By Willem Kitshoff, CEO of d6 Group
Excellent communication lies at the heart of any excellent school. There are a number of communication platforms available to the public that enable a school to connect with parents, staff, students and the rest of its school community. South African-known organisation, d6, is bringing their School Communication solutions to East Africa.
Modern education has become much more than just books, blackboards and homework. For a school, being able to bridge the gap between the school and its parents plays a critical role in the success of a learner’s schooling journey. To help build meaningful connections between schools and parents, d6 provides a solution that communities can use to notify and alert, coordinate and organise, and interact with parents.
Willem Kitshoff, CEO of d6 Group, explains: “The quality of education delivered is always dependent on a school being run as effectively and efficiently as possible in all respects. If communication to all stakeholders is not managed well, the learning will be jeopardised. So far, in South Africa and other African countries such as Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, for example, d6 helps approximately 2 700 schools to operate effectively.”
d6’s Communications offering is a software solution designed to simplify not just school-parent communication but the entire school community. Through a multi-channel (d6 app, email and SMS) communication platform, all users can be alerted at the touch of a button to school news, calendar events, useful resources, a gallery and accurate contact data. This enables the school to send the right message to the right audience no matter what their preferred communication channel is. In addition, this allows schools to create private channels with more controlled access to the information they communicate. d6 has also ensured that their communication platform has powerful integration capabilities to avoid unnecessary data duplication across platforms.
“We developed the d6 communication platform primarily to improve communication shortcomings. Schools in East Africa will also be able to be integrated with the entire d6 school management suite that includes the following departments within the business side of the school: administration, curriculum, finance and communication”
Some of the benefits of the communication platform are: eliminating the use of disparate systems, ensuring the sending out of communication is optimised by being sent via multiple distribution channels, and being ensured of compliance with data policies and regulations.
“Our platform is based on our experience in Southern Africa, but we have expansion plans across the continent. Upon engagement with several schools in Africa, our team has observed that 80% of them experience similar challenges when it comes to the efficacy of communication. There are a number of schools that rely on the more traditional forms of communication, which results in important information not reaching the parents, which inadvertently causes frustration. It is d6’s mission to enable schools to focus on their passion for education by simplifying a school’s management and communication process,” adds Kitshoff.
