Removing Friction from the System
– Guest post by Dr. Robert Dillon, Director of Technology and Innovation, Affton School District
Every district in the country is looking for partnerships. Partnerships with companies and organizations that are looking to support the district’s mission as they grow and refine their own products as an organization.
This desire by Affton has allowed us the chance to work closely with Permission Click over the last year. Permission Click has provided a way for Affton to remove friction from the system. Specifically, the online payment system has facilitated opportunities for parents and students to pay for school lunches, collect parental approvals for field trips, and more.
It is amazing how so many districts are stuck in legacy systems for payment and permission collection when great alternatives like Permission Click are available.
In addition to serving our families in a deep, meaningful way, Permission Click has worked hard in our partnership to be responsive to the needs of our organization. This means that they see their platform as responsive and growing quickly to meet the unique needs of its partner organizations and districts.
Permission Click continues to amaze in its ability to remove extra work from our teachers and free up support staff from collecting and processing field trip forms and other paperwork.
Finally, it is rare for schools to enter into partnership with organizations, and see those organizations far outpace initial expectations, but Permission Click is definitely doing this for the Affton community.
Additional comments by Chris Johnson, Co-founder & CEO, Permission Click Inc.
Working with Dr. Dillon on the Affton School District roll out was a really enjoyable experience for our entire team! Largely thanks to the planning and attention the Affton team put into the project, especially the finer details.
We first met the Affton gang at an EdSurge Summit in St. Louis, where a few specific challenges and opportunities faced by the district were shared. We had the means to address a few of these points, but admittedly, we could not meet them all. The spirit of Dr. Dillon and his team was to jump in with excitement, with no signs of reservation and plenty of support, and work with a growing EdTech startup to help shape the platform as we built it to meet their needs.
As a partner, the lines between ‘custom software’ and ‘continued development’ can often blur. The Affton team was very understanding of this, and showed amazing flexibility in the way features were implemented to ensure usefulness and relevance for districts beyond their own. And that, for our team, is only a single example of the kind of tradeoffs successful long-term partnerships are built on.
It’s thrilling to see the district adopt Permission Click in ever growing ways to collect digital permissions, forms, and payments from parents to ‘reduce the friction’.
