Lessons from The Corporate World Help Schools Tap into Thousands of Dollars of Hidden Value

NEW YORK, Sept. 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ClassTag, a cloud-based communication and scheduling platform that helps teachers turn parents into partners, announces a groundbreaking new approach to parent engagement and volunteering. Building on a parent's interests and skills, teachers and school leaders are now able to match individual parents to needs and opportunities in their classroom and school.  ClassTag has found that interest and skill-based opportunities is the secret sauce in increasing parent participation and engagement.

"Teachers and parents love how ClassTag streamlines communications and scheduling, bringing everything they need into a single platform," says Jason Olim, CTO and co-founder of ClassTag. "But our goal is larger than that. It is to help teachers turn parents into partners in the classroom, and partnership requires a solid interpersonal foundation that we are now supporting with our parent interests feature."

When parents share their interests and skills on ClassTag, teachers learn more about them, and parents can connect with one another.  Teachers can invite parents to the classroom to share their skills, interests and stories with the students, opening new untapped possibilities for everyone involved.

Taking a cue from Corporate America, ClassTag has discovered that growing skills-based volunteering is much more productive and more successful than simply trying to get a warm body to fill a need. In doing so, ClassTag is seeing a greater potential for school fundraising and cost reductions by utilizing the resources schools already have: parents. In the past, schools have urged parents to volunteer for various activities in fundraising events in effort to reach a specific financial or project goal.  The challenge for many schools is getting parents to do something that may be out of their sphere of talents, skills, abilities, and even desire.

"After working for years in management consulting and big corporations, I have seen first hand how the corporate world approaches employee engagement in a very strategic way," says Vlada Lotkina, CEO and co-founder of ClassTag.  "Corporations have figured this out. They know that the best way to get involvement from employees for volunteer activities is to match their interests with the needs of the charity or project. Parents, in much the same way, get a tremendous sense of value when they have an impact on children. They appreciate the recognition and the opportunity to give of themselves."

There is a lot at stake in terms of the value for the volunteer events as well as the volunteer's time and energy. According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, about 62.8 million Americans, or 25.3 percent of the adult population, gave 7.9 billion hours of volunteer service worth $184 billion in 2014. The latest figure from 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that the estimated value of volunteer time comes to roughly $23.56 per hour.

Lotkina continues, "What this means for schools is that there is not just more volunteering, but higher value engagement.  We've taken what we've learned from the corporate world and applied these lessons to ClassTag by linking volunteering opportunities to a parent's interests and skills, creating more productive and impactful engagement as well as an opportunity to save thousands of dollars for schools."

About ClassTag

ClassTag is a simple and powerful communication and scheduling platform that brings research-based practices to help teachers turn parents into partners and improve the quality of family support in education. It was founded by Vlada Lotkina, a fortune 500 executive, and Jason Olim, serial entrepreneur and technologist, to help parents like themselves make their children more successful and better prepared for life.  To learn more, visit: https://www.classtag.com

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SOURCE ClassTag

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