News & Updates

Facilitron’s new facility management platform recently earned an “outstanding” rating from EdTech Roundup in a review released last week. Since 2013, EdTech Roundup has provided a roundup of news from the world of education technology as well as reviews, lesson plans, application suggestions and professional development ideas.

Facilitron is a resource that supports schools in the management of their facilities. Their cloud-based platform and service enables school districts, colleges, and municipalities to manage, showcase, and monetize their facility availability and utilization while also improving the customer experience for community renters.

The Facilitron implementation team will help you create your account and configure it with all your schools and buildings, rates, requirements, services, equipment, as well as setup each facility’s general availability and existing schedules.

In short, their team provides everything you need to list, rent, and manage your facilities. Before jumping into the review, here’s an introductory video from the Facilitron team that provides an overview on the services they provide.

In my own K-12 experience, many schools still rely heavily on paper forms and in-person requests for renting and reserving school spaces. This process is often a tedious one, particularly in terms of managing payments, insurance policies for the use of the space, schedules, and so on.

Facilitron provides a much needed service for digitizing these processes, and it does so with no out-of-pocket expenses for the school or district. Instead, much like AirBnb, Facilitron will take a small portion of the rental fees when schools rent out spaces to community members and organizations.

In return, schools get their entire listing, rental, and management processes digitized. The Facilitron team takes care of everything, including documenting your spaces, digitizing insurance policies, and even creating 360 degree photos and drone shots of the facilities you have to rent.

Once the implementation team has set up your school or district in their system, administrators will be able to begin managing schedules and reservations. The Facilitron team also inputs all of your existing internal and external reservations into the system, to make the transition process even easier. After logging in, you’ll see see your home dashboard, where you can see any pending requests, upcoming events, and a breakdown of all reservations.

Administrators also have access to historical data and analytics, which can provide insight into how spaces are (and are not) being used. This can be incredibly beneficial for making decisions in terms of when spaces should be open for community use, what departments are benefiting from certain spaces, and so on.

On the community side, it’s as easy as searching for the type of space you’re looking for, and requesting a reservation. Community members will be able to see a list of all available spaces in their area that meet their criteria. They can filter those searches by capacity, location, and so on. Each listing contains detailed specifics on parking, accessibility, restrooms, and anything else someone might need to know when reserving the space. Plus, you’ll be able to complete any paperwork or waivers online to book the space provided the school district has approved your rental.

Overall, Facilitron provides a much needed service at absolutely no cost to schools and districts. For those managing school and district facilities, especially for those who are still using paper forms and processes, I absolutely recommend considering a demo from the Facilitron team. You can also check out the case studies that Facilitron has documented from their current implementations to get a better idea of how schools, districts, and colleges are using Facilitron to digitize their facilities management processes.