Making the most of your 14-day free trial: a day-by-day setup plan

Some schools that start a free trial open the account on day one, glance at a few screens and then forget about the trial amid the daily workload. When the fourteen days are up, the only impression left is "it wasn't bad". That's not a good outcome for the school, or for us.

For a trial to lead to a real decision, you need a plan. In this article I share a day-by-day plan for completing Funikid's 14-day free trial with one class, real parents and a measurable result.

Before you start: three decisions

• Pilot class: Start with one class instead of the whole school. The class of a teacher who is comfortable with technology and open to change is the best choice.
• Person in charge: Have someone from leadership own the trial; they answer the teacher's questions and they are the one who contacts us.
• Success criteria: What will you look at at the end of day fourteen? For example: "Are most parents using the app? Is the teacher comfortable sharing daily? Have the repeated phone questions gone down?"

Days 1–2: Setup

• Fill in the registration form and open your account.
• Add the pilot class and its students. See student management.
• Create teacher and admin accounts and set their permissions. See roles and permissions.
• Add the weekly meal menu and an upcoming event, so parents don't see an empty app when they first log in.

Day 3: Teacher introduction

A half-hour session with the teacher is enough. Show four tasks: taking attendance, sharing a photo, posting an announcement, replying to a message. Then let the teacher try each one. The goal of this session is not to teach every feature but to make the first week's daily routine easy.

Days 4–5: Invite the parents

• Send parents a short announcement: why you're switching, what they'll gain, how to install the app.
• Share the app's links in the iOS and Android stores.
• Offer a few minutes of setup help at the door during morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up. Most of the time, that's all it takes.
• Track who has joined, and reach out one-to-one to parents who haven't.

Days 6–10: The real week

These five days are the heart of the trial. Run all of the pilot class's daily communication through the app:

• Take attendance in the app every morning.
• Upload at least one class photo to the gallery every day.
• Record meals in meal tracking.
• Post announcements only through the app.
• Share a short newsletter at the end of the week.

Note the difficulties the teacher runs into during these five days. Most are habit issues that resolve within the first two days; the ones that persist are important information for your evaluation.

Days 11–12: Gather feedback

• Ask the teacher: Which daily tasks became easier, and which harder? Have repeated parent questions gone down?
• Ask a few parents: How often do they open the app? What do they look at most? Is anything missing for them?
• Ask yourself: Can you now see the class's communication in one place?

Days 13–14: Decision

Go back to the criteria you set at the start and compare them with the feedback you've gathered. When deciding, keep two questions apart:

• Does the software meet our needs?
• If we roll it out to the whole school, what kind of transition plan will we need?

For the second question, our new school year preparation article offers a roadmap. To discuss packages and the right setup for your school, talk to our team.

Three common trial mistakes

1. Starting with the whole school: A scattered trial doesn't produce a clear result.
2. Not inviting parents: A trial without parents means never seeing the most important half of the software.
3. Keeping the old channel running in parallel: If announcements go out both in the group and in the app, parents see no reason to switch to the app.