An Arrowtown teacher and her web-developer husband have designed and developed Message My Way, a new software product for schools to effectively get their messages to parents and students.

Nicole Fawcett, Tim Young and Greg Fawcett

Nicole and Greg Fawcett, owners of Virtual Industries Group and developers of the popular School Interviews booking system (schoolinterviews.co.nz), have just launched Message My Way – a cloud-based service that allows schools to communicate with parents, staff and students in an instantaneous, hassle-free way via the method most preferred by the recipient.

Instead of schools relying on sending emails, making individual phone calls or paying for an expensive app – which not all parents have access to or download – Message My Way delivers the message to the platform selected by the parents. This includes Facebook Messenger, Twitter, the school’s Facebook page, messaging apps like Slack, Kik and Telegram, plus email, SMS/text and voicemail.

Make life easier

Arrowtown School Deputy Principal Tim Young says Message My Way has proved to be hugely beneficial in the event of snow days last year, when they were testing the service.

“We did a communications survey after the second snow day and the parents just raved about it. Previously, we’d tried a couple of other tools but getting the buy-in from parents to download it was pretty hard. With Message My Way, parents don’t have to do a thing. That was really important to us – to have no barriers with getting the information to parents. The key thing is that the message gets to people in the way they want it. Message My Way definitely delivers on that.”

The service costs $199 a year (GST inclusive) for a school of less than 500 people, and $299 for 500-999. Non-urgent messages are always free to send, but urgent alerts may incur carrier charges if parents choose SMS/text or voice as urgent options. These charges (between 3-12 cents) are passed on to schools at cost, and schools can reduce them even further by encouraging parents to switch to free alternatives like Facebook Messenger.

For more information see page 10. Alternatively, go to
messagemyway.com or email nicole@vig.co.nz

WIN one of five annual subscriptions to Message My Way for your school.