What is your social media communication strategy?

Has your school district developed a social media communication strategy? Perhaps you have intertwined it with your overall communications plan. But if not, here are a few easy steps you need to think about.

1. Know your audience. Who do you want to engage in the conversation and who is already having a conversation about you?
2. Define your goals. Perhaps it is as simple as wanting to share good stories about your school district or as complicated as changing public opinion about an upcoming referendum.
3. Choose your metrics. Will you determine your success by number of followers, by the quality of the engagement, or a mixture of both.
4. Be present where your audiences are. You may need to be on various platforms to reach the different audiences with which you wish to communicate.
5. Listen to what your audience is saying. Are there complaints that could be easily remedied (e.g., a lack of signage), or suggestions that could be acted upon (e.g., parents would like better communication on a certain topic).
6. Respond to their concerns. With the recent incident in Marinette, you may find that your parents are concerned about how your school district would handle a similar situation. If that's the case, what information can you share to relieve their anxiety.
7. Provide content that they value. Besides dates for upcoming events, sports scores, etc., what kind of information does your community value about your schools? Perhaps continued updates on a building project or how monies are being used from a recent referendum. Your community may also find it valuable to be provided information regarding school closures or lockdowns.
8. Measure the results. There are many different tools to measure the influence and reach of your social media efforts. Watch for a future post which will delve into this topic in more depth.

Why Emotional Attachment to Schools Matters

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup, recently released their third annual Soul of the Community report. This study was conducted over three years in 26 cities across the United States. The study is designed to find out what emotionally attaches people to their communities and makes them want to build a life there.

Consistent in virtually every city in the study there are just a few categories that create emotional bonds between people and their communities. The top four categories include the area's physical beauty, opportunities for socializing, a community's openness to all people, and education. What was surprising is that jobs, the economy and safety were not among these categories.

Attachment is important because the communities with the highest levels of attachment had the highest rates of gross domestic product growth. This discovery is important because it opens up new possibilities for leaders to make informed decisions regarding policy using concrete data about what generates community and economic benefits.

In the communities that are studied, residents always rate the quality of colleges and universitites higher than the quality of K-12 public schools. In addition, less than one-quarter of residents rate the quality of their communities' K-12 public schools highly. Nearly half rated their schools poorly and the views have become more negative since last year.

The study suggests that leaders have much to gain by improving the perceptions of the quality of K-12 education in their communities. Not only will this increase attachment overall, but a more positive view of public schools can also help attract families that will help raise the next generation of talent in the communities.

Putting this study into context
Standing alone, this study is interesting and provides some new insights about what is needed to grow the productivity of our communities and also our state. But what it also does is provide some much needed data to share with the leaders of our communities and state (aldermen, mayors, legislators, governor, etc.).

If education is one of the top categories that creates emotional bonds that attach people to our communities, it is important that all community and state leaders proceed carefully around communicating their ideas regarding education reform.

According to the study:

Gallup research proving the link between employee engagement in the workplace to business outcomes such as productivity, profitability, and employee retention helps to underscore why emotional attachment matters. Just as actively engaged employees are more productive and committed to the success of their organizations, highly attached residents are more likely to actively contribute to a community's growth.

Rather than label schools and be openly critical--federal, state and local leaders need to focus on working with educators to improve our schools through best practices as well as adequate funding. To not do so, according to the Soul of the Community study, will actually have them working against what they so very much want to do -- grow our state and our communities for economic success and to improve their ability to meet resident's needs.

Our role as leaders in public schools is to make sure we are communicating what is working in our schools. Both elected officials and our communities need to understand how K-12 public schools are meeting students' needs, exploring innovative ways to deliver curriculum and working to constantly improve.

Waiting for “Waiting for Superman”

A guest post by Joe Donovan, Donovan Group, LLC

In 2000, I was an aide to a U.S. Senator and played a very minor role drafting an important bill, the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. However, the bill I was working on went nowhere. A bipartisan group moved very quickly on another reauthorization bill, one with a catchier name: No Child Left Behind.

By the time the law was passed and signed, I was no longer working for that senator. Instead, I was working at our state’s Department of Education, where my work, along with that of my colleagues, would entail implementing NCLB.

I remember pouring through the text of the bill and being astonished by the new requirements that would be put on states and school districts as a result of it. I said to my wife, who does not work in education, “Everything will change as a result of this new law.”

My wife’s response was very interesting and I remember it as if it were yesterday. “’Everything is not going to change in education," she said. "Kids will still come to places called schools, learn from people called teachers and bring home backpacks filled with stuff called homework.”

My wife was right. To most people, schools did not fundamentally change as a result of NCLB, just as they did not fundamentally change as a result of other school reforms after the release of the watershed 1983 report on education, A Nation at Risk. In large part, education has not changed because people have not wanted it to change.

The reason for this is simple: the idea of what school “is” is so much a part of our culture that changing education is tantamount to changing people’s minds about what a school should be.

Now, here is the kicker… Those on the outside, like my wife, are okay with the fact that education has not changed fundamentally. The familiar is comforting. My wife knows the system, she knows what it means to be in fourth grade and she likes it when our kids are assigned to work with flashcards because that's what she did when she was a child.

Education leaders, those whose life’s mission is to innovate the system, see caring parents like my wife as maddening because they are not pushing for innovation. My wife and those like her are not against innovation or continuous improvement. However, “school reform,” in their minds, means tinkering around the edges of a system that already works.

The idea that “schools work” is central to how most people make sense of the US education system. We can see in our research that most people like their kids’ schools. Even people who do not have a strong connection to the schools in their community because they do not have school-aged children believe that their schools are generally doing a pretty good job.

However, my wife’s perceptions, and the perceptions of parents and community members around the country, are likely about to change.

“Waiting for Superman,” the new film from director and producer Davis Guggenheim, is a powerful one that will shake the public’s perceptions about America’s public schools. As with any good film, it presents some people as villains, others as saints and mostly points to ways in which the system should and could be fixed if only we, as educational leaders, were paying close enough attention to the problems.

The challenge for educators is to not be caught flatfooted. The ideas presented in the film are not new; they are things that education leaders have been working on for years. With this in mind, we in education should see the film as a blessing, one that will create new advocates for our efforts and a public that embraces change.

As educators, we must work to focus the public on efforts underway to improve the system and get people to understand that we need them to become engaged and stay engaged.

The most important thing we need to do is to ensure that we do not lose the faith of the public. Nothing will do that more quickly than speaking of these issues as if they are only theoretical or far off. The film will create a level of urgency with which we are not familiar in education, and we need to be ready to speak of the issues that we have been wrestling with for years. Most importantly, we must do so with the same passion as the scores of the newly converted, including, by the way, my wife.