Edlio
Facilitating Personalized School-To-Home Communication

As various industries embrace the digital revolution, the education sector is not far behind. With traditional classrooms slowly turning into learning environments leaning heavily on digital infrastructure and tools, perhaps the most significant impact in this educational journey of the children is still made by the involvement of the parent. According to Ali Arsan, an EdTech industry veteran for 18 years and the CEO of Edlio, information delivery through strong communication between schools and parents plays a key role in the educational journey of the child. He firmly believes that the higher the parent engagement and involvement, the better the educational outcomes for their students.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Ali shares his insights on Edlio’s value proposition and its offerings for making communicating with parents simpler.

Tell us about the inception of the company.

The founding theory of Edlio is based on simplifying the communication process between schools and parents as we believe that if we can get more engaged parents, it will positively affect the communities that we operate in with better operational outcomes. The idea is all about making the school to home communication better through personalization. We started the business with just a simple school website to give parents a way to learn more about the school so that they can decide if they want to send their kids to that school or not. We have been working hard since our inception in 2011, to provide products to educators, teachers, and parents to significantly enhance school to home communication. Today, after eight years, we have evolved to improving parent engagement with data sources to give personalized and actionable information to parents. We started managing the website to solve the visibility issue of the schools.

What are the digital transformation trends in the education industry and how does Edlio leverage them?

There are two big trends, the first one is consolidation or platformization, which usually means schools and school districts have n solutions for n problems that are specific to the individual issues, and managing so many solutions is a cumbersome process. We aim to provide a better user experience for the parents as well as all the other stakeholders rather than just provide them with one single platform for all their solutions.

The second trend is the personalization factor on the final user of the systems, which are parents and students. Personalization is critical from the learning perspective as well as it is adaptive according to the needs of the user.

What are the key offerings of Edlio?

We provide a Content Management System (CMS) which is enterprise level software that allows educators to easily maintain a school website without having to know about HTML, coding, or programming. As a comprehensive system specifically designed for catering to the schools, it makes the life of the educators easy by allowing them to post information on the school website effortlessly.

It is a forms-based system which today accommodates payment, forms, calendars, newsletters, and is also connected to the school’s student information system, which holds all the data of the school. The easy-to-use feature-rich content CMS assists K-12 educators upgrade their website and makes editing website as simple as writing an email. 10,000 school and district websites in North America count on us for delivering fast, secure, and accessible websites. Whether its boosting enrollment or improving parent-teacher relationships, we work with schools to achieve their objectives, from design to development, to launch, and even beyond.

Our second product is the parent engagement app, built by three ex- Yahoo^® engineers who now are a part of our team. Whether it’s sending announcements, planning sign-up events, scheduling parent-teacher meetings, alerting everyone in urgent situations, or messaging parents, our app allows schools to connect and engage with parents and families in a more personalized and effective way. Teachers can use the same platform for easy auditing, and it provides parents actionable information pertinent to their kids. If a child has a field trip coming up, the parent can use the app to sign the permission slip, volunteer as a chaperone, offer to bring some water bottles, and pay for the entrance fee, that too in very less time.

Recently, we acquired the Canadian software company Scholantis, as a crucial component of Edlio’s strategy to grow rapidly in both capabilities and market share throughout the education market. We believe in being localized wherever we operate while never losing sight of our core mission of increasing engagement between teachers, students, and parents. We aim to continue creating next-gen communication tools packaged in a user-friendly interface that sets the bar for end-user experiences across the industry building on the success of both companies.

Can you share a few case studies with us where Edlio helped assist a client in attaining the desired outcome with its offerings?

Jennifer Malone, the Technology Supervisor & Webmaster of Loudon County Public Schools states that their school district was impressed with the initial design process with Edlio. They were able to provide them examples of favorite sites and incorporated all the company’s ideas. Now, their website has a fresh look that truly displays the exemplary practices of their district. In addition, as the webmaster for the district, she appreciates the ease of posting announcements one time that is integrated with the district Facebook and Twitter accounts.

In another instance, Rolland Kornblau, the Director of Information Technology at El Rancho USD asserts that their district has been working with Edlio for over eight years now and has never been let down. They appreciate that Edlio can create, design, and optimize effectively. The design offerings have always been timely, and the updates and changes are easily made through their interface. He highly recommends Edlio as they are beyond pleased with Edlio’s efficient and effective impeccable service.

What differentiates Edlio from similar organizations and keeps you ahead of the competition?

With our innovative solutions, we solve the fragmentation problem in the market. Our client onboarding process is our key differentiator as our approach towards solving any problem is that client success is our success. We work on accommodating more features and functionalities as per customer requests, which keeps us ahead of the curve and that’s why we have a 96 percent renewal rate. We even help schools migrate existing content from a website and train their staff to smooth the transition into the new solution.

Professional services is key, and each time a new school or school district is signed up, we assign a dedicated project manager, and his/her job is to facilitate communication, especially if they are on the CMS side for graphic design, assets, and content migration. The project manager works directly with our point of contact at the school and throughout the project, and we communicate regularly with them. We are changing processes in the school, so it’s is not only giving them a new CMS or parent engagement app but changing the way they operate the school. Whether it’s simplifying parent communication, boosting enrollment, or providing an accessible website for the community, we do it all.