blog / 21 January 2020

A focus on marketing plans

This month we focus on the marketing efforts in schools and how SchoolBench is adding value in this space.

Highlights are:

  • Begin with the end in mind – annual marketing plans
  • Feature update
  • Health Check – have you upgraded your version of SchoolBench
  • Milestone – breaking the 1 Million media ceiling

Begin with the end in mind

In 1989, Steven Covey coined the above phrase in his best-selling book “The 7 Habits of highly effective people”. This strategic focus remains a key part of any organisation’s planning for the year ahead – what do we want to achieve, how are we going to get there, what resources do we need to put in place now, so we succeed?

At this time of year, we see many school marketers preparing their annual marketing plans for enrolments, fundraising, community participation and engagement, yearbooks and a myriad of other projects.

So, you have your plans in place, your channels to market are set, your timing for release, your social and traditional media lined up, you’re in the process of copywriting the content and then comes the task of choosing photos and videos from your school’s events that you want to use and promote visually. What a task and as the saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words.

Your photos are easily sorted into year or event and all students appearing can be clearly identified by their media consent status. In the words of the meerkat, simples.

If you’re already using SchoolBench then it’s an easy task, right?

Is it that simple? Or are you still searching G drives and N drives and other shared drives clueless on whether you can use that photo. Are you still spending countless precious hours trawling through your media library for a supporting image?

If you do the job right the first time, then when it comes to designing your communication projects, your visual media assets will be ready to find in SchoolBench and apply accordingly to your projects now and throughout the year.

SchoolBench was introduced at Pulteney Grammar in 2018. Ms Sam Cooper, Archivist at the school, said that, “Pleasingly, SchoolBench helps make Archives part of the school, as opposed to being a separate entity. Through its security and its central storage, SchoolBench has made self-service possible, which is a huge time saver for me as I could spend up to 70% of my time fulfilling requests.”

Fortune favours the prepared.

If you want to know more, simply email us at contact@parashift.com.au or call your friendly SchoolBench team on 1300 769 809.

Feature update – ADFS 2016

After many customer requests, we are pleased to announce that Parashift has completed testing on and can confirm that SchoolBench now supports ADFS 2016 for single sign-on.

What this means for you?

Now when using SchoolBench, you no longer need to remember your password when logging in. Once logged into the school network, you can access SchoolBench if your schools uses AFDS. This results in a much easier and smoother usage of SchoolBench.

Why did we build  this capability with SchoolBench, well we listened to our customers. This makes your life easier and directly aligns to our cultural values of ‘Responsiveness’ to our customers’ wishes and ‘Intuitive’ in ease of use.

This month’s features

This month we have new features neatly unwrapped from Santa under the Christmas tree that include:

  • Last year’s profile photos will now automatically be retained as historical reference points when replaced with this year’s profile pictures. This will occur once your SIS has been updated with the new student images.
  • We’ve compiled documentation for tested photo editing software with new features now available for watermarking
  • To improve security, the SchoolBench parent portal will now either inherit the security timeout imposed by your existing LMS, or if standalone, a time limit of 5 minutes with no user activity.

Check your SchoolBench online documentation for full descriptions.

If you want to know more, simply email us at contact@parashift.com.au or call your friendly SchoolBench team on 1300 769 809.

Healthcheck

This month we are asking you to check the health of your usage and understanding of SchoolBench to ensure it is adding value to your school, your media management policy, usage and future scoping your school’s historical repository requirements.

Questions to ask yourself and your team, am I:

  • Using the latest version of SchoolBench?
  • Aware of all the features?
  • Using all the features?
  • Getting the most out of SchoolBench, what more do I need to know?
  • Up to date with training?

To book a refresher, targeted training session or if you need a question or two answered, simply email us at contact@parashift.com.au or call the friendly SchoolBench team on 1300 769 809.

Breaking the 1 million barrier

Just before Christmas, our system analytics reported the number of photos under management by SchoolBench had surpassed 1.2 million. This will continue to grow exponentially this year.

This growth is testament to the confidence in and use of SchoolBench as the premier school photo management solution. This is driven by the school retaining complete ownership of its images and information, management of privacy consent and automatic school-context tagging. These are the cornerstones of SchoolBench’s value. The features continue to grow as we continue to listen and understand the challenges faced by our clients’ and confidence in new markets.

We expect the number of photos managed by SchoolBench to continue to grow throughout the year, a figure we will share with you at this year’s EducatePlus and EduTech events.

Your feedback

We love hearing your stories about your digital media management experiences within your school community.

If you have a success story you would like to share with the SchoolBench community, contact us. Have an idea for an UpVote Feature in SchoolBench? Chomping at the bit to submit a case study?

By sharing you could win a Gold Class movie voucher for two, redeemable in your state.

This month’s lucky recipient is Annie Markey, Director of Communication at Newington College in Sydney, for her superb efforts in working with us to finalise the latest SchoolBench case study.

smart + simple + safe