Introducing Activities — An Easier Way to Bring People Together

Remind’s biggest back-to-school yet

One of the best things about building a company in the education space is getting to experience that back-to-school feeling all over again. When I was a kid, this was always exciting. Finding out what teacher I had, picking out a new Trapper Keeper, wondering what would happen in the year ahead. I get the same feeling at Remind every August, but things are a little different this time around.

Remind is heading back to school with more users than ever before — over 35 million and growing each day. And I see our vision more clearly than ever.

My brother David and I started Remind as a one-way text messaging app to help make teachers’ lives easier, and we quickly realized that efficient and effective communication was the key to student success. Now, Remind’s become the primary communication tool for helping everyone in a school community — teachers, students, parents, administrators — succeed together. Remind is used in more than 50% of U.S. public schools and in 3 out of 4 school districts, and that’s an enormous and humbling responsibility.

Anyone who’s ever had a conversation with me knows that the team at Remind talks to our users…a lot. We strive to understand what makes it harder for educators, students, and parents to work together, and we pay attention to what helps, too. That’s why our product and business model are built on the connections and dynamics between everyone in a school community.

One thing we’ve learned is that education doesn’t begin and end in the classroom. Sports teams, academic clubs, field trips, and fundraisers are all important to school life, but they’re still handled like they were literally decades ago. Teachers carry manila envelopes of cash to the principal’s office on their lunch breaks. Parents never see permission slips that get lost in backpacks or left on the bus. Administrators are stuck with paperwork for the hundreds — sometimes thousands — of activities that take place in their schools every year.

In other words, coordinating school activities is a huge burden for teachers, parents, students, and administrators. So we decided to fix it.

Activities represents the largest expansion of our core product to date as well as our first revenue stream. It’s a feature that streamlines logistics, eliminates the messiness of tracking payments, and makes administrative recordkeeping simpler than ever. And, starting today, it’s available to every Remind user on every platform.

We started testing Activities in beta earlier this year, and more than 10,000 activities have already been created for 250,000 students and parents. Field trips, sports events, yearbook sales, and PTA fundraisers are being organized on Remind from start to finish, and it’s really exciting to see how Activities makes it easier for longtime users to do what they’ve always done. Shortly after we launched the beta, one principal in California decided to use Activities to raise money for his school’s art program. In 10 minutes, he set up a fundraiser that raised more than $1,000 — with no advance planning.

There’s so much potential for Activities to help bring people together.

When flooding devastated Louisiana a little over a week ago, we reached out to educators in the area and discovered that they were using Remind to check in with students and their families, coordinate cleanup efforts, and provide support to those who lost their homes. One teacher sent us a picture of her school, almost completely submerged by the flooding, and our community team used Activities to set up an internal fundraiser to help. Over the weekend, we raised $1400 for the affected school.

Back-to-school season is always exciting, but it means more to me this year because I see how far Remind has come and what we’re beginning to achieve together. I hope Activities takes more work off teachers’ desks, gives parents the chance to be more engaged, and makes it easier for principals to strengthen their communities. And, above all, I hope we clear the way for more students to succeed this year than ever before. (: