Thomas’ London Day Schools (TomCom)
A digital platform to connect digital-first parents with their children's educational journey
Thomas’s London Day Schools is one of the country’s most prestigious independent education institutions.
Having designed a state of the art website for Thomas’s London Day Schools, Thomas’s reached out to JBi with the prospect of creating an exciting new platform that would improve the parents’ involvement with their child’s journey and development with the school.
- 3,000+ App downloads3,000+
- 65% Increase in media downloads65%
Improving communication between the schools and children's parents
The purpose of the app was to help parents feel more connected and involved as their child progresses.
As with everything the Thomas's offers they wanted something creative and innovative, unique and different from the standard communication platforms on the market.
As well as provisioning the parents with the administrative info they need, it would also provide them with information and images on their child’s development throughout their journey with Thomas’s.
JBi needed to discover an enhanced visual method of delivering important announcements, as well as showcasing the everyday activities and tasks children were partaking in.
“We approached JBi with an idea for an app that would be a one-stop shop for tailored notifications, news, images and calendar of fixtures and events/activities. It was a challenging task because none such app existed for schools. However, JBi got inside our heads and knew what we wanted.”
Exploring the needs of every stakeholder
Through workshops and focus sessions, JBi worked closely with each of Thomas’s key stakeholders: administration staff, teachers and parents. We needed to understand the information regularly sent by the school admin teams, as well as the parents’ preferred way of receiving it.
Discovery allowed us to understand how the different forms of content were created and how they flowed between the different school administrators before it could be published for parents.
Parents stressed the need for notifications and quick forms of content to be sent on their phones but that they might prefer to consume photos on a larger screen. Therefore, it was agreed that parents would have both a web-app and a mobile app to view all forms of content.
Creating an intuitive, interactive user experience
We had a tight deadline of the beginning of the school year to launch the first phase of the project with multiple features needing to be incorporated to deliver an excellent experience for every user. Our final release included:
- Workflow based content moderation system
- Digital Asset Management system with Facial Recognition
- Push notification to mobile app users
- Single Sign-on (SSO) for CMS and App users
- A media gallery for parents
- A weekly bulletin for parents
- Highlights Magazine every term
- Extensive calendar of events for the parents
- Ability to purchase images through the app
Integrating different school systems to fetch content and keeping them in sync without compromising any security added complexity to the development.
The Thomas’s team was involved throughout, and were able to test and review a staging TomCom app, before its release ensuring a a final product that satisfied all stakeholders.
“Our TomCom app is now an essential part of school life, offering all the above elements in one place, as well as offering parents a cherished window into what goes on in their child’s day-to-day life by means of what we call our ‘in-house Instagram’, using facial recognition to upload a daily bespoke gallery of professionally shot images.”
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