Rollout

Patricia Quast, the TeacherLists coordinator for the Lockport City School District in New York, first became aware of TeacherLists through the district’s website provider, Blackboard. She noticed an announcement on the Blackboard site and decided to reach out to the support team at TeacherLists to see what she could learn. The TeacherLists team answered all her questions and walked her through the process. After the conversation, she immediately realized that this tool could make school supply shopping easier for district parents. Patti presented the idea to the district and then began working to upload and edit the lists.

Lockport City rolled out TeacherLists districtwide for the 2019-2020 school year. During the upload process, Patti said, the team found that the site was extremely user-friendly and the editing of each list was quick and easy. The team also took advantage of the ability to print each list as well as have it translated to suit their needs.

Results

Every school, elementary through high school, used TeacherLists in summer 2019 to communicate their supply needs. To make the lists easy for parents to find, Lockport created a comprehensive marketing plan that included online and offline outreach. Below are a few of the methods that were successful:

• Adding a link to the “Parents” page on the district website
• Including a “School Supply Lists” icon in the Lockport Schools mobile app that parents can easily download to get every piece of information they need when it comes to school supplies
• Sending an email in early June to announce the new platform for school supply lists
• Adding a “School Supply List” link to each school website in the “Site Shortcuts” section
• Making a big splash on the District page before the end of the 2018-2019 school year
• Promoting the lists via social media using TeacherLists graphics
• Adding sticker labels to the elementary end-of-year report cards and including a copy of the appropriate grade list
• Adding an announcement directly on high school report cards
• Sending an email mid-July to reach incoming kindergarten students

Utilizing graphics and template wording provided by TeacherLists, Lockport reached thousands of parents on social media and via email within the first few days and had many parents sharing and commenting. The district team hoped that with this comprehensive plan, parents would be aware that they have access to supply lists 24/7 from any device. They were certain parents would love the idea that they would no longer have a “lost list”!

Future Plans

Lockport received positive feedback from both parents and staff on the TeacherLists implementation and found that the marketing plan it used was incredibly successful in sharing the information with everyone involved. The team plans to repeat the exact same plan going forward.

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Have any questions? Call us at 800-644-3516, ext. 6, or email tlsupport@teacherlists.com.