Education technology provider repositions to meet surging demand to streamline and automate operational school tasks and processes in K – 12 sector
CareMonkey – the world’s fastest growing cloud-based solution for online school forms, medical data and trip management – has relaunched as ‘Operoo’. The relaunch will see the company trade as Operoo, with its software – rebranded under the same name, emphasizing its power as a School Operations and Productivity Platform.
The brand’s new logo and website were unveiled at www.operoo.com, along with a simple mission statement: To help schools eliminate operational inefficiencies, so that every dollar and every minute possible is focused on student education.
Operoo CEO and CoFounder, Troy Westley, said the new name reflected how the company had evolved to meet growing demand throughout the global K – 12 education sector for solutions that could streamline a broad range of day-to-day school operations.
“The ‘Oper’ part of Operoo is short for ‘operations’, while the ‘roo’ is a reminder of our Australian origins – even though we’re now truly an international company with offices in the USA, UK and Australia,” said Westley. “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.
“Since then, our product has grown and matured. We’ve listened to what our customers want and how they use the product. The feedback was clear: The daily operational and administrative demand placed on schools and their staff is growing fast. As a result, schools are looking for solutions to reduce the resources required to complete those recurring tasks so that they can focus on what really matters; educating young people. Operoo empowers schools to achieve that goal.”
The renewed focus has seen the company grow rapidly, expanding its US and UK client bases by more than 1100% and 260% respectively since early 2019.
Operoo President, Peter Bencivenga, said: “For a long time, there’s been 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.
“While we had already been working to address this need leading up to the launch of Operoo, that gap became glaringly obvious when COVID-19 started impacting the global education sector. 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. Operoo’s School Operations and Productivity Platform bridges that gap.”
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.
Operoo client and Principal at New York City’s Staten Island Technical High School, Mark Erlenwein, commented: “We started working with CareMonkey, now Operoo, because we were spending too much time and money manually managing routine paper processes. We’ve now digitized and automated over 30 different workflows – from emergency contact cards and consent forms, to reimbursement and leave requests – reducing the manpower required to perform them by 75 percent.”
The latest iteration of the OECD’s global Teaching and Learning International Survey found that educators in the developed world are working longer hours than ever before. An increasing amount of time spent on non-teaching tasks was cited as a key contributor to that trend, with ‘skyrocketing administrative requirements’ a primary culprit. In fact, 91 percent of the 18,000 educators who contributed to the University of Sydney’s 2018 study, Understanding Work in Schools, reported experiencing a level of administrative demand so high it was a ‘hindrance’ to their job.
Founded in 2013 from 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. Company CoFounders, Troy Westley (CEO) and Martin Howell (CTO), declined the offer in favor of growing the business organically.
In 2019, a consortium led by Peter Bencivenga, New Ground Ventures and ReThink Education, approached and invested in CareMonkey, with Bencivenga becoming CareMonkey’s President.
Today, Operoo has offices in the US, UK and Australia serving thousands of customers from every major continent around the world. The company’s School Productivity and Operations Platform will be generally available under the Operoo name from Friday 14th August 2020.
About Operoo
Operoo is a School Operations and Productivity Platform. Operoo is helping thousands of schools and other organizations around the world to eliminate slow, expensive and repetitive paper-based tasks. Operoo empowers schools to save time and resources by automating operational tasks and workflows, increasing staff productivity, parental engagement and student participation.
Streamline and digitize any school process, drastically reducing the associated costs: From permission forms, payments, and school trips; to medical information and emergency contacts, incident reporting, staff agreements, student onboarding and more. And, effectively communicate with staff, parents and your whole school community in over 100 languages with Operoo’s multi-language capability.
With Operoo, ensure every dollar and every minute possible is focused on students, rather than wasting resources on operational inefficiencies. For more information, visit www.operoo.com
About Troy Westley, Operoo CEO (CareMonkey CoFounder)
Troy Westley is an Australian entrepreneur, CoFounder and CEO of CareMonkey – the award-winning platform for automating consent forms, medical records, field trips, staff forms, payments, incident reporting and group messaging. Founded in 2013, CareMonkey is used by schools and school districts, sports, scouts, clubs, camps, businesses, youth groups, the disability sector and other groups with a duty-of-care.
Troy has been a pioneer in the Australian IT industry, starting the Pacific Islands region for Oracle in his twenties. In his thirties he was the first employee and VP of Salesforce.com in Asia Pacific before joining Google. In his forties, he decided to have a “red hot go” at inventing something himself and created the award-winning CareMonkey company.
A father to seven children, Troy holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Computing) from Monash University, and completed the Venture Capital Executive Program at the University of California’s Haas School of Business in 2014.
www.linkedin.com/in/troywestley/
About Peter Bencivenga, Operoo President
Peter Bencivenga has spent his entire career in education, working at the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) as Technology Coordinator from 1993 – 2009, after graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology with a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing (1992).
While working for the NYCDOE, Peter completed a Master’s degree at the New York Institute of Technology before Co-Founding Datacation in 2007 – a software platform delivering tools to help education professionals and institutions improve learning outcomes by analyzing complex district, school, teacher and student data.
Peter left the NYCDOE in 2009, taking-up a full-time position at CaseNEX, a DataCation company, as its President and COO. Rebranding as IO Education in 2016, Peter assumed the role of Chief Academic Officer until the company was acquired by Illuminate Education in late 2018. Peter joined CareMonkey, an award-winning platform for digitizing and automating school forms and workflows, as President in February 2019.
www.linkedin.com/in/peter-bencivenga-5499a02/
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