How Rally’s Specialized K-12 Platform Improved PLPSD's Websites

Portage la Prairie School Division

Discover how PLPSD improved their websites by switching to Rally!

Size	Number of Schools	Number of Students	Partner Since
1,500 km2	8	3,300	2022

 

Communicating to families is a big priority for PLPSD, but the limited features on their old websites made it difficult. Calendars were hard to read, registration information was difficult to find, and division policies were nearly impossible to search through. The features they did have just weren’t as good as they could be. By choosing websites specialized for K-12, they upgraded their communication capabilities.

PLPSD can now publish documents, notices, calendar events, and news posts to their school websites right from their division website. Parents can subscribe to the calendars so they never miss an event. With Rally’s Maps module, parents and guardians enter a home address and see at a glance which school their children should attend. Policies have been reorganized with the ability to search based on title and description. 

By choosing Rally’s specialized features that match their needs, PLPSD makes it easy for parents to find what they are looking for online. PLPSD has shown its community that their websites are reliable sources of information - helping direct parents online instead of to the phone lines! 

From a design perspective, their old websites were not effective in putting vital information in front of visitors. Their old sites were cluttered, didn’t scale for mobile or large displays, and were difficult to navigate. 

PLPSD's new website is clean and modern. Consistent fonts, colors, and other styles keep the website looking consistent across every page. All Rally websites are responsive, so they look great on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone. With intuitive navigation and powerful built-in search, it’s easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for. The new homepage features thoughtful design that strengthens PLPSD’s brand and directs users to popular items.

Rally makes it easier for school staff to add and update content, too. Rally is designed with the end user in mind: you don’t have to know any HTML or click through twenty different screens to update your website. With a clear layout, our CMS is simple to navigate. It’s easy to add text, images, videos, documents and more with a few clicks! 

Having an easy-to-use CMS was one of the biggest priorities for PLPSD. A system can have great features, but if no one knows how to use them it doesn’t matter. By placing the user at the center, we’ve created a system that empowers everyone to update their websites easily.

These stats are pretty consistent with what we see for our other school division clients: a nice increase later in the fall, with a bit of a dip around the holidays and into the new year. As PLPSD didn’t have analytics on their old websites, all visitors have been counted as “new” visitors. But, we can see that just over 25% are already returning to the website. For our purposes, let’s take a closer look at how those new visitors changed in the first 100 days.

 

When we compare PLPSD’s first fifty days on the Rally system to the next fifty days, a few things really stand out: 

• The number of users has increased by over 20%! This tells us that PLPSD has done an excellent job showing parents that their websites are trust-worthy sources of information, and more and more people are using the website regularly. 

• Pageviews, session duration, number of sessions, and the number of sessions per user have all increased, showing that visitors are engaging more on the PLPSD website. 

• Most importantly, we see that the number of returning visitors has increased to that industry standard of 30%. This growth is incredible, and shows that PLPSD is doing a great job of delivering important information to parents. 

Parents are finding information more easily and learning to come back to the websites. They’re able to search and find the content that’s important to them. Beautiful, functional design and specialized features make it easier for both internal staff to use and for parents to find what they are looking for.

When we take a look at the top pages on PLPSD’s site, we can see that the switch to Rally has improved the website experience for staff and job seekers too! While the most-visited pages are their home page and bus status page, their third most visited page is a staff resource page, followed by their career listing page.

It’s now easier for PLPSD staff members to access internal information and coordinate their work. Job seekers can learn about openings at the division more easily. These popular pages show us that a school district website is used by more than just parents, and PLPSD’s community as whole is finding value with Rally.