignments, assemblies, performances, field trips, fundraisers and more. Administrators can choose to use Buzzmob for any of those things as well as to advise parents of emergency situations on campus.
Sounds easy enough, but when the team at Chatter Inc, the company behind Buzzmob, started having school age children they noticed that every school was communicating with parents in a different way, and for the most part that was just in Orange County California. The app development company put their brain power to work to find a better way, and that they did.
In addition to a robust but easy to use, unified communications platform, Buzzmob has some pretty neat and convenient features as well.
Buzzmob delivers proximity based messages to parents. Now, when parents go through the car line at their child’s school, they can be notified of important news. Rather than sending handouts home, it’s automatically delivered. This is perfect for reminders. Schools can use Buzzmob to remind parents when they come on campus of an upcoming PTA meeting, testing date, or day off of school. This makes perfect sense and is working well everywhere Buzzmob is used.
Now, after going mobile first, Buzzmob is releasing the next version of the platform. Not they’ve created a web based dashboard that allows teachers and schools to easily communicate with parents. Until now Buzzmob was entirely mobile. The team found that some teachers were actually more comfortable with a web based product, and others still didn’t even have a smartphone.
Both platforms are practically redundant and for good reason. Teachers can decide to communicate from their phone or through the web platform. If there was some kind of emergency or the network was done teachers can always use the mobile app for communication.
We got a chance to speak with PR manager KJ Owens along with COO Edmond Wong about what’s next for Buzzmob. Check out the short video below:
Find out about Buzzmob here
