Over the past three weeks, we've been attending focus groups, listening to PLASP parents share their feedback on our website. It has been an eye-opening experience!

One of our business goals is to build and nurture positive reciprocal relationships with our partners—especially parents. Meeting parents—listening to your concerns and gathering information about your experiences—is another step on the journey of our kaizen roadmap to improving our website. (In case you missed it, you can check out our last blog post for an overview of the website improvement project.)

As an organization, we understand the power of the parent voice—and we embrace it! The focus group sessions created an environment where parents could speak freely about their experiences, bounce ideas off of each other and, most of all, realize there are other parents who share similar challenges with the website and registration process.

By sharing this project publicly, we hope to create a further sense of credibility and transparency while building on a relationship of trust. We are listening to what is being said—even in our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram  accounts—and we are going to do our best to implement your suggestions. As a result of the focus groups we collected valuable data and made great face-to-face connections, but most of all, the parents knew someone was listening.

What we learned from meeting you

Our researcher is just beginning to compile all of the feedback for this project, but we have learned a lot from attending the focus group session. During the coming weeks, we will provide more detail about the following three things that stood out to us during the sessions:

• The registration process can be difficult
  • Focusing on how we can improve our commitment to parents by making this process as easy as possible.
• The need to consider our diverse families and language learners  
  • Many of our parents have English as a second language, and it is important to provide information that is clear, straightforward and jargon free.
• The positive attitudes of our parents
  • Parents generously shared their time and feedback with us—often apologizing if they thought their comments were too harsh. We were grateful for every comment and encouraged parents to share their constructive criticism freely.

We would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to all our parents who participated in the focus groups and helped to voice their concerns for being a huge part of change at PLASP. We'll keep you posted on the progress of this project as we continue with our kaizen approach to improving the website.

If you were not part of the focus groups but have opinions about the website, never fear. You will soon be hearing about our parent website and social media survey.

We are always looking for parent input. If you are interested in participating in future focus groups or surveys, please feel free to email daniellenorris@plasp.com or call 905.890.1711, ext. 158.