When communicating with parents, there is this notion of passive vs. active communication. If you think about social media like Facebook and Twitter, you don’t necessarily get an email notification whenever somebody posts an update. Instead, you can log in as frequently as you like to get a snapshot of recent events. This could be daily, or at the end of the week. But at any time, you can drill deeper into specific events. However, you still get notifications for events/activities that may require immediate action, like a Private Message, or an important announcement.

This is what we’re trying to translate into QuickSchools. As a parent, you can log in at any time to view how the student is doing. As a parent, you would (and should) expect a lot of activity regarding the student and the school, like upcoming events, grades for recently submitted assignments, attendance, homework assignments, etc. But you wouldn’t necessarily want an alert for every single event that takes place, especially if it means several email notifications on a daily basis (although some might want this).

The Parent Portal already has several modes of active and passive communication with the school. These were discussed in a previous article – “Building a Community”. It is our hope that, by building a community feel via the Parent Portal, parents will want to log in frequently to check with their child and participate in school activities. And for parents that don’t like logging in, there are still active ways of communicating with them (like via our Mass Parent Messaging).

And as our software matures, we’ll allow parents to configure what types of events warrant an email notification, and what events/info can remain within the Parent Portal for passive consumption.

So how are we doing so far? Are we on the right path?