Customer Story
How Central Kids made family communication faster and more effective with SMS
Overview
Challenge: Central Kids needed a more effective way to communicate with parents across its kindergartens and childcare centres, especially for urgent notices, documentation requests and day-to-day updates that were easy to miss by email or phone.
Solution: Using Sinch Engage technology through Info-Txt, Central Kids enabled head office and individual centres to send SMS to families for reminders, updates, compliance requests, emergency notices and enrollment communication.
Results: Stronger family engagement, faster responses, lower administrative workload and a more reliable way to communicate with whΔnau across the organization.
“At Central Kids, we use Info-Txt as a form of communication with whΔnau across our entire organisation, both from head office and within each kindergarten or early learning centre.“
For Central Kids Early Education, communication with whΔnau (parents) is part of how it supports children to become confident, capable learners. But across dozens of kindergartens and childcare centres, keeping families informed quickly and consistently is not always easy.
Central Kids is a registered charitable trust providing early childhood education and care for families across the Central North Island of New Zealand. With 48 kindergartens and eight full-day childcare centres, the organisation needed a practical way for both head office and individual centres to communicate with families about everyday updates, required documentation and urgent situations.
That is where Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) came in, through the Info-Txt messaging facility from Infocare Systems. Once SMS became part of the communication approach, Central Kids found it was more effective than traditional email because messages reached parents instantly on a channel they were already paying attention to.
Faster communication, stronger family engagement
UsingΒ Sinch EngageΒ through Info-Txt, Central Kids could send messages across the organisation for a wide range of needs: event reminders, timetable changes, enrolment updates, compliance requests, notices about lost property, and emergency communications such as flooding or centre closures. The same system also made it easier to offer available spaces when a child was absent and to keep families informed about when children were settling in or due to start.Β
The benefits went beyond speed. Central Kids says SMS improved engagement and responses from parents, reduced the administrative burden of sending letters or chasing replies, and gave staff a complete historical log of messages and responses. The format also helped in practical ways for migrant families, who may find texts easier to read and translate than phone conversations.
