Dalton Public Schools Continuously Improve District Websites With Monsido

Dalton Public Schools

Originally chartered in 1886, Dalton Public Schools is a world-class Pre-K-12 school district located in Northwest Georgia. The school is dedicated to developing trusting relationships that engage students in learning and prepare them for success after graduation. Today, the district runs a total of 10 schools and is the academic home to more than 7,000 students.

Problem: Improving Product Adoption Amongst Staff

Dalton Public Schools has a total of 11 websites which are overseen by their Communications Specialist, Emily Martin, as well as a dedicated webmaster at each school. They'd previously been using another Web Governance solution, but their team struggled with the complexity of the platform. The result was that only three of the ten webmasters were using the platform to proactively identify and correct website issues.

By not proactively addressing website issues, Dalton Public Schools fell behind on their website goals of improving web accessibility and website navigation, as well as strengthening their website as part of their overall marketing strategy. In August 2020, they decided to switch from their previous provider to Monsido, as the platform provided a more user-friendly interface, as well as the easy-to-use Browser Extension.

Solution: A User-Friendly and Transparent Platform

While Emily oversees all the websites, the dedicated webmasters at each school are responsible for updating their respective school's sites. Emily uses Monsido's weekly report to address errors on the main school district website, as well as ensure that the webmasters are continuously addressing errors and issues that arise on their sites.

The weekly reports provide Emily with a clear overview on the progress of the individual school websites. She said, "Our school webmasters are librarians or school teachers, and the report makes it easy for them to know exactly what they need to correct on the website on a weekly basis".

The ease-of-use of the Monsido Browser Extension was also a game-changer for the Dalton Public Schools' team as it increased adoption of the Web Governance platform to include all of their webmasters.

"Our team is incentivized to log in to the Monsido Platform on a weekly basis, and they love the Browser Extension. Many of our webmasters do not have a technical background, and the Browser Extension makes it significantly faster and easier to identify, locate, and correct errors on the websites. If they can use it to fix website errors — anyone can do it!", said Emily.

Benefit: A Stronger Digital Presence For Their School District

The Dalton Public Schools website had previously been a static information hub, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, they transitioned to publishing updates on a nearly daily basis for their school community. With Monsido, they were able to swiftly maintain the addition of large amounts of new content, and still maintain high content quality and accessibility.

In fact, despite constant additions of new web content, all of Dalton Public Schools' websites boast Quality Assurance scores in the 90th percentile. One of their websites, Hammond Creek Middle School, even has a 100% Quality Assurance, as well as equally high Web Accessibility scores.

"Even though we're constantly adding content, we've been able to more effectively stay on top of broken links and misspellings with the Monsido Platform. In just over a month, we were able to improve our main website's Quality Assurance score from 86% to nearly 95%," noted Emily.

Another added benefit for Emily and the team of webmasters at Dalton Public Schools has been the support from Monsido's Customer Success Team.

"One of the other aspects of working with Monsido that we really like is the unlimited amount of training and online chat options. The times we've needed support with the platform, they've been incredibly helpful in getting everything resolved." shared Emily. "I also really enjoyed the Product Update webinar that their team put on to share more on new features and functionality that we can use to continuously improve our websites".

In the future, Dalton Public Schools will continue to work on strengthening the overall digital presence of their school district — as increased competition amongst K-12 schools means they need to focus on improving their SEO and overall user experience to continue to stand out.