IHT is excited to welcome back all of our teachers, administrators and students as school gets underway. It’s an exciting time of the year for everyone. We are especially looking forward to continuing to reinvent the physical education experience for our customers this coming year and continue to work toward our mission to empower students, educators and any individual seeking to self-manage their health through the use of technology. IHT doesn’t just make the most robust fitness and assessment solution in education. We elevate and transform schools.
This, at the very core, has been the cornerstone of our organization and what drives us to continue to offer solutions both in and out of the classroom that revolutionize an individual’s well-being. With this in mind, to better serve our customers and provide resources, support and educational tools to help them do their job the best when it matters most, we spent our summer working on 5 BIG projects that will help you shine this fall:
- Improving Our Software for Each Customer Group
We’ve made some focused and purposeful technology enhancements for each of our customer groups:
- K-12 Education
- Higher Education
- Distance Learning
- State Associations
As our organization has evolved over the last four years, the types of customers we work with have expanded and the needs of each one has changed, naturally. Along with greater market penetration, these new needs bring new challenges and defining the types of customers had to be made a top priority. No customer is exactly as the other, nor is there a one-size-fits-all solution.
- New Website
Serving our customer types in targeted ways that enhance their efforts best comes in delivering tailored solutions for each one through robust software and hardware technology and relative messaging, all displayed cleanly and efficiently where our customers get it first – online. This has been made evident in our new website through the prominence of customer-focused content, messaging and calls-to-action.
The Spirit System
The Spirit System is the gold standard in fitness technology that encompasses first-rate hardware, robust software management and customized professional development, and connects this data to a student’s performance physically in the gym and academically in the classroom. Since this area of our business has so many moving parts, we needed a way to present it cleanly on our website. To do so, we created a visual graphic that breaks down the Spirit System into easily digestible chunks of information that links visitors to corresponding pages for each group.
Becoming a Resource
In addition to offering cutting edge hardware technology and fully-integrated software, we’ve made a heavy investment in building an online resource hub for students, teachers, parents and the like. This hub (Blog + Buzz) houses all-original fitness education content, training and customer videos, step-by-step user guides and even provides educators resources for finding, applying and receiving grants from the federal government. Surrounding all this support is our enhanced new professional development opportunities and training to care for our customers in every way possible, today and every step of the way.
- IHT | The Spirit Challenge
Along with our newfound technology comes the opportunity to expand our reach and offer our world-class service and training to markets outside of the classroom while helping provide innovations in sports technology to students across the nation. At the core of this partnership lives The Spirit Challenge – a semester-long fitness challenge for students and teachers. These challenges drive students to participate in active lifestyles through friendly competition incentivized by prizes for the student, teacher and school.
- Enhanced Dashboard
One of the most beneficial improvements this summer came to the Spirit System – our cloud-based customer portal where users can monitor and track student participation, activity and performance when using IHT hardware. Improvements include over twenty new interactive training videos, refined product/software guides and most importantly, reporting enhancements that now connect all data in one place daily-to-yearly, from individual to state-wide levels. Some of our new enhancements include automated student roster management capabilities that allow districts to sync seamlessly with their district servers, districtwide Fitnessgram reports, and of course correlate physical activity and physical education to improved academic performance and readiness to learn.
- Growing Our Team
Our people are our greatest asset. Although it’s a commonly used expression, it couldn’t be more accurate and more defining of how we feel each and every day. The successes we’ve had in the last four years have been wholly based on the success of each one of our team members. This summer, we were faced with an opportunity to expand our core team with professionals of their individual crafts. As we focused in on robust training and professional development offerings, a need for more tenured people became evident. Enter Bev Brown and Lois M. Mauch – two of the nation’s leading education trainers both highly regarded as customer-centric individuals. Dawn Marie Baletka, our new Director of Grant Services, will aid our customers in finding, applying for and managing grants from the federal government. And lastly, Daniel Alvarez joined IHT as Director of Marketing where he focuses his time and efforts on holistic marketing, lead generation and was the catalyst behind our web revamp.
Looking Forward to a Great Year Ahead
As a company, we thought big in envisioning how to best serve our customers and worked hard to help you start the school year off with great success. We hope you enjoy a more vibrant, customer-focused, professional and ready-for-whatever company. We discovered new growth opportunities and built a plan to achieve that growth, we re-identified our customer base, we expanded our offerings, and we forged new relationships with people. We are focused on physical education’s greatest needs: to correlate individual student fitness to academic performance, streamline classroom management, connect all stakeholders, and empower students to self-manage their health and well-being, for life. Whether that means offering stellar customer service at all times or integrating a classroom solution that fundamentally changes the way students perform physically and academically, we are committed to the individual. And if nothing else, if we can’t positively impact all of our children across the nation, then we’d be thrilled to know that we favorably changed the life of one.
