Concord School District of New Hampshire

The Concord School District of New Hampshire is a public school district with 7 schools and a regional technical center. The district helps students develop a passion for learning, experience excellence, and believes that students have the ability to shape the future of their lives and communities.

The problem

With limited budgets, thousands of staff, and the education of their students on the line, school districts have historically relied on long-standing business processes over implementing new, more efficient technology. That’s why when the Concord School District reevaluated how it sent and signed documents for 20+ years, there was plenty of room for improvement. The District sent around 1,200 teacher contracts through the mail each year that needed to be signed and returned within a tight time frame. Even if the delivery was seamless and the teacher sent the document back the same day, it was not uncommon for contracts to get shuffled in with the rest of the mail the District received and not reach its intended destination in time. When the documents eventually reached the hands of administrators, they would then tediously transfer data from the paper docs into electronic records, all with the unavoidable risk of human error. The postage cost, paper waste, and time spent processing each contract regularly caused HR and other District departments to bottleneck. 

So, why didn’t the District reevaluate their process sooner? Because teacher contracts only represented one piece of the pie, they were also sending out thousands of critical documents to parents, students, and other employees. Attempting to on-board the staff of an entire school district, as well as the students and parents whom they served, to a new business tool risked wasting precious funds and bottlenecking their process even further if the tool wasn’t a fit. The Concord School District knew it needed a reliable and easy to use eSignature, document creation, and management tool in order to streamline and simplify its existing process. 

The solution

After thorough research, the District’s Director of Technology, Pamela McLeod, selected PandaDoc because of its consistent and transparent pricing, user-friendliness, data security, and bulk-send functionality. 

The education market, in general, is difficult for many SaaS vendors to serve, as it sits at a lower cost threshold and they often set budgets up to a year and a half in advance. What set PandaDoc apart for McLeod was its predictable, per-user pricing, so she knew exactly what the yearly cost would be to the District instead of running the risk of being billed according to usage. 

With the district-wide roll-out being led by a lean IT team of six, PandaDoc’s intuitiveness and usability was a major selling point. The team was able to introduce PandaDoc to the District with confidence and ease thanks to its simple UX, single-sign-on functionality, and standard of data security that met the criteria of New Hampshire’s strict requirements. 

Given budgetary constraints, McLeod knew that her District needed to be able to do a lot with a single tool. PandaDoc’s bulk-send functionality enabled District administrators to significantly decrease the time and effort required to send yearly teacher contracts and more regular documents to parents and students. They no longer needed to print, seal, and mail countless envelopes after implementing PandaDoc. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in March, the entire District transitioned nearly 5,000 students to remote learning with only a few days’ notice. However, student IEP and 504 meetings needed to continue on schedule and, while the Special Education teams could meet virtually, they could no longer sign documents in person. The district was able to add just a few more senders to their existing PandaDoc subscription to request signatures on IEPs from parents and case managers.

The result

Process bottlenecks are now a thing of the past with all employees efficiently functioning with PandaDoc. HR and other District departments benefit from time saved by replacing manual data entry, filing, and mailing with PandaDoc.

Teachers love the ability to sign their yearly contracts from their phones, especially knowing that their docs will never get lost in the mailroom again. The administrators who formerly received those contracts are now able to spend more time on meaningful work instead of pushing paper.

Previous employees of the Concord School District who experienced PandaDoc before becoming admins of neighboring districts have made business cases for PandaDoc to their new schools. With the sudden shift into remote learning due to the spread of COVID-19, many other districts have found themselves in the same position as Concord did before implementing PandaDoc.

Pandadoc has positively impacted the document workflow, students entering the realm of remote learning, and the lives of Concord School District employees.