Today’s guest post is from Julie Bray from Konnective. Julie is also a founder of Ventiv who created the Planning With Kids Menu Planner App. Not only is Julie super smart when it comes to the technology side of things, but paired with her experience as a mum and business owner, she has great insights into how important planning and organisation is to families.
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I’m a Mum of two children and like many other kids, they are involved in a couple of different sports as well as their school activities. I find it’s really important to keep up to date on all of the special events, extra practices, changes of dates, excursion days etc but to be honest the amount of things to keep on top of can be quite overwhelming.
My daughter is involved in gymnastics and at her former club I would receive emails that stretched to over 2 pages long filled with dates, reminders and other news, of which only a small portion was relevant to us. Also, buried down the bottom of these email was often a request for payment!
Back a couple of years ago, I decided to do something about it and so grew the idea for Konnective. The aim of Konnective is provide a simple way to get information to parents or anyone that needs it, with a message straight to their smartphone. I also wanted to provide schools and clubs with a better way to engage with parents, so that they could share the fun stuff as well as the administrative news and reminders.
Konnective is now used by over 60 schools around Australia (and growing!). Thousands of parents use Konnective to receive information from their child’s school or clubs. Konnective has the support of the Victorian Government and we actively work with members of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development to receive advice or confirm direction.
The service is currently available for iPhone, Android and a web version available for other phone types or users without a smartphone. Participating schools and clubs can use Konnective to send news, events, notices, photos, attachments and more.
The schools we work with find Konnective really easy to use and all get fantastic feedback from parents. For schools or clubs, it’s a way to increase the effectiveness of their communications and it also reduces paper and printing costs. Schools or clubs are able to setup parent groupings (we call them feeds) so they can send targeted information just to the groups that need it. Not everyone needs to know that the Grade 2’s are starting their swimming program tomorrow!
My daughter’s school uses Konnective to sends out photos each day when the kids go to camp. It is so nice to get a little insight into what they are up to as well as to get up to the minute notifications on when the camp bus will return.
If you would like to encourage your school or sporting club to start using Konnective, you can contact us. Or better yet get them to complete their details and we’ll get in touch.
For any school or sporting club that gets introduced from Planning With Kids we would like to offer 50% off the first year’s subscription. (We charge a yearly subscription to the school or sporting club but the app itself is free to parents or members). Just make sure you (or they) mention you learnt about Konnective from Planning With Kids. Offer ends Dec 31st 2013.
To learn more about Konnective, including pricing, visit www.konnective.com.au.
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I have let our kids’ primary school know about Konnective and am hoping they will join up! Does your school use Konnective?