Aussie operations success story CareMonkey becomes ‘Operoo’

CareMonkey, the cloud-based solution for online school forms, medical data and trip management, has relaunched as ‘Operoo’, emphasising its strengths as a school operations and productivity platform.

The company seeks to help schools eliminate operational inefficiencies so teachers can focus on student education.

According to the latest iteration of the OECD’s global Teaching and Learning International Survey, 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 cause.

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.

Operoo enables schools to automate, manage and track operational tasks in one cloud-based platform and 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 per cent.”

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.”

Founded in 2013 in Melbourne, 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.

The brand’s new logo and website can be seen at www.operoo.com