Ask any parent and they will most certainly have one of those “OMG!” stories when trying to pay student’s school lunch, after-school program, or when trying to register for sports activities. Since Millennials are currently the largest K-12 parent population, they are at the forefront of influencing how schools implement new technologies to optimize their processes and better serve their constituents who are heavy mobile social media users.
Millennials are literally glued to their mobile phones and K-12 schools need to understand that and take steps to adapt to their customer needs. Nearly half of millennials — significantly more than any older age group — say they “couldn’t live without” their smartphone, according to data released in 2015 by the Pew Research Center. Furthermore, nearly 4 in 10 millennials (39%) say they interact more with their smartphones than they do with their significant others, parents, friends, children or co-workers, according to a survey by Bank of America. In fact, millennials spend so much time on their smartphones that they account for 41% of the total time that Americans spend using smartphones, despite making up just 29% of the population according to the Experian report.
Millennial parents rely on the Internet, including YouTube and Pinterest, for parenting advice almost 2X more than talking to other people. These new parents on the block are taking serious steps to abstain from being Helicopter Parents. According to Ypulse survey, 88% of Millennial Drone Parents do not want to recreate their overprotected childhoods, and 62% say “I have or will let my children play unsupervised.”
According to Crowdtap report, much like older generations, Millennials just want to be good parents, and define good parenting as “being there for your family” and “putting your child’s needs and wants above your own.” Because Millennial parents strive very hard to raise tech savvy digital natives, they have high expectations from K-12 schools, not only academically, but also operationally. In this day and age of swipes and clicks, Millennial parents hate writing checks for donations; filling out dozens of pages for aftercare registrations; or going to school front-office every month to pay for lunches.
Skookii is the fastest growing school payments solution being used by hundreds of K-12 public, private, and charter schools that provides fast and easy mobile and web payments for Millennial parents.