Harlem Success Academy Achieves Close To 100 Percent Parental Involvement Through Mobility
Harlem Success Academy Selects CellTrust Corporation’s Advanced SMS Gateway as Technology Foundation for Mobile Messaging Program
Scottsdale, Arizona . — January 16, 2008 — CellTrust Corporation (www.celltrust.com) today announced that its world-class SMS Gateway in use by year-old New York charter school Harlem Success Academy (www.harlemsuccess.org) has returned definitive and positive mobile marketing metrics. Harlem Success Academy reports close to 100 percent parental involvement during its inaugural 2006-2007 school year and attributes much of this high level of success to its SMS solution from CellTrust. Harlem Success Academy now educates 280 kindergarten through second grade students and will open 40 more schools serving high need communities in New York City over the next decade.
Harlem Success Academy’s parental involvement metric was largely achieved through regular and timely text messages sent via CellTrust’s advanced and secure SMS Gateway. The text messages concerned upcoming events and family academic venues, administrative procedures, attendance, recruitment, and grades/homework assignments, to name a few.
“One of the key factors in choosing a mobile solutions provider was ease of use,” said Harlem Success Academy’s Director of External Affairs Jenny Sedlis. “We needed to create messages and alerts on a moment’s notice, send them to our parent community, and know they got there.”
Harlem Success Academy chose an SMS solution from CellTrust because it was easy to implement and cost-effective. Many of the students’ parents don’t have access to the Internet and can’t respond to email or access the school’s website from home. Moreover, many of the students’ parents work fulltime, thus the cell phone was selected as the school’s communication method of choice.
According to a recent Network World blog posting, more than 3.3 billion mobile accounts (one for every two earthlings) exist today, making Harlem Success Academy’s mobile communications program realistic and timely.
“The return on investment this past year has been two-fold,” explains Sedlis. “First and foremost, we achieved a very high level of parent engagement in students’ academic success. Second, the mobile messaging program helped us to become a much more efficient operation. As a school in Harlem, we quite honestly have limited resources. It was critical for us to make the most of our communications methods.”
CellTrust CEO Sean Moshir adds, “We are proud to be selected by Harlem Success Academy as their mobile provider of choice. Being able to take part in a child’s academic success by providing the mobile foundation makes what we do at CellTrust that much more meaningful.”
The CellTrust SMS Gateway is functionality packed with additional modules and features to assist all types of businesses and organizations interested in building mobile marketing and messaging campaigns. For example, the CellTrust SMS Gateway Scheduling Module provides the ability to send any message desired with a pre-defined date to one group or groups of recipients. A scheduled message or marketing message can be sent out at different time intervals to individuals or groups via SMS, email and/or voice.
In support of the idea that mobile phones can improve community involvement on all levels, CellTrust donated its SMS solution to Harlem Success Academy for year 2008. CellTrust actively seeks other interested schools and non-profits that could benefit from a similar program.
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