Enabling guardians to join Plurall and follow students’ progress

Guardians are central to the school journey. They follow students' progress, support learning at home, and help schools maintain stronger relationships with families.

For SOMOS Educação, which developed Plurall and also owned schools, reaching more guardians was a strategic move to support student retention at those schools. The company aimed to grow Plurall's guardian base by 20% and planned new materials and features for guardians to create more opportunities for B2C revenue.

User interviews, feedback analysis, and a review of the existing journey showed that students could register guardians, but many skipped the step, assumed their guardians would not be interested, or avoided sharing access to their grades. Guardians could also ask a teacher or school director for access.

Neither route was easy to scale. Guardians depended on a student taking action or on school staff adding them individually. The barrier was not just the registration form; it was how access began.

Student behavior was only part of the problem. Through interviews, feedback analysis, and workshops with school directors and internal stakeholders, we learned that many schools did not consistently introduce guardians to Plurall during onboarding. Some guardians did not even know the platform existed.

We also revisited how teachers and directors brought guardians into the product. When a guardian asked the school for access, staff had to add them one by one. We needed to address both the awareness gap and the effort required to invite families at scale.

A self-service route needed to work for guardians with different levels of technical confidence. Students had to be able to find the connection information in their own accounts, while guardians needed a secure way to connect to the correct student from a different account or device.

We also needed to make school-assisted invitations simpler without conflicting with school policies or the platform's technical limits. Guardians should not have to rely on one route alone.

Research shifted the question from how to improve student invitations to how guardians could join on their own and how schools could invite them at scale. We ran workshops with stakeholders and the cross-functional team so each group could share its knowledge of families, schools, the business, and the platform.

The sessions produced several approaches. One suggestion from the technical team stood out: we might be able to use something already in the ecosystem to connect guardians with students, avoiding a much larger build.

Following the technical team's idea, we found that every student already had a unique identification code in their account. It was underused, but could securely connect a guardian and student without requiring the student to register the guardian.

We worked with Engineering and stakeholders to adapt the code for registration, making it shorter, easier for students to find and share, and simpler for guardians to enter. Guardians could then create their own accounts and connect with students without waiting for an invitation.

The solution used an existing part of the ecosystem rather than introducing an entirely new verification system. That reduced technical complexity while removing the journey's primary dependency.

We tested the journey remotely with more than 200 participants through Maze. The study helped us identify where guardians hesitated, misunderstood instructions, or struggled to enter and validate the student code.

We also checked the handoff between accounts and devices: whether students could find the code, guardians could use it from their own account, and the connection reached the right student. We used what we learned to simplify the language and clarify steps on both sides of the journey.

Guardians could create their own accounts and use the adapted student code to connect with the right student. Clear instructions helped them complete the flow without relying on someone else to register them.

Teachers and directors could upload a list of guardians and send invitations in bulk instead of adding them one by one. Families now had two routes: join independently or receive an invitation from their school.

I took part in initiatives with schools to explain why guardian participation mattered and how staff could share the new routes with families. We also worked with Marketing on social media and educational content that explained why guardians should join Plurall and how to register.

Guardian registrations increased 96% compared with the same period the previous year. More than 180,000 guardians registered during the off-peak season.

Over its first three months, the new journey recorded 33% more guardian registrations than the previous version. These registration gains supported Plurall's goal of expanding the guardian base and created a stronger foundation for family engagement.

The growth opened a separate project focused on what happened after guardians joined: how to improve retention and engagement, and how to offer relevant materials and features to the new families coming into Plurall.

Improving the registration form alone would not have solved the problem. Students could miss or avoid invitations, school staff had to add guardians individually, and some families did not know Plurall existed.

The student code gave guardians an independent route, while bulk invitations and school outreach made the assisted route easier to use and discover. Connecting these parts of the journey gave more families a practical way into Plurall.