As a school, communicating with parents is an essential part of running your school and growing it. And to make things easier, most schools have adopted WhatsApp groups as their channel for communication. There are some benefits to this: it’s simple to start, costs nothing to get started, and requires no additional apps on the parents’ side to get things going.
But WhatsApp was designed for communication with people and groups that share a more personal connection. It’s not designed for communication like that of schools, where teachers and parents have a formal relationship and where most parents are not friends with each other.
In this post, I’ll highlight some of the reasons why you should move away from WhatsApp groups as your school’s communication channel.
1. WhatsApp groups expose the numbers of all members
We all know that to be added to a WhatsApp group, your phone number needs to be known and used for the addition. And once added, members can see the phone numbers of other members. This is not good for privacy, as people with bad intentions can use these phone numbers for purposes that members would not appreciate at all.
WhatsApp has made recent changes that allow users to set up usernames. Though this may mask phone numbers, usernames have now taken the place of phone numbers, since people still wouldn’t want their WhatsApp usernames used for inappropriate things.
Some schools have also had experiences where teachers, who are usually admins of these groups, have created backdoor communication channels with parents and carried out unofficial activities that schools would not approve of.
2. WhatsApp groups put parents in the way of spammers
Because individual members of school WhatsApp groups can be hacked and have their accounts taken over, these groups are usually at the mercy of spam and scams.
I have been part of school WhatsApp groups where accounts were hacked and members were contacted for scam purposes, with some ending up losing money. This becomes worse when the compromised account belongs to an admin and the hackers take full control of the group.
What usually happens is that a new group has to be created and members are asked to leave the old one and join the new one, only for the same cycle to potentially repeat one day.
3. WhatsApp groups are a distraction from purposeful communication
WhatsApp is a multipurpose communication channel, and so if school communication happens there, schools are putting important school information and updates in a place where a lot is already happening: religious groups, old school groups, family groups, football groups, work groups, and so on.
Parents are likely to miss important school information, which reduces how engaged they are with the school. A less engaged parent can, in turn, affect how involved they are in their child’s school and classroom experience.
4. WhatsApp groups don’t provide a proper archive of your school communication for parents
It should be easy for parents to go over all the information they’ve received from your school across all the terms and years their children have spent there. When they’re looking for specific old information, it should be easy to search for and find it.
But what usually happens is that there are many groups created for different school years, hacked groups that have been abandoned, and different topic-based groups within the school. All of this makes finding old information difficult.
There have also been instances in some schools where, when teachers left the school, they left with the WhatsApp groups they created because they were the admins, along with all the school communication and data in those groups. The school was then forced to create new ones.
5. WhatsApp groups don’t give your school a professional image
Because of all the reasons mentioned above, when schools continue to use WhatsApp groups for school communication, they’re not giving off the right impression.
They’re indirectly telling parents, “We’re aware of these challenges, but we won’t do anything about them.”
That’s not the kind of school experience parents will appreciate and value.
Conclusion
The question on the minds of schools by now is: what is a better replacement for WhatsApp groups?
And the answer is simple: Classfeel.
Classfeel is a communication app built specifically for school communication. It solves the problems mentioned in this post and gives your school a more professional way to communicate with parents.
Visit our homepage to learn more about Classfeel, and if you’re interested in a demo, please feel free to reach out to us (hello@classfeel.com).