If you are a business owner running classes, you know all about the ‘uber’ parent. They enrol their children in classes and the most important job for them is to drop and pick their kids from the class. And that one job is often a complex logistical affair filled with confusion especially if you have a few children attending different classes on different days.

As a thought experiment, ask yourself this –

• Do the parents know what the students were taught in the last class?
• Do they know if their kids are learning a skill or getting better?
• Do they see any of the efforts made in the actual teaching?
• Do they see value that you provide?

What’s the problem?

Let’s take look at Mark who runs a Dance Studio. He spends a lot of time preparing for classes, has lesson plans for each class, gives practise homework, shares YouTube videos to learn from and follows-up in the next class to see if the student is making progress. There is only one small problem. None of this is done in a structured way. Mark has lesson plan as word documents on his laptop, he tells his students what they need to do before the next class, sends email or WhatsApp of materials that he wants to share and checks in on progress when they come back next. The parents pay for the classes up-front and don’t really engage after that.

A few teachers and coaches use WhatsApp and SMS to let parents know what was covered and try to keep them in the loop. But, this ends up being generic and not personalised for each student.

Churn and drop-off

The most common impact of this issue is churn. Parents don’t see the value or students lose interest and therefore they churn over time. Or the students continue with the classes, but it feels like everyone is going through the motions rather than trying to actually get better and acquire new skills.

Our internal research revealed that it’s not that parents were not interested. They were – they just needed an easy way to stay up to date. Anything that takes more than 45 seconds, is just too long. Parents wanted to know what their kids are up to, parents were interested in chasing them up on their homework, they wanted to know how their children performed on tests and competitions and most importantly, if they were getting better. But, they weren’t prepared to read war and peace. They didn’t really want 15 different systems to log in and access this information. The generic information felt more like announcements rather than anything specific to their child.

Solution

This is not a new problem, and a number of different industries are trying to solve this problem though technology. Schools are now commonly using platforms like Compass, Canvas etc. to engage parents and involve them in student development. But, large scale enterprise software is not something most small business can afford or have the time to administer.

There are a few key principles in finding a solution –

• The solution should be mobile friendly where parents can engage in bit sized information quickly.
• The solution should centralise and integrate all the required information to provide them with a 360-degree view of their children and what’s going on.
• The solution should be easy to implement and administer. Ideally, everything should just work on the phone.
• The solution should be intuitive and simple to use. Less is more as most parents and teachers are time poor and just want to get to the chase pretty quickly.
• It should be cost effective, ideally even free access to parents depending on the pricing model.

Increasing parent engagement through Outcoach

At Outcoach, we are passionate about education and in supporting small business owners in creating the next generation of athletes, artists, musicians, dancers and leaders. We always wanted to start at the grass roots level. So, after talking to over 50+ business owners, we created a platform to solve this problem in the simplest possible way.

• Coaches can set and track goals for their students
• Coaches can assign homework, and students have to mark them as completed when done.
• Coaches can log all the test and competition result to see when students are getting better over time
• Coaches and students can provide feedback and record their reflections.
• Coaches can share photos and videos to provide personalised feedback.

All of these are visible to the parents on their mobile for free!

Parents can see the actual effort being made by the teachers and coaches. Like most other student engagement platforms, parents feel connected and ‘in the know’. There are some systems that offer a dedicated parent portal, but their focus is administrative. It is to view and pay invoices or change classes. These are valuable (and something that can also be done in Outcoach) but they don’t really engage the hearts and minds of the parents.

Benefits

If you were to ask the parents today, “why is you child attending this class?”, what would be the response? It is almost always skill development, getting better at something. If you can allow them to take a peek under the hood so that they can see the amount of effort that goes into running these classes, if they can track the progress, they can see the value. This has several benefits –

• Increase in engagement which should translate into reduced churn
• Potential increase in revenue through recommendations and review for your business (parents talk!)
• Ability to show justification for price increases (yes, this is an unintended benefit but one we have seen many do successfully and without customer friction).

Summary

Getting mindshare of the ubering parent can benefit small businesses running classes in more ways than one. If parents are engaged, the risk of churn reduces. Platforms like Outcoach drive that engagement through it’s mobile first, bite size information approach. Students feel accountable as they know that everything is tracked and measured. As the good old adage goes, you can only improve what gets measured. Most people already have a lot of apps on their phone, one more might help literally ‘change the game’.