What is OurNews?
OurNews is a platform for sharing stories from your school, like you would a newsletter or social media post.
OurNews began with a frustration with school newsletters.
School newsletters were hard to make. Reading them felt like you were time-travelling back to 2005. And yet: Every school had one.
Then, AI came along - and so did the risk. We’re quickly reaching a point of no return for student images on social media.
It has become increasingly clear that schools need a better way of delivering their stories to the world beyond their internal, login-gated system.
What if schools had a central place to curate all the wonderful stories being lived each day?
What if schools could share these stories publicly, without having to hand their data over to a platform like Meta?
What if the experience of gathering, writing and reading those stories was enjoyable?
We believe
01
That school stories should be easier to curate.
02
That school stories should be more enjoyable and accessible to consume.
03
That school stories should be shared on platforms that are not owned by tech billionaires or delivered via an algorithm.
What we’re setting out to solve.
01
School newsletters that take many hours to gather content for, write, design, and send.
02
School communications that are hard to read and inaccessible (like PDF newsletters).
03
Responding to the changing regulatory, cultural and risk landscape around the sharing of sensitive staff and student information online, especially on social media.
04
Responding to the changing ways that parents consume information and connect with their school community.
What makes OurNews unique.
Visibility controls
We set out to build controls that borrow from the cybersecurity playbook - reducing attack surface - to give schools a way to meaningfully reduce the risk of attack or abuse of sensitive information, without having to exclude important community connections from good-news stories (such as future prospective families and grandparents).
Storytelling culture
As our co-founder, Jacob Shultz from Bolsta Education, regularly speaks about: building a storytelling culture in a school community is an important component of creating belonging, connection and long-term stability. OurNews is built to be the central hub of this culture.
No integrations
We're acutely aware of 'platform-fatigue' in schools. We want to do all we can to reduce the interdependence of platforms, instead seeing ourselves as 'a layer on top' of your core ICT infrastructure. So much so that we have taken a no-integration policy: OurNews should always be able to perform its core function extremely well, without relying on integrations.
Who’s behind OurNews.
Jacob Shultz
Bolsta Education
Jacob has helped schools re-imagine their communication, marketing, enrolment and digital experience for almost a decade.
LinkedIn
Daniel Robson
Robson Studio
Dan has delivered brand-integrated design systems for companies like Sweat, Money.com.au and Grays.com.au. He leads UX for complex digital products across strategy, systems, and execution.
LinkedInFrom our co-founder, Jacob
I think schools should be able to connect to their wider community through storytelling, WITHOUT having to rely on mega-ultra-giga tech billionaires and their platforms to be a vessel for that public communication.
I want technology to be an enabler for connection and belonging.
I want schools to be able to find new ways to connect with families - “2030-ready” - not just what worked in 2005, or 2015, or 2021-pre-AI for that matter.
I want schools to feel like their communication channels are SUPPORTING a safe community, not threatening it.
I want families to take pride in their school. To revel in the good news, to cheer their community on.
Of course, achieving these things takes concerted effort. It also needs the right tools.
That’s why we’re building OurNews.
Simple enough to start using today - with a vision big enough to connect your community for years to come.
— Jacob Shultz, co-founder
Common Questions
Become a founding school.
Our Pilot Program is open for registration. We’re looking for a small number of founding schools who want to be a part of OurNews from day one.