Family Engagement Platform Adds Phone Alerts for District, School Administrators

  • By Staff
  • 01/31/17

LivingTree, a private social network for pre-K–12 families, has added a new feature to its family engagement platform. The company Tuesday announced the addition of Phone Alerts, which enables school and district administrators to foster ongoing, two-way communication with parents.

Phone Alerts add voice capability to the texting, multimedia, private messaging and two-way conversation features already available on the platform. Voice messages can now be delivered to a parent’s phone via message post, email notification or mobile notification (based on their preference). The platform offers voice translation in 26 languages and text translation to more than 100 languages, so parents can receive the call or message in their preferred language.  

Parents can choose to opt in or out whenever they like, as per Federal Communications Commission regulation. School administrators can send phone alerts in the LivingTree platform, the same way they would share conversations and posts within the platform.

A recent report from Scholastic on equity in education said that that involving families in children's learning is important for student success, “but many educators need help engaging families.” The Scholastic study, which surveyed more than 4,700 public school pre-K–12 teachers and principals, found that almost every educator (99 percent) agreed that “it is important to student success that families be involved in their children’s learning, yet 74 percent say they need help engaging the families of their students.” Maintaining ongoing and two-way communication with families “is considered the most important activity educators should do to help families be engaged,” according to the report.

LivingTree’s latest feature to bridge the communication gap and help unite educators and families is on its private and secure platform.

To learn more, visit the Living Tree site.

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