Can a Smartphone app help to counter school budget cuts?
Balancing finances in-light of continual school budget cuts is extremely difficult. Schools are continually looking to optimise value for money whilst protecting and improving outcomes for their pupils.
With school budgets stretched, schools are continually fighting and having to identify more cost-effective ways of balancing the budgets.
Here at mySchoolApp, we continually ask Head Teachers, Deputy Head Teachers and School Business Managers of our schools to consider and assess the true cost of communicating with parents and carers.
SMS messaging systems were originally introduced to School offices for emergency use. However, in order to keep parents better informed, schools started to use the services more widely on a day-to-day basis. Please bear in mind that the average text message cost is between 4-5p. As a result, considerations must be made about which messages can justifiably be sent via these means. This is a continual burden to school administrative teams having to make justifications each time a message is sent.
Similarly, it has been widely reported that the average school can spend up to £60k per annum on print and photocopying alone. Of course we do recognise that the majority of this print is to support the curriculum and classroom learning. However, many schools still print and send hardcopies of important dates and letters home to parents and carers. What’s more concerning is the reliance on ‘pupil-post’ to get this information delivered.
Some thoughts in-light of school budget cuts:
The mySchoolApp platform offers unlimited, free messaging to our schools using Push Notifications. For this reason, our schools can prompt and remind their parents of the latest goings on at school as if they were sending a text but for free. One mySchoolApp customer sent 18,000 in-app messages in one month which could have cost approximately £720 if sent via SMS.
Publishing your newsletters or notifications via mySchoolApp or sending prompts and reminders via app messaging could save significant printing costs. If we could save 1% of total print by using an app such as mySchoolApp, that equates to £600 per annum.
Just think, if a school used a Smartphone app to send all external communication to Parents/Carers, what could the savings be?
For more information about using mySchoolApp for cost savings, please read our Blog (link to Blog). We also have published a Case Study from Shephalbury Primary School who saved significant budgets by reducing their reliance on SMS messages.
Above all, don’t just take our word for it…
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