Schools need a MIS. Platforms such as Arbor and Bromcom hold essential pupil records, support administration and help teams manage everyday school operations.
Most MIS also offer parent communications functionality. For a school already using these platforms, keeping communications within the same system can feel convenient and cost-effective.
But does that functionality cover everything you need to achieve, from keeping current parents informed to attracting prospective families and coordinating communications across a trust?
The answer depends on the role you want communications to play.
ReachMoreParents is not an alternative to an MIS like Arbor or Bromcom. The platforms serve different purposes, and both are important.
An MIS is the operational system of record for a school, managing pupil data and administrative processes. ReachMoreParents is a Parent Relationship Management (PRM) platform designed to help schools and trusts manage relationships with prospective and current families.
ReachMoreParents works alongside an MIS, extending beyond operational parent communications into pupil recruitment, parent engagement, feedback and trust-wide insight.
Sending updates, collecting consent and helping families complete everyday tasks are important parts of school life. Your MIS may already support these tasks.
But parent relationships extend beyond those interactions. An MIS is built around the school's operational needs. Parent communications are built around the parent's experience.
A parent may be able to report an absence, give consent or make a payment on the school app. A parent may be able to report an absence, give consent or make a payment on the school app. But schools also need to share news, promote events and celebrate achievements in ways that help parents feel connected to school life.
ReachMoreParents' secure newsfeed for parents
Secure ways to share student updates
With safeguarding issues around student photos becoming a hot-button issue in the age of AI, parents and schools alike are looking for more secure ways to share photos and videos – but private social-media style newsfeeds are a functionality only offered in platforms dedicated to parent communications, like ReachMoreParents.
Publish across multiple channels
Many trusts and schools do not just post updates to their parent communications app. They may also use social media channels to share information. But without cross-channel posting, that same update needs to be posted two, three or more times. Over time, this adds up to a lot of duplicated work – or in some channels being forgotten and left without updates.
But with cross-channel posting, both trust and school teams can publish content once in their app, and update everywhere – no duplicated work required.
For schools and trusts who simply need to send parents the occasional message, the functionality offered by their MIS may suffice. For those with greater needs, it’s worth looking beyond.
Trust-wide prospecting in ReachMoreParents
A family visits your website, attends an open event or asks for more information. What happens next?
Responding to the initial enquiry matters, but families may still be considering several schools. Helpful follow-up can encourage another visit, explain what makes your school distinctive and remind parents when to apply.
Without a coordinated approach, that follow-up can depend on individual staff finding time. Contact details may sit in separate forms, inboxes and spreadsheets, making it difficult to see which families have heard from you and which still need a response.
MIS admissions functions have an important role in managing applicants and new starters. It is also worth examining how you manage interest before a family is ready to apply.
ReachMoreParents helps schools capture interest through their websites, social media and recruitment campaigns, then follow up automatically. Ready-made communications help busy teams maintain contact, while trusts can coordinate activity centrally.
That gives both school and trust teams a clearer view of interested families and the follow-up they receive, helping them take action while families are still making their choice.
For a single school, the priority may be making communications and recruitment manageable for a busy team.
A trust also needs to consider how that work is coordinated across its schools.
Can central staff support pupil recruitment activity? Can they oversee communications and social activity? Can they identify gaps in parent engagement without asking every school to prepare a separate report?
With trusts increasingly centralising back-office functions, can your trust afford not to centralise parent communications too?
ReachMoreParents gives trusts central visibility and coordination, while allowing individual schools to communicate with their own communities and retain their identity.
Your MIS remains essential to running your school or trust. ReachMoreParents provides a connected Parent Relationship Management platform, supporting four priorities:
Attract: Build awareness through your website and social media.
Enrol: Capture family interest and follow up to encourage enrolment.
Engage: Keep current parents informed and build stronger relationships.
Insights: Use engagement data and parent feedback to guide action.
The case for investing in both rests on what that wider approach enables: less repeated work, more consistent follow-up, better visibility and stronger coordination across schools.
Comparing trust-wide parent engagement in ReachMoreParents
MIS platforms can be used for parent communications. However, when considering using their MIS for parent communications, schools and trusts should ask:
For trusts:
Can we compare metrics like parent reach and engagement across our schools?
Can we see future enrolment risk and opportunity for all of our schools, in one place?
Does every school in the trust communicate to the same standard, and would we know if one didn't?
For schools
Can we capture interest from prospective families before they apply?
Can we automatically follow up enquiries and open-event visitors?
Where can parents find school news, an event or an achievement, other than in a message?
Can we post to our parent app, school website and social media simultaneously, or will we need to do that three or more times?
Do we know how parents feel about a school before it shows up in Ofsted Parent View?
Most schools and trusts have never had a way to answer these questions, because their MIS platform was never meant to. And for some schools, those questions are not important.
But schools and trusts who do want answers to those questions should look beyond their MIS. They need a platform built around the whole parent relationship — not just the messages sent to parents.
An MIS can be part of that picture. It just shouldn't be the whole picture.
Read more about how ReachMoreParents gives trusts and schools one central platform to manage the complete parent journey.