Contactability
Contactability is the share of a district's families for whom at least one usable contact route exists — a valid phone number, a working email address, or an active app account. The term is not an industry standard. It was coined and popularised by ParentSquare, and it deserves a neutral definition.
| Captures | Does not capture |
|---|---|
| Whether a contact record exists at all | Whether the adult in that record is the right adult |
| Whether the number or address is syntactically valid | Whether the household reads the language you send in |
| Whether the channel has failed recently | Whether anyone opened, understood or acted on a message |
| Coverage across the roster as a percentage | Which named families are in the gap |
| Data completeness at a point in time | Consent state — a reachable number may be opted out |
| A trend you can manage against | Custody or guardian-of-record accuracy |
Credit where it is due, and why we are defining a competitor's term
ParentSquare is the largest platform in US K-12 school-home communication and a direct competitor of ours. Contactability is their coinage; they use it across their research and customer materials, and they did the useful work of turning a vague worry — "how much of our contact data is rubbish?" — into a number a superintendent can be shown.
We are defining it here for two reasons, and it is fairer to state both. The first is that there is no neutral definition of the term anywhere on the public web: searching it returns the vendor who invented it and pages that cite the vendor who invented it. The second is that we are in the glossary business and they are not, so this page will rank, and we would rather it were accurate than convenient.
The metric is a good one. It measures something real, it moves when you do the work, and it points at contact-data hygiene — which is the actual bottleneck in most districts, ahead of anything a platform does. Districts should track it whoever they buy from.
What the number does not tell you
Contactability measures the existence of a route. Communication requires four things to be true at once, and the metric covers one of them:
- A route exists — contactability measures this.
- It points at the right person. A contact record can be complete, valid and belong to a grandparent who moved out two years ago. Nothing in the metric can see this.
- The message is in a language they read. A perfectly valid email address in a household that reads Dari is contactable and not communicated with.
- Something happened as a result. Reachability is a precondition, not an outcome.
There is also a definitional soft spot worth naming: a district with sloppy data and a high contactability score is entirely possible, because a stale-but-syntactically-valid phone number counts as a route until it fails. Contactability computed from data completeness flatters you; contactability computed from actual delivery outcomes does not. Which one you are being shown is the first question to ask about any figure.
The related measure is true reach — the share of families a specific send actually reached on at least one channel. Contactability asks whether you could reach them; true reach asks whether you did. A district generally wants both, and the difference between them is the interesting part.
How to compute it yourself, without a vendor dashboard
You do not need a platform to measure this, and computing it independently is a good discipline because it does not depend on the definition your vendor chose. From a plain SIS export of guardians:
- Take every active student and the guardians linked to them.
- For each student, mark reachable if at least one linked guardian has a valid mobile, a valid email, or a valid voice number. Normalise phone numbers to E.164 first, and treat obviously invalid entries — 555 numbers, all-zeros, the school's own number — as absent.
- Contactability = reachable students divided by active students.
- Then compute the same figure restricted to guardians with a recorded language preference. The gap between those two numbers is usually the most useful thing on the page.
The cut that finds the real problem. Break the figure down by school, by grade band, and by home language. District-wide contactability of 96% often conceals one school at 82% and one language group at 71%, and those are the families your attendance and truancy processes are already struggling with. A single percentage hides exactly the pattern worth acting on.
Kastr publishes no contactability figure of its own and has no computed data-health metric to show you — the tooling for it does not exist in our product yet, and we would rather say that than display a hardcoded number. What we do carry on every contact point is a validation state and a consent state, held separately, which is the data model the calculation above needs.
Questions people actually ask
Who coined the term contactability?
ParentSquare, who use it across their research and customer materials. It is a vendor coinage rather than an industry standard, which is worth knowing when an RFP template asks for it — you are asking vendors to report on a metric one competitor defined.
How is contactability different from true reach?
Contactability measures whether a usable contact route exists. True reach measures whether a specific message actually arrived, per family, on at least one channel. The first is a data-quality measure; the second is an outcome measure. A family can be contactable on paper and not reached in practice.
Can a district measure contactability independently of its vendor?
Yes, from a plain SIS guardian export. Normalise phone numbers, discard obviously invalid entries, and count the share of active students with at least one guardian holding a valid mobile, email or voice number. Doing it yourself also fixes the definition, which vendors set differently.
Does high contactability mean families are engaged?
No. It means a route exists. It says nothing about whether the right adult is on the record, whether the message is in a language the household reads, or whether anyone acted on it. Treat it as a floor condition for engagement rather than a measure of it.
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