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 in 2019, 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.
The purpose of the app was to help improve the communication between the schools and the children’s parents so they can feel more connected and involved as their child progresses.
As with everything the school 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.”
Kate Thomas, Director of Marketing at Thomas’s London Day Schools
JBi’s goal was to demonstrate a creative, visual and innovative experience that would purvey the school’s depth of education.
Our initial work began with exploring the needs of each of Thomas’s key stakeholders: administration staff, teachers and parents. We worked closely with each of them through workshops and focus sessions to examine their expectations.
JBi needed to understand what information needed to be regularly sent out 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.
“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.”
Kate Thomas, Director of Marketing at Thomas’s London Day Schools
A key challenge for JBi was various different school systems that needed to be integrated to fetch all the content and keep them in sync. We also had a tight deadline of the beginning of the school year (September) to launch the first phase of the project.
One vital part of the project was to achieve Single Sign On (SSO) for the user with TomCom and the other school system. We had to work with other systems to achieve this.
Additionally, security was paramount and JBi had to ensure we weren’t compromising any security with this development.
The Thomas’s team was involved throughout and given access to a staging TomCom app, where they were able to test and review before its release. Thus, ongoing feedback was readily available for us and contributed greatly to the success of this project.
“The backend of TomCom is also designed in a way that is intuitive to use, so that members of staff can build their own pages or send out a Need To Know notification after only a small amount of training.”
Kate Thomas, Director of Marketing at Thomas’s London Day Schools
“We are absolutely delighted with the work JBi has carried out for us; we are the envy of other schools that have been shown our app, and we look forward to continuing our working relationship with JBi.”
Kate Thomas, Director of Marketing at Thomas’s London Day Schools
At JBi, we want to be much more than just a web designer for our clients. We want to build ongoing relationships and act as strategic partners well beyond launch day.
If you are looking for support on a digital project, you can get in touch with us by emailing hello@jbidigital.co.uk or calling us on 0207 043 2510.
