/)
In this showcase, Apptegy's leadership team shares what "All In" looks like in 2026.
The new capabilities launching this year
the philosophy driving them,
and how leading districts are already using Apptegy to tackle chronic absenteeism, strengthen their brand, and create safer, more connected communities.
You'll walk away with a clear picture of where K-12 communication is headed — and why the future is already here for districts that are ready to lead.
Resources
One AI-powered hub that delivers fast answers for your entire school community, with automatic routing for every question and real insights for school leaders.
An AI-powered, two-way SMS attendance system with complete workflows and real-time insights to support earlier interventions.
Your internal communication hub that brings staff messaging, intranet pages, and resources into one place driving collaboration and engagement.
Join us for two days of practical strategies, deep connections and time to wrestle with school leadership's biggest ideas. With all-new breakout sessions, keynotes and workshops this year, you’ll leave ready to put ideas into action.
From Compliance to Confidence: Navigating the New ADA Title II Accessibility Updates with Apptegy
In this webinar, we'll break down what the updated guidance means for school districts and how you can begin preparing today
Transcript
Bob Butler: Hello, everybody, we're gonna go ahead and get started. For those of you that I haven't met, my name's Bob Butler, and I'm the CEO of Apptegy. Welcome today to today's webinar, Going All In, The Future of K-12 is Already Here.
Bob Butler: First, I just want to say thanks for taking time to be here today. We know this time of the year is relentless, and the fact that you carved out time today to be with us just means a lot. We have two goals today for today's session. First, we're going to look at where K-12 communication is headed, and then second, we're going to show you the innovations we're building right now to support you on that journey.
Bob Butler: A lot of what you'll see today is already in our core product, Apptegy Foundations. If you're not familiar with that term, last year we rebranded the core product to Apptegy Foundations. That is your alerts, your CMS, your district app, as well as your website.
Bob Butler: And we've been heads down adding to that platform. We want to make sure that today you leave aware of what is going into… what enhancements are coming into that platform. Also, some of the things that you're going to see today are new products, extensions of the Apptegy Foundation's platform.
Bob Butler: Built, built to help you solve problems that you've told us you're facing today, things like attendance, inbound communications, and internal communications.
Bob Butler: We have not held many sessions like this previously, but if you find value in it, please let us know, and we'll continue to do them more regularly in the future.
Bob Butler: But first, let me introduce the team. We've got a whole panel of folks that'll be talking today. Jesson George is our Chief Client Officer.
Bob Butler: Shannon Williams is our new Chief Marketing Officer, Charlie Lang is our Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Drew Doman is our VP of Product. Everyone on this list is committed to your district's success, and they're going to be speaking about how Apptegy is driving innovation to help you along your journey. Couple of housekeeping items.
Bob Butler: First is, we are recording today's session, so if you have a peer that registered that wasn't able to make it, and obviously for all of you that have joined, we will be sending out a recording in the next 24 hours. And then second, we are going to use the Q&A feature on the Zoom today, so if you have questions along the way, please go ahead and submit them. We have 3 product experts, Nick, Jenna, and Emily, standing
Bob Butler: and they'll be able to respond as we go. With that, I will turn it over to Charlie Lang, and we'll jump into the content.
Charlie Lang: Thanks, Bob, and hi, everyone. It's great to be with you today. We have a lot of exciting things to share about both emerging trends, best practices.
Charlie Lang: And how the Apptegy platform is evolving to enable them.
Charlie Lang: But before we get into that content, I wanted to take a few minutes to take a step back and talk about some of the biggest challenges that districts are facing today.
Charlie Lang: Now, these are things that we hear each and every day from the more than 5,000 school districts that we partner with.
Charlie Lang: So, starting with the first one, communities are increasingly feeling notification overload.
Charlie Lang: This isn't just about too many notifications and messages, but the fact that they're coming from multiple apps and different channels. And these apps are often not the school's branded app, but one with a different name, and sometimes being used by a subset of teachers in schools.
Charlie Lang: Families are tired, they're overloaded with communication, they're asking for a streamlined way to get more information from districts in a simpler way.
Charlie Lang: Second, school choice is an emerging trend, and paired with declining enrollment and budget challenges, districts are facing tougher choices than ever before.
Charlie Lang: The districts we speak with are looking for ways to operate more efficiently and streamline how they manage communications within the community.
Charlie Lang: And then finally, the third area. Data privacy, security, and family safety continue to be top of mind for district leaders. Whether it's recent data breaches or a growing number of communication-related incidents within a community.
Charlie Lang: Districts are looking for technology partners that prioritize security and provide tools to create approved communication channels that keep students, staff, and guardians safe.
Charlie Lang: So we built Apptegy to solve these problems, and we believe that districts should have the opportunity to establish one central place to connect with the community across all the students, parents, and community members that they serve.
Charlie Lang: And we believe that a district's comms platform should be school-branded, should also be safe and easy for families to engage with.
Charlie Lang: And so we really see that vision coming together across three key elements. First, we want… if we go back one slide, please. First, we want districts to create a branded central property.
Charlie Lang: Our motto is, your brand, not ours. Families don't need to know who Apptegy is, but they do need to know who you are. And as a parent, I admittedly will often forget the name of the new app that some of the school staff is using, but I will never forget the name of my kid's school.
Charlie Lang: And with Apptegy, that app is conveniently the same name as the school.
Charlie Lang: So second, we increasingly want to be a platform not just for communication, but for getting work done.
Charlie Lang: Whether that's maintaining a teacher conference schedule, managing attendance patterns and reason codes, or triaging a parent's question that might be submitted from a chatbot on your website, Apptegy is increasingly a platform where district staff can do work, not just communicate about it.
Charlie Lang: And then finally, we want to build a platform that's easy to use, intuitive, and seamless. And there's a lot of software out there that's hard to use. A lot of software that doesn't look great, and can ultimately make life hard or not easier, and our platform is changing that for K-12 leaders.
Charlie Lang: So if we move along, with these opportunities in mind, we're going to structure today's conversation around three key topics. The first is reach, ensuring that district communicators are using the right tools and strategies to reach every member of the community.
Charlie Lang: We're going to discuss not only why this is important, but the tools that Apptegy provides that help districts make this a reality.
Charlie Lang: Second, we'll cover different approaches that double down on the school's personality, brand, and identity, and we'll discuss how our clients are thinking about brand, and how new functionality from Apptegy is helping to move the brand story forward.
Charlie Lang: And then third and finally, safety and security.
Charlie Lang: Using technology and approaches that keep your students, families, and staff safe and compliant in an ever-evolving world.
Charlie Lang: So to start the discussion, I'm going to kick it over to our Chief Marketing Officer, Shannon Williams, who's an expert in marketing and communications, and she's going to discuss the importance of reach in K-12.
Shannon Williams: Thank you, Charlie. So, here's the thing about communication in K-12 right now. Sending a message has never been easier, but actually engaging your community? That's a whole different challenge.
Shannon Williams: Districts are doing the work, communicators are showing up every day, and yet families are harder to reach than ever. The tools are disconnected, the noise is loud, and the bar for what families expect has never been higher. So, let's dive into what's driving that.
Shannon Williams: Today, districts are facing unprecedented absenteeism levels. They're leveraging between 5 and 7 disconnected tools, and families are still harder to reach than ever. So your communication is competing with the everyday noise. Personal texts, work emails, social feeds, and more.
Shannon Williams: And none of you were built for this level of complexity, and the data here that we have tells that story pretty clearly. First, 1 in 4 students are chronically absent.
Shannon Williams: Next, for staff, they're jumping between 5 to 7 tools, building contact lists manually, and operating with very limited visibility into whether their messages are actually landing.
Shannon Williams: And for those of you, you serve your families, they're navigating uncertainty about where to go for updates, competing with a flood of all those personal texts and emails, and, doing that every single day. And so, that's exactly the problem that we're solving for in the Apptegy platform.
Shannon Williams: As a fellow communications leader, as Charlie said, I understand these challenges.
Shannon Williams: Communication is easy, but engaging your community can be really hard. But it doesn't have to be. And so, when we think about how Apptegy helps districts extend their reach, we're not thinking about just blasting more messages out the door. We're thinking about what it actually means to engage your entire community.
That means every family, every channel, every single interaction.
Shannon Williams: And at Achieve, our commitment to reach is built on those three things. Every channel means things like SMS, push, web, app, every family, both known and unknown, in their own language automatically, and every interaction, meaning making it each message, genuine moment for engagement.
Shannon Williams: So, now I'm excited to have Drew share with you what that looks like in practice on Apptegy.
Drew Doman: Thanks, Shannon.
Drew Doman: Quick question. Think about the single most important message your district sent last month.
Drew Doman: What percentage of your families actually saw it?
Drew Doman: What percentage actually engaged with it?
Drew Doman: I want to show you how Apptegy dramatically increases your reach, so you know your message actually landed and was seen.
Drew Doman: You'll see the tools and features we've built to help you reach your community, and new products that drive outcomes.
Drew Doman: Here's the good news. A lot of what you just heard from Shannon, reaching every family on every channel, is already live in our platform today.
Drew Doman: You can publish once, and it goes everywhere. An alert, a text message, a push notification, website update, social email, in one click and send.
Drew Doman: But reach isn't just about sending, it's about landing. So when you send a direct message in Apptegy's platform, families now get a text message even if they've never downloaded the app, even if they've never logged in.
Drew Doman: And once you've reached those guardians, those guardians can now engage with the content. We support reactions, threads, group spaces for coaches and clubs, an experience that feels consistent with what families already do every single day.
Drew Doman: Apptegy's platform doesn't just help you reach families, it lets you have real engagement with them.
Drew Doman: Reach isn't just about sending. Reach is about landing, and more so, it's about engagement.
Drew Doman: This is all just the foundation.
Drew Doman: If we jump to the next slide, you'll see we're not standing still.
Drew Doman: Coming soon, you will also be able to react and comment directly on announcements, supporting two-way engagement in more communication channels.
Drew Doman: Additionally, we're launching a unified notification center so guardians and students can easily find new updates.
Drew Doman: Also, coming to our foundation website and alert package, we're building a flexible audience builder, so any post is just a few filters away. No more building contact lists by hand.
Drew Doman: We're adding SMS notifications that reach students directly, no app required.
Drew Doman: And the update I'm most excited about is two-way engagement analytics.
Drew Doman: Using our new analytics suite, you'll see what's actually landing, where staff and families are communicating, where they're going quiet, so you can refine your communication strategy with real insight, and not guesswork.
Drew Doman: Using Apptegy, you can stop guessing what content is landing and start seeing it.
Drew Doman: Now, taking a step back from the feature list for a second, there's one through-line underneath all of this.
Drew Doman: Everything I just showed you, what's in our platform today, and what's coming soon, ladders up to one idea.
Drew Doman: Most tools make it easy to send.
Drew Doman: Apptegy makes sure it actually reaches your community, your students, your guardians, inbound and outbound, those that have downloaded the app and those that are new to the district, in their language, automatically.
Drew Doman: Remember the question I opened with, what percentage of your families actually saw the content or engaged the content? Now with Apptegy, why can't the answer be all of them?
Drew Doman: Reach and engagement are critical, and they are the first step towards driving outcomes.
Drew Doman: Let me show you what I mean.
Drew Doman: This is Attendance Pro. We've all heard the stats. One in four students are chronically absent in the U.S. And how do most districts find out? A robocall goes out, a note gets chased, a code gets manually entered into a system somewhere.
Drew Doman: By the time anyone in your district understands why a student is missing, they're already behind. We react too late to absences. Attendance Pro changes the game.
Drew Doman: From telling a family that their student was absent, to understanding why, and helping before it becomes a pattern.
Drew Doman: Here's how.
Drew Doman: The moment a student is marked absent, Attendance Pro sends district-branded text messages to the family in their native language, with no staff lifting a finger.
Drew Doman: Our customized AI agent asks the right follow-up questions to get a real reason behind the absent, then it codes the absint automatically, logs the conversation, and escalates any high-risk cases to your team.
Drew Doman: Attendance Pro automates the routine attendance work so your staff have time for families, for proactive engagement to address absenteeism at its core.
Drew Doman: Attendance Pro moves you from absence to answer automatically.
Drew Doman: Reach, engagement, and outcomes all sit on a vital foundation. A strong brand. Shannon will now show you how we're all in on your brand.
Shannon Williams: That's right. Thanks, Drew. This strategy really works, you know, as evidenced here by our friend Mindy, who is reaching and engaging more families than ever before. And as Charlie mentioned, it doesn't matter what you say if it doesn't reach the right audience, and that's the first pillar.
Shannon Williams: Now, let's talk about another one of my favorite topics, building your brand.
Shannon Williams: So your community should experience… oh, you could go back… your community should experience your district's brand, not your vendors, and that's just a product principle. It's… it's a trust principle. And here's a question I'd love for you to sit with for just a second before we dive in.
Shannon Williams: When your community connects with you through your website, an alert, a newsletter, or a message.
Shannon Williams: Who and what are they actually experiencing?
Shannon Williams: Are they experiencing your district? Is that your brand? Is that your voice and your values?
Shannon Williams: Or are they experiencing a patchwork of third-party vendors? In many districts, it's both, and that's the problem. So now, we'll jump in and talk about what happens when your brand gets fragmented.
Shannon Williams: So, when we're talking about brand, we're really talking about trust.
Shannon Williams: And the truth is, when your brand is fragmented, trust begins to erode. When families interact across these communication channels, different platforms, different vendors, different looks and feels, they're not experiencing and connecting with your district. They're experiencing disconnected pieces of it.
Shannon Williams: And that creates real risk. That inconsistent branding chips away at your identity, and then you have ADA exposure, like inaccessible content that you may not know is even going out. And then no visibility, you can't see what's being sent, or how that might be affecting your reputation.
Shannon Williams: So, your brand is more than a logo. Every interaction that your community has with your district is a brand moment, and that's why, here at Apptegy, we're committed to making every one of those moments count.
Shannon Williams: We ensure every one of those interactions that your community experiences comes from your district. That's your voice, your identity, and your brand. And that's why we love empowering storytelling at all levels.
Shannon Williams: This is really where the shift from brand as a design function to brand as a district-wide operating system builds that trust. So, that's the change Apptegy helps make possible, and I'm excited to have Drew share with you a little bit about what that looks like in the platform.
Drew Doman: Absolutely.
Drew Doman: Picture a family that just moved into your district. Before they ever set foot in a building, their initial impression of you forms digitally.
Drew Doman: I want to show you how to make that initial impression, and every interaction after that come from your district brand, not another vendor's.
Drew Doman: You'll see the Apptegy tools that can power your brand today.
Drew Doman: When we say brand, a lot of people think of the logo, the colors, but your brand is really a feeling. Can my families find what they need? Are their questions answered? And does it feel like my district when they do?
Drew Doman: Apptegy starts with building one branded ecosystem for your district. A website, an app, newsletters, all unmistakably tied to your district.
Drew Doman: And we're intentional about the governance controls that goes into that brand. Schools get the flexibility to tell their own story inside the guardrails that you set for your brand. That helps drive brand consistency without you having to micromanage every single post or becoming a bottleneck for communication.
Drew Doman: And it shows up in the small moments, too. We've released a faster, smarter site search, so that parents can get quick, accurate answers from your website.
Drew Doman: We now have alerts that clearly come from your district, as they're fully branded. And no more cramming an urgent message into a character limit. We now enable you to tell the entire story with all the context that families need.
Drew Doman: Your brand isn't a logo, it's every single interaction. And we're investing even more to power your brand at scale.
Drew Doman: On the next slide, you'll see a lot of the new features.
Drew Doman: are new… are new. We've got Write With AI that's now built directly into our CMS, and our alerts give you a solid first draft in seconds. AI Alt Text takes your page and makes it accessible automatically.
Drew Doman: Our new global live feed templates allow you to drive consistency across your entire organization.
Drew Doman: Coming soon, we're adding website analytics, so you can understand site health, audience insights across all of your domains and all of your schools at a glance.
Drew Doman: One new feature that I'm really excited about is AI Page Builder. Upload a PDF and get a clean, accessible, translatable, and discoverable web page. Because we know accessibility isn't a checkbox. It's whether every family in your district can actually get the information they need.
Drew Doman: Our platform builds in accessibility by default, not as an afterthought.
Drew Doman: So when you step back.
Drew Doman: Apptegy gives you one platform to make your brand unmistakable across every channel, every school, every interaction. The visual experience come together.
Drew Doman: And it's not another tech company's brand, it's your brand that's being promoted.
Drew Doman: The example I opened with, the new family, visiting your district.
Drew Doman: Using our tools, they can have an amazing experience, and you can nail that first impression every single time.
Drew Doman: And nowhere does that experience matter more than the moment a family has a question. Let's take a look.
Drew Doman: This is Community Experience. Picture that family that just moved to your community, and they're trying to figure out how to enroll their child.
Drew Doman: Today, they dig through your website, or they wait until Monday to call the front office if they even remember.
Drew Doman: With Community Experience, they just ask, in plain language, and get an instant branded answer, no login, no phone call required.
Drew Doman: Community Experience works in three layers. First, AI site search. Instant, summarized answers pulled from your district-approved content.
Drew Doman: Second, an AI chatbot for the natural follow-up question, where no staff required.
Drew Doman: And third, when something truly needs a human, intelligent routing makes sure it lands with the right person, and they have a task assigned so no question gets lost.
Drew Doman: And sitting on top of all of this is rich analytics.
Drew Doman: For the first time, you can see what your community is actually asking, and whether they're getting the answers that they need.
Drew Doman: That's your brand working at scale around the clock for you.
Drew Doman: With Apptegy Community Experience, your website stops being a place to dig, and starts being a place where answers are found.
Drew Doman: So you've built an incredible brand. Jesson will now talk about how you maintain it.
Jesson George: Thanks, Drew. So many of you here today, similar to our friend Monica at Chesapeake Public Schools, have been so deliberate, and it's taken a lot of time to focus on your brand.
Jesson George: But in doing so, it's also about building trust, because those two things go hand in hand.
Jesson George: But when you think about that, we all know that you're just one message.
Jesson George: Or even one crisis away from putting all that at risk.
Jesson George: And so that's why we're all in on safety as well. Because trust is built by how protected, controlled, and reliable all of your interactions feel to your community.
Jesson George: So think about that. What do you have to control for? It's not just one type of risk. You've got to control for your reputation, your operational risk.
Jesson George: and compliance. And most importantly, the safety of your teachers, parents, and students.
Jesson George: And so, you know how to do that. You can do that, but once you think about a big community, and you think about every message.
Jesson George: every access point and every client. There's just no way to do that all manually, and scale that manually, even if you know what to do.
Jesson George: And so that's where Apptegy comes in.
Jesson George: what are the things already in the platform? For Apptegy, it's not just about a feature here, or a feature there.
Jesson George: It's about a foundation built on safety and security. And so, some of the things that's already in our platform, governance and visibility controls, think about that for a leader. For you on this call, or a leader, to be able to see every interaction in our two-way tool between
Jesson George: A teacher, a parent, a student.
Jesson George: But then there's also message moderation.
Jesson George: With message moderation, someone can flag a conversation that's not going well, and that results up to a leader
Jesson George: in a queue that they can visualize. Those are just two of the things in our two-way tool, on top of numerous other things that are in the platform. Again, more as a foundation and not just a feature.
Jesson George: That's what's already in the platform, but this investment doesn't go away, right? There is so many things coming, and already coming, is how are we streamlining… streamlining all of your data for your students and parents, and streamlining that?
Jesson George: Here in the next couple months. But then it's also a partnership with Givebacks for secure payments. And these are just a few of the things coming soon to you all for this back-to-school season.
Jesson George: So we talked about what's already in the platform, and then what's coming here in the next couple weeks and next couple months, and obviously the investments we're going to continue to put into this. And now I'm going to hand it over to Charlie to just talk about some of this innovation that he's been leading up.
Charlie Lang: Thank you, Jesson.
Charlie Lang: So, as we think about safety and security in practice, let's do a deep dive on one of our most exciting new features, AI moderation.
Charlie Lang: So last back to school, we relaunched our Messaging Essentials and Group Connect solutions, what many of you probably know as Rooms.
Charlie Lang: And we upgraded it in many ways, but one of the most exciting areas was it included AI-powered messaging moderation.
Charlie Lang: So, Jesson talked about some of the traditional approaches around visibility and leveraging something called manual moderation.
Charlie Lang: Which effectively requires a recipient to flag a message.
Charlie Lang: Now, this can sometimes be awkward for the recipient, or maybe even frightening, particularly if the recipient is a student or a parent, and they're not sure if the process is anonymous.
Charlie Lang: So this has historically led to reduced reporting and many messages that are ultimately just left
Charlie Lang: unmoderated. At the same time, while it's technically possible for a leader to see all the messages and all the communications in our platform.
Charlie Lang: At a district of scale, or even a medium-sized district, it's hard for a leader to review every single message sent, which is causing yet another problem related to scale.
Charlie Lang: So with AI moderation, our AI-powered safety models look at thousands and thousands of messages in real time, and will flag messages that contain inappropriate content.
Charlie Lang: Or, messages that do something as simple as trying to move a conversation into an unofficial channel.
Charlie Lang: Apptegy's AI-powered moderation also handles nuanced situations, like elevating one-off reports of bullying to a principal, or helping student services teams intervene in a sensitive situation before it escalates.
Charlie Lang: Apptegy is the only leading messaging platform in K-12 that approaches safety to this extent.
Charlie Lang: And it's one of the things that we're the most proud of.
Charlie Lang: And as we talk to existing and prospective clients about messaging essentials and Group Connect each and every day, it's one of the key reasons why they're choosing to use the Apptegy platform for two-way messaging at an increasing rate.
Charlie Lang: So, in conclusion, today we covered 3 important areas that are crucial to executing a successful K-12 comms strategy.
Charlie Lang: Shannon and Drew spent some time outlining Reach, not just why it's important, but also how Apptegy's growing set of functionality helps school districts reach and engage communities across a variety of channels.
Charlie Lang: Drew and Shannon also spent time talking about the importance of brand.
Charlie Lang: how brand and identity is more than just a logo, and how things like improvements to analytics, a global live feed, and new AI features are helping districts double down on their brand and identity with the Apptegy platform.
Charlie Lang: And then finally, Jesson and I just spent some time outlining the importance of privacy and safety.
Charlie Lang: how that commitment builds trust within your community, and why Apptegy's new functionality around things like identity management, AI-powered moderation, and our partnership with Givebacks are helping districts further that commitment within the community.
Charlie Lang: So, as we think about the product moving into back-to-school.
Charlie Lang: Let's spend just a few minutes talking about how our products are helping districts evolve some of the strategies that we just discussed today.
Charlie Lang: So first, Apptegy's story originally started with improving outbound communication for school districts. First, with websites and apps, then alerts, newsletters, and then two-way communication.
Charlie Lang: Last year, we extended our platform into inbound communication through our acquisition of AlwaysOn.
Charlie Lang: and the subsequent launch of Community Experience.
Charlie Lang: Which is the product that allows schools to create world-class customer support on their channels, all powered by AI.
Charlie Lang: And then, in the past few weeks, we've entered into a new category of communication, internal communications.
Charlie Lang: The launch of Staff Connect is a K-12-first intranet solution that takes everything we've learned about K-12 comms and applies it to how districts… how district staff collaborate internally.
Charlie Lang: And I'll just say, as a side note, this is one of the products that was most requested by the more than 5,000 districts that we work with today, and so we're incredibly excited to be able to bring it to life.
Charlie Lang: So if we talk more about Staff Connect.
Charlie Lang: The first release of Staff Connect, which is available now, anchors on some key pieces of functionality.
Charlie Lang: First.
Charlie Lang: It provides a centralized internet, so an ability for administrators to create multiple spaces dedicated to particular teams or areas of the org.
Charlie Lang: So, for example, leaders can create a space just for 7th grade teachers, or just for coaches, or for specific buildings.
Charlie Lang: Within these spaces, Staff Connect administrators can build internal pages, manage internal documents securely, post to internal feeds, providing a staff-only and staff-first experience that districts previously were only providing to families and classrooms.
Charlie Lang: In addition, with Staff Connect, district staff can leverage global messaging, create group chats and direct messaging between staff members for real-time communication, all within the context of a tool that the staff are already using for other forms of communication in the district.
Charlie Lang: And because it's all happening in one central place for your district, leadership is now able to identify what messages are being sent.
Charlie Lang: Who's reacting and viewing the content, and where gaps might exist within the internal communication strategy as it exists today.
Charlie Lang: And just like with Apptegy's other communication tools, conversations are increasingly two-way if desired.
Charlie Lang: This is not an old-fashioned static intranet webpage, but one where staff members can react or reply to posts, they can reshare information with colleagues, and create internal engagement that's helping drive broader engagement with communication tools in the district.
Charlie Lang: I'll close by saying that many districts are already up and running on Staff Connect, and towards the end of the school year, one of the most striking things to see
Charlie Lang: is the increased staff engagement because of Staff Connect. In one district, we saw teacher, parent, and student messaging increase extraordinarily, predominantly because more staff were engaging with Apptegy Platform through Staff Connect.
Charlie Lang: So the mission around providing one central place for the district to engage, both internally and externally, is real. And we're seeing that the more a district consolidates into one platform, the higher the usage, the more value communities are getting from Apptegy.
Charlie Lang: So, Staff Connect is available now, and the response we are getting from districts is overwhelming, so if you'd like to learn more, please reach out.
Charlie Lang: So I know we have a few more things to discuss, so to bring us home, I'll kick it back over to Bob.
Bob Butler: Perfect. Thank you, Charlie, and thank you to Jesson, Shannon, and Drew for presenting. You heard a lot about our products today.
Bob Butler: But we do pride ourselves in being your all-in partner for a lot more than product. That's with the service that we provide, so I just wanted to highlight a couple of things just to make sure you're aware. First of all, we do invest heavily in our SchoolCEO magazine. That helps us bring thought leadership
Bob Butler: Both from our team internally, but also from your peers. That's a quarterly print magazine that we can have sent to your location. If you're not on that list, please just ping us in the channel, and we'll make sure you're on it. And we also hold our annual SchoolCEO conference as well.
This year, it's gonna be in Dallas, Texas on September 28th and 29th.
Bob Butler: And based on registration so far, this will be our biggest conference we've ever had, so we're very excited about it. That QR code will give you some more details, and we'd love to see you there.
Bob Butler: We also want to be that strategic advisor to you when you're navigating high-stakes topics like ADA and state legislature. So we know we were all very focused on ADA this year. At the last minute, the bills were pushed back a couple of years, but that QR code will bring you to some of the resources that we pulled together for you, around ADA, because believe it or not, we're going to be having the same discussion
Bob Butler: Later this year, as we gear up for some of the regulations next year. And then finally, your customer experience team's here to help. It's not just support. If you want to hear… if you've got questions about the product, if you've got questions to… if you want to hear some of the latest best practices, they are here to be your advisor.
I've already seen some questions come through.
Bob Butler: around what do I own, what do I not own, your customer success, team can help you with that, so feel free just to reach out to them directly.
Bob Butler: In closing, we'll go to questions after this, but just a couple of parting thoughts. The districts that lead their communities five years from now, they're starting that evolution today. They're not waiting for the perfect moment because there isn't one. They're building towards that today, and we've, we would love to continue to be that partner for you as we help you along this journey.
Bob Butler: We did move very quickly through the content today. I used the word relentless at the beginning of the conversation, because we know it is a relentless time of year. But if you'd like to continue the conversation and have some additional dialogue with us, there's a number of ways to get in touch with us.
Bob Butler: If you click yes to the poll that we just dropped, we'll have someone follow up with you shortly. If you'd like to book time in with us through… scan that QR code, and that'll, walk you through how to get in touch with us, or you can simply just email us at marketing@apptegy.com.
Bob Butler: We do have some time for questions, and I've started to see some come through, so, maybe I'll just, if you don't mind, I can pull all the presenters back on camera, and I'll tee these up for you as we go. I get to moderate, that way I don't have to answer any of them. That's why you're the panel, and I'm moderating. Little joke, we're good.
Bob Butler: Maybe we'll start off with, Drew. A lot of conversation around chronic absenteeism in my state. Can you talk a little bit more about how your attendance product is different from the robocall systems that my district's using?
Drew Doman: Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. First and foremost, it's… it's two-way. We see a lot of products out there that are one-way communication.
It's mass comms, or it's a robocall, but there's no way for the Guardian to respond. So, our Attendance Pro product allows Guardians to respond directly via text message.
Drew Doman: And the AI agent is customized to every single district. We use your attendance codes, we use your attendance policies, and ultimately also use your brand to make sure that your agent reflects how you would want anyone in your district to handle those situations.
Drew Doman: And therefore, the combination of two-way and the AI automation allows for your staff to stop focusing on the manual coding work and let them focus on where they can really drive proactive attendance solutions with students.
Bob Butler: Very good. Thank you, Drew. Here's one for you, Charlie. This one's near and dear to my heart, because I'm just a year away from it with my kids.
How do you handle families who have multiple students in a district across different schools?
Charlie Lang: Yeah, it's a great question. So, first of all, if you're using the Apptegy platform across all the schools, consistently, we do allow the management of multiple students within different rooms pretty seamlessly in the platform.
Charlie Lang: So I think that, if your students are in the same district across multiple schools, you see one consolidated view of your students, regardless of what building or school they're physically in.
Charlie Lang: And then we're also rolling out some new authentication technology that is allowing parents who may have students in multiple districts sign into different districts
Charlie Lang: to gain that, experience across districts. So, we've thought about all the different edge cases and combinations, and tried to make it as seamless and possible for… seamless as possible for a parent who either has multiple students within a district, or students across multiple districts.
Charlie Lang: And happy to follow up on that answer with a demo if there are further questions after the session today.
Bob Butler: Yep, very good. Charlie, I'll stick with you. Got another one. How does the AI moderation handle threatening messages?
Charlie Lang: So the AI moderation model is very robust, and it is looking at not just what's being said.
Charlie Lang: But if there are images or audio that are uploaded that might be threatening, we actually have different types of threats that we're able to adjust for, and so whether it is violent imagery, whether it's aggressive or threatening imagery or words, the model is uncanny at picking up these nuances and blocking messages in real time.
Charlie Lang: The other thing we'll say is that there are controls for districts if they want to tune up or tune down certain types of messages that they deem as more important.
Charlie Lang: So, for example, some messages can be automatically blocked in real time, while others might just be elevated or flagged to a principal or an administrator based on the content.
Charlie Lang: Regardless, we have dozens of attributes that we're currently looking for, and multiple versions of threatening messages that we scan for, and we're really, really proud of how robust that model is.
Bob Butler: Good, thank you. Onboarding question for Jesson, what does the rollout of Community Experience look like? How long before families are using it?
Jesson George: Good question. Community Experience, much easier than our Foundations platform and our rooms platform. Usually, that's going to be 2 to 3 very hands-on calls with our onboarders, and we've got a couple clients already rolled out on that and using it.
Bob Butler: Very good, thank you. Shannon, this is a branding question. I don't think I heard rooms mentioned today. Is that still being actively worked on?
Shannon Williams: Yes, that is. We have a lot of rooms clients, and there are a lot of enhancements that we've been doing, so I'm excited to share more. You can get a demo scheduled here, scan the QR code to grab time with us to go through the innovations that we have there, in addition to everything else that you heard today.
Bob Butler: Good, thank you. Another attendance question, we'll keep it with Drew. How does the attendance tracker connect with school systems like JMC and PowerSchool?
Drew Doman: Yep. We work with you to integrate, with your SIS both ways. One, to receive the data on who's absent, and two, to make sure that the data gets back to your source of truth, your SIS.
Drew Doman: All formatted, once again, customized for your attendance codes and your attendance reasons, so that we can close the loop and ensure that all of that information that's being captured in Attendance Pro ultimately lands back in your SIS.
Bob Butler: Very good. Okay. I'm not sure… this is either Drew or Charlie. I'll put it out in the ether, let one of you two grab it.
How are parents and or students sent messages without being enrolled?
Drew Doman: Without… if they're not enrolled, to be able to use rooms, they have to be enrolled, so that's our two-way communication platform. However, if a student is not enrolled yet, they can use our inbound tool, Community Experience.
Drew Doman: To ask questions about enrollment, to get information from the district on how they would enroll their student, and make sure they are able to kind of follow the steps necessary for enrollment.
Drew Doman: If that information doesn't live on the website, within Community Experience, you can use the contact form, and that automatically assigns a task to district administrators or to principals that can answer that enrollment question and make sure the guardian is… the loop is closed with that guardian.
Bob Butler: Cool.
Bob Butler: Thank you, Drew. Charlie, one for you. If the parents and students are receiving messages from the district, school, and all their teachers in the same place, how do messages from individual teachers that are particular to the student and or vital information and or vital information isn't lost?
Charlie Lang: If I'm understanding the question, how does a parent receive and manage all the different direct messages? Is that what the question pertains to?
Bob Butler: Yes.
Charlie Lang: Yeah, so within both our native app experience for the district, but also our mobile web experience.
Charlie Lang: a parent, and a student, and a teacher for that matter, all have an inbox, very similar to what you would see in iMessage on your phone, or Gmail in your email.
Charlie Lang: And there are a historical list of all the messages that you've received, there are group messages, there are direct messages, and you have the ability to review those that are unread, to respond to those, and continue conversations for months, if not years on end.
Charlie Lang: And so there is always a full history of these things, and the ability for you to revisit chats and conversations that occurred in the past. And again, as I mentioned a second ago, even to conduct group chats.
Charlie Lang: So think of it as a private, secure, private WhatsApp or email, just for your school district, and just for the parents that are looking to engage with the individuals on the other side.
Bob Butler: Great, thank you. Charlie. Drew, attendance, hot topic, we're getting a lot of questions here. Attendance codes need to be reflected in the school's SIS.
Does Attendance Pro sync with the school's SIS?
Drew Doman: Yeah, we share the perspective that the SIS should be the source of truth for your district. Attendance Pro collaborates with your CIS to make sure the why behind the absence is accurately reflected.
Drew Doman: During the onboarding process for Attendance Pro, we work with you to ensure the data that we collect in Attendance Pro is formatted correctly so that it can get back to your CIS and ultimately be tied to that source of truth.
Bob Butler: Cool. Thank you, Drew.
Bob Butler: Drew, I'll keep it with you. Any ideas when the PDF AI Page Builder tool will be coming? I feel like lots of districts will be really excited for that feature, especially with the ADA changes in law.
Drew Doman: Yeah, we're super excited, too. I'm glad to hear some excitement on that feature. It'll be coming in the back half of 2026. And we're excited because we know PDFs, they aren't accessible, they aren't translatable, they're really sometimes hard to find on websites.
Drew Doman: And if we can turn those into website pages, that works really well with Community Experience, but it also works really well with our improved site search that we've rolled out to all of our websites. So, look out for more details coming in the back half of 2026, and we're super excited for you to try out AI Page Builder.
Bob Butler: Great, thank you. Charlie, back to you. From a training perspective, it can get confusing to refer to Apptegy as Thrillshare. Is it your intention to rebrand to just Apptegy?
For consistency, having one name would be extremely helpful. I think we all agree. I'll let you take it from here.
Charlie Lang: Yeah, it is, and that journey has begun and has been in flight for more than a year. If you notice, the word Thrillshare is appearing less and less.
Charlie Lang: on our marketing website, and almost non-existently within our product. We are aware the domain still is Thrillshare.com, and that is something that unfortunately carries a lot of technical complexity with it.
Charlie Lang: But it is something that ultimately will start to fade away, and we'll really just think about that as the Apptegy Staff Experience.
Charlie Lang: So we'll have the branded experience for your communities, for your families, your students and parents, and then you'll have the Apptegy Staff Experience. You'll notice that the
Charlie Lang: The mobile app, formerly known as the Thrillshare app, is now just the Apptegy Staff app, and we're well underway. Again, the last piece is really just changing that domain from Thrillshare.com to Apptegy.com.
Charlie Lang: And that's in flight right now.
Bob Butler: Cool. Thank you for bearing with us, everyone, on that change. We think we agree it'll be much simpler and less confusing. Drew, another one for you.
Are there any improvements, changes on the way for parent notification options in rooms?
Drew Doman: Yes, coming very soon. We're rolling out a more consistent, a more streamlined way for you to select your notification preferences.
Drew Doman: For rooms across all of the different communication channels. So for messages, for announcements, for behavior updates, you're gonna be able to have more granular ways to drive notifications.
Drew Doman: And then, later this year, likely in Q3 or early Q4, we're also going to be rolling out a unified notification center, so that you have a really streamlined and simple way to find, as a guardian or as a student, all of the notifications that you've received from all of your students in all of the rooms.
Drew Doman: in one centralized place. So we're gonna make a lot of progress this year on notifications, and we think that's gonna play a huge role in making back to school even better this year.
Bob Butler: Good, thank you, Drew. Another one for you. Will you add a URL shortener to your social media manager? And is AI-based picture resizing coming out?
So, so many times I want to post, but it does not allow me to show the entire picture.
Drew Doman: Yeah, great, great question. Amazing idea, on the link shortener. We know that that can take up a lot of characters, and the AI resizer is also a great idea. One constraint that we have when we're posting to social is, we have to maintain what the… each of the social platforms want in terms of picture ratio, but those are amazing ideas that we'll definitely look into.
Bob Butler: Cool, thank you.
Bob Butler: One for Charlie. When… when Staff View Staff Connect,
Bob Butler: Is it with Apptegy for staff app, or is it the district app? Can they do everything on the Staff Connect app that they can do on the website?
Charlie Lang: Yeah, so, Staff Connect today is launching as desktop only, in the web.
Charlie Lang: It is the exact same login that they're using today for messaging, for rooms. If they're using the website functionality, it's the same product. You're just seeing more functionality in your navigation and the ability to build multiple intranets within it.
Charlie Lang: It is, over the next few quarters, rolling out into the mobile app as well.
Charlie Lang: So that all the functionality around internal pages, internal documents, internal messaging will be available.
Charlie Lang: in the staff app. But for back-to-school launch, we are focusing predominantly on the desktop web experience.
Bob Butler: Perfect.
Bob Butler: Okay, one… one more, and then maybe we'll wrap it up. First of all, thank you for all the questions. Here's… here's one more.
Bob Butler: I'll put this out to Drew or Charlie. Either of you can grab this one. It is difficult as a parent who is also a teacher in the same district having to log in separately. Will that be streamlined so staff can see their children without switching apps?
This is really cumbersome.
Drew Doman: Yes, yeah, good question. We're making the first step in that journey, and we'll be rolling that out, here in the next couple months, where each district will have their own subdomain, and this is going to allow for a better separation between districts, and also better separation for the example that you shared, where a parent
Drew Doman: and a staff member in the same place. We also have the staff app for staff, and then if you are also a parent, you can download the school app for your district to kind of maintain those separate experiences for now. But this is the first step in a journey in how we want to streamline users that either have multiple districts for students that go to schools in two districts.
Drew Doman: Or for the example that you shared, where we have staff members and parents all in one.
Bob Butler: Great.
Bob Butler: Well, thank you again, everybody, for joining. I'll just say we are going to keep the poll open, so if you have… if you'd like to continue the conversation, please go ahead and click yes on that, and we'll go ahead and follow up with a phone call. But again, I use the term relentless. I know it's a relentless time of the year.
Thanks for taking the time today, and if you like this, please let us know, because we would,
Bob Butler: We'd be happy to do this again, in the future.
Bob Butler: Thank you so much, and have a good rest of the day.