Company: PowerSchool
Company background: PowerSchool boasts over twenty years of innovation, starting as the first web-based student information system. At PowerSchool, we believe in the simple truth that every student deserves the best opportunities in life. That’s why our mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their potential, in their way, from the front office to the classroom to the home.
Contact: Jbid Kissel
Title: Senior Manager, PowerSchool Community
Related URLs: https://help.powerschool.com/
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.).
We designed our Community to be the central hub for peer-to-peer discussions, self-help, and chat and web support for customers across the board – administrators, teachers, and parents. Previously, we were many support sites serving our many customers. PowerSchool Community was the first-time in PowerSchool history we were able to bring all 30+ solutions under one umbrella, an overwhelming win for PowerSchool and our customers.
2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations?
Our Executive Leadership team was instrumental in adopting Khoros (Lithium) as our new Community. As we migrated our newly acquired products to our CRM, we moved them to our Community at the same time.
We started with a handful or products that provided B2C support and worked with our Khoros team to build out the structure and resources for those products.
We provided a series of communications, hosted webinars and Q&As, and added messaging to our old sites. We shared dates in advance to allow customers time to transition. Since we serve the greater education community, we chose to go live in late fall, after the usual back to school rush. Once we launched, we started seeing views, registrations, and posts. We repeated this process as we added more products to our Community over the next two years until all of our solutions were together in one place.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.
Between 2018 and 2019, we saw a 274% increase in average monthly member entrances and 390% increase in our average monthly forum posts. We are currently trending 30% higher in activity since last year. As we come into the busy season, we expect to continue the upward trend.
We have seen over 127,000 registrations, over 850,000 member entrances, and over 4 million visits. We have had over 28,000 posts in our forums and more than 16,000 articles across our products.
We are continuing to add new features and content to our Community to continue to drive growth and engagement, such as COVID-19 resources to help our schools with online instructions, which was a collaboration between Support, Product, and Marketing. We received over 50,000 views in two months, an Ideas Portal for product enhancements, and chatbot for parent back-to-school support.