HipChime Mobile Marketing and the education industry are a perfect fit. The old saying, "Goes together like a horse and carriage" couldn't be more appropriate than describing the relationship between schools and text messaging.
Every high school, middle school, elementary school, private school, and other educational institution should embrace this technology as quickly as they can. The benefits are immediate, cost-saving, time-saving, efficient, and quick.
Colleges are required by law to be able to communicate with their students quickly in the case of an emergency, and no other means of communication could be better than sending a text message to all of the students' cell phones immediately.
In addition to emergency alerts, the school can send a whole host of other types of messages :
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Event announcements
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Sports cancellations
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Meeting notices
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Class scheduling changes
Students and faculty can also be divided into various groups for messages specific to that group. Even the Athletics dept, campus stores and restaurants could send out coupons and specials of the day.
Bulk text messaging can also be a valuable service for clubs, school sports, intramural teams, etc. They can announce the scores, increase attendance at meetings, send out party invitations, and much more.
Text messaging can be used to keep parents informed of many things like days off, school closing early, storm alerts, parent/teacher meetings, bus delays, sick children.
Many of those things usually have significant costs associated with them - paper and printing, mailing, labor, and phone calls. With our text messaging service, a school can:
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Make the school more secure overall
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Deliver the information quicker and more efficiently
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Reduce associated costs significantly
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Improve the parent/school relationships
Every educational institution will benefit from a bulk messaging service. Their students, the parents, and the staff are all carrying their phones with them today, and there isn't a quicker, more cost-efficient way to get information to them than buy blasting a text message directly to their phones.
How many kids never get home with the note from the school?
How many times has a parent missed an appointment with a teacher?
How many students weren't aware of a class being canceled or re-scheduled?
How much expense goes into copying, stamping and mailing notices to parents?
If you're a teacher, professor, or administrator, you can add to that list endlessly. It should be apparent by now that a sophisticated bulk SMS messaging system like ours is absolutely necessary for solving the poor communication methods employed now.
In fact, studies have shown that over two thirds of parents would like to see schools using text messaging and the internet to communicate more often. Isn't it time that you adopted this amazing technology to make dramatic improvements within the school-to-student, school-to-parent, and the school-to-faculty communication streams?
Schools & Universities
The University of San Diego is going mobile to connect with its growing student body and said other schools need to embrace the platform.
Among several new mobile initiatives is an iPhone application, mobile landing site and application for BlackBerry smartphones. The application and other mobile deployments that were created and paid for by the school’s IT budget.
“Our students are extremely mobile,” said Chris Wessells, vice provost and Chief Information Officer at the University of San Diego. “We just want apps that are practical and in demand for the students.”
The University of San Diego is a Catholic university in California chartered in 1949. The school enrolls approximately 7,800 undergraduate and graduate students.
USD’s applications and mobile sites allow students to perform a variety of functions while on the go.
Students can register for classes, access a faculty and staff director, find their classes on a GPS map, get directions, find out who their professors are, browse courses and search library catalogs.
Eventually, USD said it would like to make tuition and other payments available via mobile devices.
With that addition to the mobile platforms, USD will also open up other commerce opportunities to places like the school bookstore.
“Students are much more mobile than they used to be in the past,” Mr. Wessells said. “They want info in their hands, we have a pervasive wireless network on campus and a student is not going to flip open a laptop to see when the next tram is coming.
“We believe students want info in the palm of their hand,” he said.
USD updates its applications and mobile sites with campus news and events, athletic news and scores in real time, a course catalog to enable users to browse and make decisions on enrollment and official university streaming media.
Additionally, wallpaper and photos are available for download.
Mobile application development for higher education facilities is nothing new.
Last year, AT&T Inc. announced the winners of its first Big Mobile On Campus Challenge, a national higher education contest for mobile application development.
Prizes were awarded at a reception during the AT&T Higher Education CIO Forum at The Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes in Orlando, FL. The grand-prize winner was a team of full-time students from Stanford University.
Mr. Wessells said USD’s mobile applications were designed to make the school more accessible to students and to make things more effective and practical because of the prevalence of mobile devices amongst college students.
Within the first four hours of the application launch there were more than 500 downloads.
“I think universities and colleges that don’t invest in mobile will find themselves in a predicament,” Mr. Wessells said. “We happen to be among the leading universities in the country to do this.”
And the most important aspect of this technology is the ability to instantly get alerts out to staff and students in seconds that warn of a danger on campus or impending dangerous weather conditions.
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