Blog - Parent Portal Guide

Jackrabbit Parent Portal Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Connecting with Parents

As a business owner, you know that customer experience plays a huge role in the success of your youth activity program. It’s simple: if your customers are happy with their experience, they’ll continue to enroll in classes at your gymnastics or cheer gym, swim or music school, or dance studio.

In today’s got-to-have-it-now world, parents and students expect to be able to connect with your business anytime, anywhere. That’s why we created this helpful Jackrabbit Parent Portal guide, to help you understand the importance of staying connected to customers and how to easily reach them.

What is the Jackrabbit Parent Portal?

The Jackrabbit Parent Portal is a centralized hub that allows you to seamlessly connect with families at your program. Pretty awesome, right?

As the leader in cloud-based class management software, Jackrabbit Class sets the standard for ways in which you can effectively and efficiently communicate with families, keeping them in the loop with all that is going on at your program while also giving them all the information they need for their child enrolled in classes at your facility.

Why should you use the Jackrabbit Parent Portal?

There are a lot of reasons why you should use the Jackrabbit Parent Portal at your youth activity center. To help break them down, we’ve divided the benefits into two buckets: 1) benefits for your customers; 2) benefits for you.

The benefit to parents and customers

Utilizing the Jackrabbit Parent Portal because it’s beneficial to you is important. But if it’s not beneficial to families, the segment of your customer base this feature was designed for, then what’s the point?

With the right Parent Portal strategy in place, your customers will be able to:

  • access news and announcements from you and your staff in a single location,
  • track the progress of their child’s advancement via detailed skill updates,
  • access supplemental resources specific to their classes, 
  • notify your program of an upcoming absence and schedule a makeup class,
  • make payments and manage their billing information,
  • watch their child in class through a secure live stream, 
  • and much more!

Read to the end for an infographic on the top 13 benefits families love about the Jackrabbit Parent Portal.

The benefit to owners, directors, and managers

Now that you’ve had a glimpse of how your customers can benefit from the Parent Portal, are you ready to see what’s in it for you?

I thought so!

The benefit owners, directors, and managers get from using the Jackrabbit Parent Portal is all about convenience. In a world where time is monetized, utilizing this time-saving business tool is a no-brainer.

Need your part-time front desk assistant to take on the responsibility of getting families to agree to updated policies without adding a full-time workload?

Check.

Looking to spend a little less time sharing skill progress and updates?

Check.

How about notifying a portion of your students of an important announcement without having to write a single email? Or securely sharing files? Or scheduling future absences or makeup classes?

Check. Check. Check.

So you get it. With all that it has to offer, the Jackrabbit Parent Portal is the total package when it comes to conveniently connect with the students of your gymnastics gym, dance studio, or swim school.

Jackrabbit Parent Portal makes communicating with parents easy 

Whether you have 50 students, 5,000, or somewhere in between – the Jackrabbit Parent Portal really does make connecting with parents easy. The team at Jackrabbit understands you know the best way to reach the families at your program, so they created ways for you to:

  • email an individual family or group of families that meet certain search criteria,
  • text time-sensitive information to parents, and
  • send push notifications through your custom-branded mobile app, all without adding major tasks to your to-do list.

Just as you need a way to reach parents and students, your customers need an easy way to reach you when the time comes. Parents can:

  • submit a future absence with a note,
  • schedule a makeup class, and
  • send a message to your front office.

Are you ready to make seamless connections with customers of your program through a centralized hub? Give Jackrabbit Class a try for 30-days. It’s free!

Get started with your free account today!

The Jackrabbit Parent Portal creates a simple enrollment process

Enrolling in classes and events

In addition to allowing you to easily engage with your families, the Jackrabbit Parent Portal makes enrolling in new classes easier than ever. Since families already have an existing account with you, all they have to do is log in to the portal, add classes for the current session or an upcoming session, and submit payment. It’s really that easy!

(Jackrabbit Clients —> Get started with enrolling through the Parent Portal)

Using the Parent Portal at your dance studio, gymnastics gym, swim school, or youth activity center gives you the opportunity to open up new classes to existing students first. We like to call this priority enrollment. Giving current families early access to your schedule gives them a chance to secure their favorite classes before the schedule is opened to the public for new students to join. It’s a great perk for them that is easy for you to implement when using the Jackrabbit Parent Portal.

As your classes fill up (and they will), parents can add their child to the waitlist. When a spot comes open, you can contact families to see if they are still interested in the class. And while they’re waiting for an opening to come up, they can see exactly which classes they are on the waitlist for without having access to where they fall in line. Read that again and breathe!

From time to time, you may host a special event in addition to your class schedule. Just as families can easily enroll in new classes, they can also sign up for your events through the Parent Portal as well!

Online payments

Parents are accustomed to having a card on file for many different memberships and services. Your youth activity center shouldn’t be any different.

Requiring a bank account or credit card on file for online payments drastically decreases the time and money spent tracking down tuition. Of course this is an expectation that you should set in your policies so families are aware but you shouldn’t hesitate to require this information upfront. It will make life easier for you and the parents – I promise.

And for those parents that like to ‘push the button’ themselves, they absolutely can! Encourage your families to use all of the Parent Portal, especially the option to make payments. That’s a win-win for everyone!

In addition to making payments from the portal, parents can also update their billing information as new cards are issued or new accounts are opened. And with full insight to the transactions on their account, they can always see where their account stands and print transaction history when needed!

(Jackrabbit Clients —> How to get started with online payments)

Easily access class resources

Share anything related to classes – virtual class links or supplemental resources – through the Parent Portal so everything is easily accessed in one place. Virtual class links are pretty straightforward but for supplemental resources think of choreography videos, how-to videos for technical skills, worksheets, or bonus classes. The sky’s the limit!

If you want to take your program’s virtual experience to the next level for families, you can create a virtual viewing room through Jackrabbit’s exclusive integration with Spot TV. Just as a parent would log in to the portal to make a payment, enroll in classes, or update information – they can also log in to the portal to see their child’s class live from anywhere. With the most secure and reliable platform, Spot TV makes it easy for you to offer this luxurious service to your families when connection matters most!

Learn more about Jackrabbit’s Spot TV integration

Effortless collection of accurate information

Data in equals data out, meaning you get from your data what you put into it. We are all human and errors are bound to happen, but why not put the responsibility into the hands of parents? No one knows their family’s information better than them, giving you clean, accurate data to work with. Sounds like a win to me!

Of course, the data entry starts with the Online Registration form when a family first joins your program but the Parent Portal allows them to update their information as it changes if needed.

So, what can parents update in their Parent Portal?

  • student allergies, special needs, and medications
  • family address, phone number, and email address
  • credit card or bank account information
  • additional information (through user-defined fields)
  • student t-shirt size
  • student grade level
  • agreement to your program’s policies and legalese
  • schedule future absences and or makeup classes

There’s not much that a parent can’t do from the portal to engage and interact with your program!

13 benefits families love about the Jackrabbit Parent Portal

Are you ready to benefit from all that the Jackrabbit Parent Portal has to offer? We are here to ensure that you and your families have the best experience possible. Start your 30-day trial of Jackrabbit Class today.

Start your 30-day trial of Jackrabbit Class

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