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: The Accelerator
1. Please describe your company and your initiative.
PowerSchool’s 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, PowerSchool helps schools and districts efficiently manage instruction, learning, grading, attendance, assessment, analytics, state reporting, special education, student registration, talent, finance, and HR. Over the last few years, PowerSchool has brought many different solutions under its umbrella to build this educational ecosystem. We wanted to create one Community, for all of our current and newly added solutions.
2. What was the “before” state? What challenges did you have to overcome?
With our homegrown legacy site, it was not sustainable to handle the unique needs of all of our products. With the decision to have a fresh start in the fall of 2017, we launched our PowerSchool Community to be the central hub for peer-to-peer discussions and self-help interactions, and for chat and web support across our products.
Our newly acquired solutions all had their own help sites, some with active communities. Moving all customers to one help site meant we needed to gather a lot of input to ensure our structure, permissions, and content would work well. We also needed to make sure our customers transitioned successfully to the new space.
3. What were the results? Please cite qualitative and quantitative results.
Initially, we did not have a Community team. Last year, we added a dedicated team and saw a growth in activity, and it has continued in an upward trend this year. Not only have our member entrances, visits, views, and posts increased, but we have also grown our members’ responsiveness.
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.