Welcoming visitors to your campus is an important part of the school day. Parents may be coming to enjoy lunch with their children, a vendor stopping by for a service call, or even future families getting a tour of the school. The different possibilities of who wants to be on campus also highlight the importance of having reliable and effective visitor management practices. In this post, you’ll learn why a visitor management system is a much more practical solution for your school than a sign-in sheet.
Know Who Is On Your Campus
The main purpose of a sign-in sheet is to know who is on your campus. When we talk with schools and districts about the effectiveness of this method, we hear a few common responses.
- “The visitor signed in but only used their first name or a nickname.”
- “We couldn’t read the handwriting of most people.”
- “We don’t have a way to check if the info is correct.”
Those responses can be troubling and expose a few shortcomings of using a sign-in sheet for your visitor management. When a visitor wants to enter campus, best school safety practices recommend you accurately collect the necessary information.
A visitor management system can quickly collect visitors’ information by scanning their license or ID. This takes just seconds and ensures that you’re receiving accurate information.
In addition to scanning IDs, you can require visitors to take a picture of themselves. This photo will be part of your activities report and helpful in the future should you need to identify and find a visitor on campus.
Safety of Students and Staff
A major downfall of the sign-in sheet is that there aren’t safety checks automatically performed. How would you check that a visitor has custody to sign out or visit a student? What if the individual is a known convicted sex offender? Some districts may require a visitor to share their license or ID to look up the visitor manually, but this can take minutes and require you to pay for access to certain databases.
With a visitor management system like iVisitor Management, when a visitor scans their license or ID, their full name, date of birth, and state of residence will be cross-checked against the national sex offender database and your own custom-banned or monitored individual database. These safety checks are included at no additional cost and happen instantly. If a visitor’s info matches a record, you and your team will be notified to take the necessary steps.
Accurate Data When You Need It
In an emergency, you may need to get a count on all visitors currently on campus. Looking through a sign-in sheet probably wouldn’t give you the needed data. You would need all visitors to complete the form, have legible handwriting, and ensure they signed out for it to be useful. On top of that, you would need to go through all the entries quickly.
Visitor management systems do all of this work for you. You can easily create a report for all activities when a visitor completes their check-in. With a system like iVisitor Management, you can create a report of all visitors on campus with just a few clicks. Your team will quickly have the data they need to respond more efficiently in an emergency.
iVisitor Management for Your Schools
iVisitor Management provides districts around the country with reliable, easy-to-use visitor management systems that simplify the visitor check-in process. Contact us today to learn about other benefits of using iVisitor Management, like student attendance tracking and SIS integrations.