Founding Partner
The Donovan Group
The start of the new school year represents an excellent time to consider how school district leaders can foster engagement with their district communities. To do this, we must consider how our schools continually evolve over the years and how our community members wish to engage in our schools’ work. This begins with acknowledging that school and district communication strategies that were effective in the past may be less effective now.
It often helps to start this work by considering your district’s current communications and determining what is and is not working. This effort begins by asking and answering a district leader’s most important question about school communications: what is success?
Collaborate with your administrative team under the direction of your district’s communications pro (if you have one) to define communications success in your district by reflecting on the following: “Imagine that our district does an amazing job of engaging our entire school district community this year through effective communication. What evidence will we cite as proof of this success?”
This question is important for several reasons. First, people within a school district may disagree about what constitutes great communication. For example, a school board member who is connected to a specific group of constituents may have a different view of effective communication than an administrator who feels more accountable to the entire district community.
Working together as an administrative team with the school board and defining success enables creating shared goals related to communication. Remember that effective definitions of success must be specific. Toward that end, we always suggest establishing specific, tangible items as proof of success. After determining what constitutes success in your school district, you should answer three other questions whose answers form the basis of a communications plan.
After defining success, determine who you need to communication with to achieve that success. In this regard, remember that if we say we want to communicate with “everyone” in a school district community, we are really just giving ourselves permission to communicate with no one. Instead, identify specific audiences, remembering to include the breadth of the school district community.
In this, it often helps to think of those to whom we are closest—including school board members, staff members, and parents of students currently enrolled in our schools—as well as those who are the most distant. The latter group may include elderly residents, younger residents, and those who typically do not have children enrolled in schools. While these groups are generally more difficult to reach, they are still important members of the district community.
After defining what constitutes success in your district and identifying the audiences you must reach to achieve that success, consider the proactive messages you want all your audiences to know and feel about their district. Consider this: you know about all the great things that happen in your district every day. To many community members, however, especially those who do not have children in school and have not been in the district for years, the schools are black boxes. Effective communication includes engaging those with little knowledge of our schools.
Creating these messages is frequently the most difficult part of communications planning yet often the most important as well. Note that in my earlier remark on messages, I indicated that messages are what we want all our audiences to know and feel about their district. It is crucial to remember that how people feel about their schools is critically important. In education, we tend to focus too much on the head and not enough on the heart.
The final question is often the most fun to answer: how will we deliver our messages to our audiences to achieve the success we have outlined? In other words, what tools will we use to communicate?
This is often the easiest question, because it tends to be the one that school district leaders want to answer first. For example, district leaders who know they need to ramp up their communications efforts often point to the tactic of doing more on social media. While this may be the case, we must remember that social media and other communication efforts are only tools of engagement. They are not an end in themselves.
After defining what effective school communication looks like (i.e., what represents success in our school communications efforts), which audiences must be engaged, which messages must be communicated to achieve that success, and which tools we will use to communicate our messages, we simply create a weekly communications calendar to do the work. Creating such a communication plan is not necessarily easy, but the steps are simple. If your school or district does not have a communications plan or clear ideas about how to communicate effectively this year, the key is to start now.
If your district does have a good plan, I challenge you to take your communications efforts to the next level by asking yourself these questions: What can be done to create a better culture of communication in our district? What can be done to promote greater transparency and greater engagement with our more difficult-to-reach audiences? How can we create higher levels of two-way communication in our district? As in the education of our students, we must continually raise the bar in our school communications.
With that, best wishes for a great school year!
Joe Donovan is the founding partner of the Donovan Group, an award-winning school district communication, marketing, and public relations firm that focuses exclusively on public education. The Donovan Group provides 24/7 crisis communications services to MASA members free of charge. Learn more at www.mnasa.org/crisis-communication-services.
