CareMonkey, the world’s fastest growing cloud-based solution for online school forms, has relaunched as Operoo to be a full and robust school operations and productivity platform.
The new brand and image were announced with a new mission statement, the company said. The Operoo mission is, “To help schools eliminate operational inefficiencies, so that every dollar and every minute possible is focused on student education.”
“The ‘Oper’ part of Operoo is short for ‘operations’, while the ‘roo’ is a reminder of our Australian origins,” said Troy Westley, CEO and CoFounder in the announcement. “When we began CareMonkey in 2013, the product was all about care – hence the name. The focus was on collecting child medical and emergency information from parents, then making that data securely available to schools and supervisors at other organizations with a duty-of-care.”
Now, with success and increased global demand, the company is hopping, and a better name and image were in order. Since 2019, the company said its US and UK client bases have grown by more than 1100% and 260% respectively.
The growth is the result of filling what Operoo President, Peter Bencivenga, called, “a huge gap in the education technology market, which sat between school administration systems and single use case products; like parent communication or payment apps.”
That gap, Bencivenga says, widened to a chasm during the Covid-19 pandemic. ”Not only did the number of operational tasks schools had to manage soar, they simply had to be managed digitally in order to adhere to social distancing requirements and government health guidelines. Paper-based and human-reliant ways of working just weren’t an option.”
CEO Westley, told ETC exclusively, “One of the bits of feedback we’re having more and more is that both schools and parents are sick of trying to wrangle too many apps. There’s one app for the school newsletter, another for dedicated parent communications, something else for field trips, and so on. In 2020, it’s not always the case that schools are drowning in mountains of paperwork — though many still are. Increasingly, the challenge lies in the fact that they’ve approached digitizing recurring operational tasks in an ad-hoc manner.”
The new Operoo enables schools to automate, manage and track operational tasks in one cloud-based platform. Operoo offers digital workflows for a range of routine school processes – which are often manual, disconnected and paper-based – including distributing and collecting school forms, mobile communications, parental consent, payments, medical and emergency information, staff approvals, incident reporting, activity and group management, paperless school trips and more, according to the release.
“Our rapidly expanding customer base in the US has driven a plethora of workflow automation requirements that far exceeded CareMonkey’s original focus of medical information,” Westley said.
Founded in 2013 in Melbourne, Australia, CareMonkey won numerous awards, including two global start-up competitions in 2015: Talent Unleashed, presented by Sir Richard Branson, and Slush, where the company won a €650,000 investment, which the company founders declined. Today, Operoo has offices in the US, UK and Australia serving thousands of customers globally.
