Why internal comms is breaking down in K-12 — and what districts can do about it.

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Transcript

Monica McClellan: All right, we'll go ahead and get started. We're about 2-3 minutes after. Welcome. So today's webinar is The Hidden Cost of Fragmented Staff Communication, Why Internal Communication is Breaking Down in K-12 and What to Do About It.

Long-winded title.

Monica McClellan: But let me give you some context on why we decided to cover a webinar on this specific topic. So, you guys probably know this, but we talk to hundreds, thousands of districts across the U.S. every single

Monica McClellan: year. And one of the biggest pieces of wants or needs that we continued to hear was, we need an internet. We want an intranet, can you please have an internet product? In fact, actually, that was the first thing I learned when I joined Apptegy, of like, hey, the biggest thing is an internet.

Monica McClellan: People are really excited about it. And so… so you guys know, anytime we're about to build a new product at Apptegy, we go through something called a discovery phase. And so, what we want to do during that discovery phase is to understand what the client pain points are.

Monica McClellan: what do current solutions look like? We talked to a ton of clients in districts to understand, okay, what is it that they want us to solve? What could a potential product solution look like? And so when we dug into this specific, we want an internet, like, call-out that we kept hearing over and over again.

Monica McClellan: we actually realized that a simple internet wasn't gonna solve the overarching problem, which, you guys have guessed it, it's the staff-to-staff communication piece. So…

Monica McClellan: In today's session, we're going to cover why internal communication is so hard, right? So, we have a couple polls throughout this webinar, so, please, please participate, engage, we love to hear from you all, and we want to hear from you on what you're seeing and hearing as far as, like, why internal communication is hard for you. Assuming if you're joining this, like, this is a pain point that you guys are…

Monica McClellan: Experiencing within your district.

Monica McClellan: We're gonna talk about, kind of, the three hierarchy levels of communication within your district, so sharing, communication, engagement. We're gonna dive into that and what that actually means.

Monica McClellan: And then, of course, diving into what it's actually costing you, so the hidden cost. So, not the, like, item on the P&L, but actually what it's costing you, internally, and what we're hearing from districts on what it's costing them.

Monica McClellan: And then we're gonna wrap up with a framework, so 3 questions you can bring back to your district, your team, that kind of diagnose what the communication gaps can be like. So this will get you thinking, so whether you know or you don't know, or you think you know, this kind of framework will give you just, like, some… some varying gaps or ways to think through

Monica McClellan: what this looks like at your current district. And then, of course, we'll have a live Q&A, so please bring questions, please ask them. In fact, please bring them throughout the presentation. Please engage.

I find… I do a ton of webinars, and I find the more engagement from here, the more questions you guys answer, the more, A, fun, and then B, you'll learn.

Monica McClellan: So there is a Q&A feature, in Zoom, so you should find it, it's in that bar. You should be able to click into that. If you're not familiar or don't know, the chat is totally fine, too. We have Barrett and Mitch here, who are going to be answering questions as well, so feel free to throw them in there, and we'll…

Monica McClellan: We'll answer them as we go throughout, and then have that Q&A session at the end.

Monica McClellan: Before we dive in, let's do some intros. So please, would love to hear from you all. In the chat, drop your role, where you're joining from today, we want to hear from you. And then, while you're doing that, quick intro.

So, I am Monica McClellan.

Monica McClellan: I'm a product marketing here at Apptegy. My main role here is to help launch products, into the ether, so to you guys, to make them available, and then also help, internal teams

Monica McClellan: prepare, and get ready for launches, help support them, and then keep the products in the market. And then we have Mitch here, and I'll let him introduce… oh, and sorry, I'm in Fairfax, Virginia, so that's in Northern Virginia, right outside Washington, D.C. And then I'll let Mitch do a quick intro on him.

Mitchell Wilston: Hey everybody, I'm Mitch Wilston, I'm a product manager. If you're not familiar with that role, I am the person that gets to talk to, our customers and figure out what are the pain points, what are you looking to solve.

Mitchell Wilston: And then, if I hear a bunch of the same problems, I get to work with our designers and our engineers and come up with solutions for that. Super fun, and I'm really excited to go through this and talk to y'all about the problems that you're seeing, and how I think we're positioned to help solve those.

Mitchell Wilston: And I am in Asheville, New York. I just moved. I'm set up on a folding table right now, and yeah, very excited to be here.

Monica McClellan: Cool, and then Barrett, do you want to give a quick intro on yourself? Barrett is the OG, and he's, everything after G, but… and Barrett, you want to give a quick intro?

Barrett Goodwin: Yeah, hi everybody. I'm Barrett Goodwin, I'm a part of our marketing operations team, so helping support all of our wonderful webinars that we do, and Monica will mention that we've got some more webinars on this particular topic coming up.

Barrett Goodwin: Very soon, but just so happy that you're here for this one.

Monica McClellan: Cool.

Monica McClellan: And then I'm pulling up the chat, looks like we have people from Minnesota, Texas, a couple people from Texas, Oregon, Ohio, South Carolina, love it.

Monica McClellan: Hi, Linda.

Monica McClellan: Gina, am I still echoing? I hear you say I'm echoing really bad. Okay, I want to make sure. Illinois is welcome.

Monica McClellan: Okay, awesome, let's jump in. So I mentioned poll. I'm going to launch a poll within Zoom, so it should pop up right on your screen. If you guys can't see it, let me know.

I gotta move some things out of the way.

Monica McClellan: it should pop up. All you have to do is answer… there's two questions. So, the first question, is how, can you measure whether your staff actually sees what you send?

Monica McClellan: Wait, sorry, this is the wrong poll. Hold on.

Monica McClellan: There we go. Okay. Sorry, sorry.

Monica McClellan: Alright, let me see if you guys, can see that. So, two questions we're asking to begin with is, one, what makes internal communication hardest within your district? So, we want to hear from you. It's multiple choice, so think through that.

It could be some, all, it could be other, maybe none of them apply, but we really want to understand,

Monica McClellan: what's your reality within your district? And then two, when you send a staff update, this one's a little bit more specific, are you confident it lands? And when we say lands, it means, like, staff's read it, you're confident they read it, they've digested it, and then maybe there's an action related to it that, they need to take. And so, when we say lands, what does that look like?

Monica McClellan: And is that something you're seeing within your district? So, I'm gonna give you guys a couple minutes to respond. We've got a lot of participants already, which is great, and then we'll kind of go through the results.

Monica McClellan: Okay, we're about 75%. You guys are fast, my goodness, that's great, though.

Monica McClellan: Okay.

Monica McClellan: I think we got most participants here, so I'm gonna end the poll, and then let me see if I can share results.

Monica McClellan: Sorry, it keeps getting hidden here. Okay.

Monica McClellan: Let's talk through these a little bit. So that first question, what makes internal communication hardest? It looks like the majority of you all interned staff don't engage with what we send. So that's very interesting, I want to talk a little bit more about that.

Monica McClellan: And then 34%, the second one, was honestly all of the above. So there's just too many channels, there's no way to actually see who saw the message, not enough time or capacity to manage it all. So that's really good to see.

Monica McClellan: Obviously, and I feel like that would probably be most representative here, since, if you guys are joining, you obviously have, that issue. And then when you send a staff update, are you confident it lands?

Monica McClellan: And 81% of you said sometimes depend on the message. And so I think that is very depictive, like you mentioned, like, if it's something that's requiring an action, obviously it… it depends on what that is, or if it's just, like, a quick, you know, hey, we made an update to the quick handbook, the employee handbook, here, check it out.

Monica McClellan: Very good. Well, thank you guys for indulging on us, it's super helpful. So, let's dive into this kind of first piece when we're, evaluating communication, what this looks like. So, let's talk about the three hierarchy, if you will.

Monica McClellan: So the first,

Monica McClellan: I would say, like, step. When we talked to and did our discovery phase, like I mentioned, when we talked to districts, we found that most districts sit in this nice sharing bucket. And so what sharing means is exactly how it sounds, is like you've sent it. So, you pushed out the email, you posted the PDF, you dropped the announcement in a drive, or whatever it may be.

Monica McClellan: And then you basically chucked that off the list.

Monica McClellan: it's done, let's move on. So most districts

Monica McClellan: fall in that bucket. Then there's a level above that, which is communication, and that's basically saying you sent it, and you know the staff received it. So you actually verify the message arrived, whether through read receipts, confirmed delivery, you know John Smith.

Monica McClellan: that the principal at this school saw this message, and that could be maybe through email read receipts, or depending on the system that you're using, basically has that confirmed. You don't know if they understood it, you don't know if they had digested it, they could have, like, briefly scanned the email, but you know that they did

Monica McClellan: In fact, it got delivered and they received it. And so, fewer districts fall in this bucket.

Monica McClellan: When it comes to communication, there's still a lot of systems out there that can do this, but maybe your district isn't using

Monica McClellan: Now, this is where we found pretty much no districts are in, and I think you guys also said this in the poll, right? About 45% of you, is you don't see the engagement piece, you don't know if they actually acted on it. So, did staff respond? Did they comment?

Did they ask questions? Did they internalize it? Did they change behavior because of this?

Monica McClellan: And this is where communication actually drives something to happen. This is where the impact lives, right? So here's an example. So when you send…

Monica McClellan: the staff handbook update, like, for an upcoming meeting. Where did you stop? Did you just post it in the internet, maybe send an email, or did you just post it, hoping people check there and see it? Most people, what we found is districts will post the resources in a Google Drive or SharePoint or something, and maybe send, like, a text or some sort of email saying, hey, this has been updated.

Monica McClellan: But then you have no idea if that actually

Monica McClellan: was… if people actually saw that communication, you have no idea if they opened the handbook and actually read it. You don't know if they had any follow-up questions, or worse.

Monica McClellan: maybe they did all of those things. Maybe the staff member opened up the email, opened up the staff handbook, read it, and then had follow-up questions. And so you're getting email responses with the same question from different staff all across the district, or within a building or a school, and then you're having to then take the time

Monica McClellan: to respond to those folks in different channels. Maybe you're passing through the hall, maybe it's through a text, maybe it's through the email chain, versus if you have a place where you can easily engage with people all in one place, you're posting that information, and they can engage with that information in that place, and if someone's asking a question, you know they've digested it, you know they saw it, and then hopefully they're taking that action, and if there's a follow-up question, then everyone within that

Monica McClellan: group can then see the answer to that question. So we'll talk a little bit more about this, because I know this is kind of a little bit of a hypothetical situation.

Monica McClellan: But what we want to get districts to is to this engagement and hierarchy level, because that's where we're seeing the impact, that's where we're seeing staff adoption, engagement, that's where we're seeing people actually see results. And so…

Monica McClellan: Really exciting, and then we're gonna use this framework through the rest of the session, because once you see internal comms through this kind of lens, the rest of it makes sense

Monica McClellan: Including the fragmentation piece. So this one is the craziest to me, but I think it affects… it affects across the board every organization, business, whether it's K-12 or not.

Monica McClellan: But this is kind of what I view as, like, a sharing-only, across-your-district-right-now process, and we call it the chaos diagram because it's chaos. We actually toned this down a little bit because there is another diagram we created that just was a little too much, but

Monica McClellan: Let's walk through it. So, there's information… this… the top you'll see are, like, the six sources of information, right? So you have the superintendent, you have the human resources department, you have the principals, department heads, coaches, IT. That's not even all staff, right?

But let's just say…

Monica McClellan: The top is where the information is coming from.

Monica McClellan: Then on each side, you have every tool, every channel that staff are supposedly using to receive that information. So email, Google Drive, SharePoint, text threads, newsletters, you're walking by in the hall, word of mouth, there's so many different channels, right?

Monica McClellan: The old internet that nobody's updated since 2019, bulletin boards.

Monica McClellan: messaging apps, you know, depending on district and kind of, like, what your process is. And then in the middle, you have your frontline district staff. So that's the teachers, the custodians, front office folks, bus drivers, the people doing the work, right? And so, most of the majority of the time, that's the communication you're trying to get to.

Monica McClellan: And so, here's what we notice. Every one of these channels is sharing channel information, and they're optimized for pushing information out.

Monica McClellan: None of them confirm receipt, none of them measure engagement, none of them talk to each other. So if you're sending out an email about a handbook, and then maybe the principal is also sending out an email.

Monica McClellan: And maybe the communication isn't on the same page, maybe it's saying different information. You have no idea if John Smith read this email from the superintendent or from this… from the principal. Maybe they're asking questions through text or through the hallway.

Monica McClellan: there's no way to keep track of it all, and you don't actually know who saw the message, and if there's any follow-up questions, right? So, fragmentation isn't the… really the root problem, it's the symptom of treating sharing as the goal, right? And so, when every leader has their own sharing tool, it ends up looking like this. Eight channels, no measurement, no engagement.

Monica McClellan: And I think based off of the polls, that's definitely something you guys are experiencing within your district, because there's just so much going on.

Monica McClellan: And one of the things that I love about Apptegy is that we are definitely trying to solve this, whether it's

Monica McClellan: outbound, so from your district to your community, your parents, your guards, your students. Inbound, we just launched Community Experience earlier this year, so how are your parents, your community, your students

Monica McClellan: inquiry… sending inquiries, getting in touch with you. Most would probably say phone, right? Or showing up at the school, talking to the front desk. Community experience solves a lot of that issue.

Monica McClellan: And so now we're solving that issue of internal communication all in one place. And so, if we can fix the communication fragmentation of everything in one place, that's a game changer, and then that also solves that hierarchy that we just kind of walked through and talked through, previously.

Monica McClellan: So let's talk about what this is actually costing you, right? You'll notice we like threes. I think threes keeps it simple and easy, but also breaks down, what… what the actual issue is. And so, there's three real costs that we see, and like I mentioned, none of these show up on P&L statements, but everyone of these hits your district in different ways.

And so, the first one is missed updates.

Monica McClellan: We actually saw a…

Monica McClellan: a Forbes workforce study that found that over 40% of workers say poor communication has hurt job productivity, satisfaction, and just general trust in their leadership.

Monica McClellan: And so in K-12, that shows up as an email that nobody read, the policy that nobody knew about, maybe a schedule change that caught staff off guard, and so every one of these is, like, a little small fire principal and admin team have to put out, right? And so that's taking time away from their actual job to try and communicate with

Monica McClellan: you know, the fire that they're currently dealing with. And as you guys said in the poll, the number one thing is you guys can't see whether your staff is engaging or reading or digesting the communication that you're pushing out. So it seems like missed updates in general is just the biggest pain point that we hear, and that's what we found in the discovery is too.

Monica McClellan: The second one is obviously common sense, but compliance and security risk, right? This is, I think, a quiet killer, and something that everyone's constantly thinking about, but maybe not being able to dedicate full-time, or even figure out how to solve.

Monica McClellan: are four more employees still accessing password-protected pages? Because nobody ever did, like, an audit, and there's no formal process to make sure those who had access no longer have access.

Monica McClellan: since… maybe sensitive HR documents are scattered across personal drives, and some people have access that shouldn't, I can just even speak to here at Apptegy.

Monica McClellan: if you don't have the right permissions, it becomes frustrating, because then it's a blocker to not be able to get your work done. I'm assuming that could definitely translate into K-12 as well, right? Like, you're trying to get something done, you don't have access to that document, and it's frustrating. Or in this case, you have access, but you shouldn't.

Monica McClellan: Maybe your staff handbook has 3 different versions floating around, right? Maybe that Google Drive has a couple different versions you thought you copied over the old one, or maybe it's saved in multiple different places, and so it just causes

Monica McClellan: real legal exposure, and then you just don't have a system to track it all. You don't have someone that's dedicated to that. Or they are, but they're just bogged down with a ton of other work, and so that becomes an issue.

Monica McClellan: And then third is leader blind spots, and so I think this comes back to, again, that hierarchy. You send an email, you hope it landed, fingers crossed, you hope they actually read it, but there's no engagement data, no read receipts, there's no way to follow up with staff who missed it.

Monica McClellan: So you don't know, you sent out an urgent message around, hey, there was a water line break, you know, in the gymnasium, like.

Monica McClellan: hey, we're either gonna cancel gym classes, or there's a follow-up message, there's an action required, and you don't know if your third grade teacher saw the message or not, and so you're running around like a crazy person, making sure, hey, like, I need to make sure you know this, or sending out texts fire rapidly.

Monica McClellan: Instead of having a very clear, here is the announcement, it's urgent, and then very clearly being able to see who actually saw it, and then one place for the employees to engage and ask follow-up questions if needed.

Monica McClellan: One last thing I'll say is our… we have a school CEO team, which basically is, like, our team that meets with a bunch of different districts across the U.S, whether they're clients or not. They'll do research on different topics.

Monica McClellan: That we find interesting, or are trending right now. And so, of course, one of the ones that we did was around internal communications, and…

Monica McClellan: One principal told us, and this is a direct quote, like, lack of communication is an ax that chips away at the foundation of anything that you have going on. And I think that's a very impactful quote, and kind of stops me in my tracks, especially when I'm thinking about staff communication, because it is true.

Monica McClellan: If you don't have a solid foundation, right, that does, coming back to that

Monica McClellan: that study, that survey that Forbes did, it comes back and affects the job satisfaction, the actual responsibilities, that culture that you're trying to set, and that tone across your district, or within a certain building school. So it's really something to be thinking about, and having these core things figured out really helps to set a very strong, strong foundation.

Monica McClellan: So, let's talk about why today's systems aren't working. And so, during this discovery phase, we talked through, okay, what are the pain points?

Monica McClellan: That we're seeing, and it's those kind of, like, missed updates, not being able to see leadership, the compliance piece. Let's talk about, okay, how are they trying to solve those pain points? And what we saw, again, sticking with the three theme, three, like, main buckets or categories where we're seeing systems fall short.

Monica McClellan: So the first one is static storage. So, the thing that we kept hearing, remember, was we need an internet, we need an intranet, and so when we looked at that, it's a static storage place, right? So you're, you know, typically what we've seen is there's a landing page that's password protected.

Monica McClellan: That's organized maybe by department, or organized by district, whatever it is.

Monica McClellan: A club, maybe, and they have resources, and updates just posted on there.

Monica McClellan: it's static. There's maybe some document library. It's built once.

Monica McClellan: But then they age, so information goes stale, pages get outdated. It's not because it's a lack of not wanting or needing it, but maybe a lack of not one person owning it, maybe a lack of… there's, you know, a bunch of different channels, and it gets confusing on where to actually store things and push things out.

Monica McClellan: And so once you upload the document, the system, you know, in your district, it's considered done, we're good, let's move on. Kind of going back to that, like, you shared it, you're good, that resource is up.

Monica McClellan: Let's move on. But the static storage piece doesn't fill that communication piece, right?

Monica McClellan: if your staff hasn't adopted that storage place, then at the end of the day, then they're actually never going to get that resource or that update. And so a lot of what we're hearing is that static storage page isn't actually helpful because they find things that are updated, and so sooner rather than later, maybe it's adopted within a month or two, and then it just kind of falls off.

Monica McClellan: The second piece, what kind of builds on top of that, is it's one-way broadcast.

Monica McClellan: Email blasts, push notifications, mass text, whatever it is.

Monica McClellan: They're designed to push information out, so there's no comment, no reaction, no thread. Even when there's information.

Monica McClellan: is there, staff aren't connected to it. Sharing happens, but engagement doesn't. So coming back to this example of, you push out an email about a handbook update, right? Let's say you have a meeting about it the next week, you want to get ahead of it, you send out an email saying, hey, just letting you guys know, added this blurb into the employee handbook.

Monica McClellan: Again, crossing your fingers, hoping and praying that everyone that's attending that meeting next week has seen it, read it, digested it, and then coming to that meeting prepared with questions.

Monica McClellan: Well, you don't know, right?

Monica McClellan: It's one-way broadcast. So then you show up to the meeting that you're hosting to talk through it, and half of the staff have no idea what you're talking about, or half the staff forgot, and they're digging through their emails trying to find where that update was, right? I can definitely speak through a lot of the districts I've sent to, is your inbox is stacked, like most people's inboxes. So.

Monica McClellan: It's really hard to find information unless you're really organized and have different folders, and…

Monica McClellan: you know, are really on top of that stuff, which some people are, but, you know, for those that aren't, it's a little bit more difficult to track that information down, and so…

Monica McClellan: that one-way broadcast becomes more difficult. And then, maybe there are some people that, you know, popped up and had different questions, and so that meeting is a great place to have that, but what if you didn't have a meeting, and it was just like, hey, here's the update, and then two months later, that update to the employee handbook

Monica McClellan: you know, certain people didn't know about it, and so they didn't actually, follow that new rule, or follow along with what that employee handbook had to say, and so that's definitely an issue we've seen.

Monica McClellan: And then I think the last one is disconnected silos, so this is that fragmentation piece that we talked about earlier, but none of your channels are speaking together, right? You have the internet, the email, the messaging tool, your district app, but none of them are talking to each other, and each one adds another channel or layer of sharing, and so instead of consolidating, right, you're fragmenting further.

Monica McClellan: And so, we've definitely seen folks do this, so let's just add another tool to it, and that will kind of fix the issue. But I think the issue that we're seeing is they're still keeping all of the channels, adding another tool, adding another line item, and then the bigger problem is the staff isn't adopting it, so the tool that you're paying for no longer becomes helpful, is no longer solving the issue, it's just adding to the chaos of it all.

Monica McClellan: And so, most districts invest in a better internet or a new messaging tool, but they have all the same problems 6 months later.

Monica McClellan: And so, I think one of the things, like I mentioned, that we're trying to solve at Apptegy is create this all-in-one place where you can communicate out, parents can communicate in, and staff can communicate internally. And so, that really fixes the whole, hey.

Monica McClellan: staff are going to adopt this tool because they're already in it. They're already communicating in multiple different ways, in one channel, in one place. So it's not going to fall off, it's not going to add to the fragmentation piece. And so when we got to this place, we were like, okay.

Monica McClellan: I think now that we've learned the pain points, the current systems aren't working, what we need to fix, we kind of knew what we needed to build from there.

Monica McClellan: So we'll talk about that later, but we did want to dive into another poll to kind of get your pulse on, how visible your communication is, and I'm actually going to pass it over to Mitch to talk through this.

Mitchell Wilston: Yeah, let's launch that poll and get some questions answered here, but we're asking two questions here about visibility, and I'll speak a little bit about why it matters. So the first is, can you measure whether your staff actually sees what you send?

Mitchell Wilston: And then the second is, if a new hire started on Monday, could they find what they need?

Mitchell Wilston: Let me just make sure I have the window open here. So, it's really important, and it's important for two layers. On some level, reporting is just important, whether you're talking to the board, you're talking to your boss, you just want to make sure, at an aggregate level, that people are seeing it.

Mitchell Wilston: But in talking to clients, talking to users who are struggling with these pain points, it also has a really practical effect of just wasting a huge amount of time. And an example that one of our beta clients shared with me was, they had some documentation that they were sending out, and it was a small district, there was only, like, 150 staff or something like that, and when they send it out, they need to make sure that people see this.

Mitchell Wilston: And, if you don't have any visibility, to follow up, you are following up one-to-many. Like, you have to go check in with 150 people and make sure, did you actually see this? But if you can establish visibility, even if everybody doesn't see it with your first blast.

Mitchell Wilston: it really narrows the amount of follow-up that you have to do. So rather than chasing down 150 people, you have a much shorter list of, I got 20 people to follow up with, and that's much, much easier.

Mitchell Wilston: And then the second one is, if a new hire started on Monday, could they find what they need? This is something that I think is,

Mitchell Wilston: you know, apparent to everybody, but with disparate systems, even if the information is there, it takes time just to map everything out and explain to people where that mapping is. And a lot of these actually go together that I'll talk about in a little bit, where even if, you know, the communications tools and the consolidation go together here, do we have,

Mitchell Wilston: answers in…

Monica McClellan: Yes, yes, we have a good participation, so I'm gonna go ahead and end the poll.

Monica McClellan: And then, let's share results. Sorry, all this is…

Mitchell Wilston: The timer, da-da-da-dun… Okay, so this is about what I would expect having talked to clients, but…

Mitchell Wilston: For most, it's some channels, not all, or not really. There are some that have good engagement data. You guys are doing great. If a new hire started on Monday, could they find what they need?

Yes, easily. A lot of people are saying, not without help, or they'd have to ask around, and that's where the overlap of communication and consolidation happens. Even… I'll start with the second one. We can jump to the next slide, too, sorry about that.

Monica McClellan: Hell yeah.

Mitchell Wilston: So, in consolidating, we're going from storage to hub, and it's tying both of those together. You have the assets and the communication in one place. So, if you have to go ask around, boy, is it easy if you're already in the place where you can do that asking around. And if you have to go get help.

Mitchell Wilston: Boy, is it easy if instead of having a one-way blast, there's two-way communications that you can,

Mitchell Wilston: you know, other people can pitch in. It's not just on you to answer those questions. If someone posts a question in a public space, there's the opportunity for a bunch of people to pitch in and help. And that engagement really lifts the tide in a number of interesting ways.

Mitchell Wilston: And then again, from hoping to measuring, you have a lot more clarity into how this is actually going.

Mitchell Wilston: with the storage to hub and broadcast to two-way, we saw a lot of really interesting time savings when we were testing this with beta clients. A couple examples were, like, clarifying questions. You might have a broadcast that is like, hey, here are the updated bus schedules.

Mitchell Wilston: And if it's a broadcast that you send out as an email to a thousand people, you might get, you know, a lot of questions that are like, oh, this is good information, but what about this? But what about that? Where do I find this information? And all of those follow-up questions are siloed.

If you can have that… those follow-ups in a more public space.

Mitchell Wilston: then it's just a lot less following up. If one person comments onto a broadcast that is like, oh, great, when is this due? It requires one follow-up, one response to say this is the due date, and then everybody in that area, or in that, in that,

Mitchell Wilston: room will understand the date without having to have one-to-many follow-ups. We found that to be really, really effective in saving time for administrators and communication leads that are, that are deploying this content.

Mitchell Wilston: So, 3 questions to ask your district and diagnose, take them back to their team. Where do staff actually go for trusted information today? I do think that an honest answer is going to be, it depends on who you ask, and I think that those answers can be really, really helpful in helping steer your teams and your systems

Mitchell Wilston: To a less fragmented place.

Mitchell Wilston: And it's one of those things to be, like, intellectually honest about. If people are going to the wrong place, it's not necessarily a problem with the people, right? There's just opportunity to improve on the system. And if it's really confusing, it's not necessarily that, you know, like, people aren't trying hard enough, it's our roles to make

Mitchell Wilston: that path as easy as possible to reduce the friction. When things aren't going right, we can look at that as an opportunity, not a problem.

Mitchell Wilston: Then asking about measurement. Can you measure what they've seen when you've sent it? And even just asking follow-up questions to them, like.

Mitchell Wilston: if they didn't see it, why not? And that can be, like, a really, really, compelling conversation to understand, like, where the gaps in your processes are. The follow-up questions are the… are so much better than the initial questions sometimes.

Mitchell Wilston: And then with a brand new hire, if, you know, you could do this as a hypothetical, if you're asking your team, if we had a brand new hire, where would they go on day one? Or if…

Mitchell Wilston: you're staffing up and having brand new hires, ask them, and use… use that path and that journey of a real new hire to map out where all of those opportunities for consolidation are. With these three questions, I do think they're really, really good starting points. You're not gonna… you're not gonna find every answer with 3 questions, but as a starting point and with follow-up questions.

Mitchell Wilston: It's really, really illuminating.

Monica McClellan: Yep, yep, echoing all of that. And so we're hoping, kind of taking these three questions, like your homework, we'll talk a little bit about next steps, but obviously with all of the learnings that we're sharing, some of this might be common sense, some of it might, but I feel like from our viewpoint, getting to talk to so many districts across the U.S, we wanted to share this information. So.

Monica McClellan: what did we do with this information? So, you've probably seen, we've created a product called Staff Connect. So, we took an intranet, a communication hub, and we've married them into one. And so, with Staff Connect, you are still getting an internet, still a place where you can post up, or have resources and documents and

Monica McClellan: static things live, but then you'll also have a place where you can message, communicate, send announcements to staff, all in one place, and you can organize and store these intranets based off of, you know, the district, the department, a club, whatever makes sense for your district, so it's organized like K-12, not like a corporate site. And so.

Monica McClellan: We're gonna dig more into…

Monica McClellan: what Staff Connect actually looks like in our next webinar, which I'll get to, and we'll, we'll have a special guest there. But we wanted to make sure you had these three questions of framework to kind of help build on that, of like, okay, let's talk about my district specifically and what I'm trying to solve, because then the next webinar, when we dig into how Staff Connect can actually help, and more of the principles around that, you can match to see if this is

Monica McClellan: This is a good tool that will help solve my pain points or not.

Monica McClellan: So, with all that being said, we want to open it up. Q&A. What questions do you guys have? What do you want to learn more about?

Did this make sense? Did this resonate? Talk, talk to us. How can we kind of help illuminate more?

Again, given us, given our, like, kind of…

Monica McClellan: viewpoint of building this product and talking to a lot of different districts, across… across the U.S.

Monica McClellan: I'll give you guys a couple minutes.

Monica McClellan: And we'd love to hear from you, so I know there's a couple of communication folks on. If you're in communication, and, you know, you're in a comms role, what does your process look like right now for communicating?

Monica McClellan: I think we had a couple come through.

Mitchell Wilston: I see one in here from Kathleen I can speak to a little bit, but what's the best practice or tip? We've talked about this with a lot of our beta clients for this project and other ones, but one of the hardest things has been, like, we know there's a problem, or we know that there's opportunity, we have so much content, or we have so many different communication channels.

Mitchell Wilston: how do you migrate that out all at once? It's so overwhelming, the scope of that would be really hard, and one of the things that we coach on, and it works really, really well, is just start small. Like.

Mitchell Wilston: Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and if you have a wide myriad of problems that you're trying to solve, if you can focus on one of them and make progress.

Mitchell Wilston: internally, you'll start to build evangelists, and then that kind of gets the ball rolling, and it starts to ramp up, and progress becomes faster and faster and faster. As an example, with one of our beta clients.

Mitchell Wilston: They were in a similar situation, and they had one small team start with this new revised intranet, and they… they just took to it really quickly, and all of the sudden, it's not you trying to get the organization to change, or you trying to promote change by yourself, but you have a team of evangelists, and they pull in more people into the process, and they pull in more people to the process.

Mitchell Wilston: And it's empowering in not trying to delegate everything.

Monica McClellan: Great answer. Aj has a question, curious about what everyone's experiences have been with their IT team. We struggle with the idea of control with internet solutions.

Monica McClellan: Mitch, do you want to give perspective on, kind of, some of the feedback we got?

Mitchell Wilston: I would love to hear more about that, and you could follow up even after the webinar, so I could better understand that. We definitely see, you know.

Mitchell Wilston: security concerns, or just, you know, there can be a hard time handing over the reins, and, I think transparency is really good, but one of the things that

Mitchell Wilston: works well with the approach that we try to coach on is, like, not making it too complicated, because that's where IT teams get a little hesitant. If you have a setup that requires a whole bunch of tooling, that's a whole bunch of work for them to approve, a whole bunch of them to go through SecOps processes. If you can consolidate workflows into fewer platforms, then it's just less work for them, and I think everybody is always on the

Mitchell Wilston: board with less work. I did see a really interesting one in here. I currently use Thrillshare for communicating with parents. District uses it for communicating with coworkers well.

Yeah, for sure, that's a really, really big one, and I think there's a case study that we have out right now with one of the beta clients.

Mitchell Wilston: Do you want to take this one, Monica?

Monica McClellan: Well, no, I was just gonna say, feel free to add, but the case study is with a district that went through the beta with us, and so they'll be joining us for the next webinar to talk about this, one of this exact situation. So go ahead and add more color, but Adrienne, definitely tune in for the next webinar, because they're going to walk you through what that actually looks like.

Mitchell Wilston: Yeah, so it's exactly right, and one of the… if you're communicating with parents, one of the hard parts

Mitchell Wilston: and starting that communication is just getting staff adoption. So when we're thinking about how to solve this problem, we don't want to introduce a new thing to learn. And this ties in, actually, really well to Valerie's question. Do you have any guidance on how to get staff to use this?

I don't want people to think this is just something else I have to do. So,

Mitchell Wilston: There's always… there's always people that are, like, just resistant to change, and intranet has content and information that they need to have, and it… it…

Mitchell Wilston: forces adoption for internal communication, but we're finding that once people get in and they use it like, oh, this is so bad, I know how to use this intranet tool, and because it's the same tool, or the same UI, UX, you do actions the same way as your external-facing communication, they're actually learning two tools at once. And in this case study, because intranet, our Staff Connect solution.

Mitchell Wilston: brought in so much more staff adoption. They saw really tremendous increases in staff to guardian communication as well. And it's a… it's a feedback loop that just builds on itself. So, you learn one tool, I need to understand, how to post to comics, I need to know, like, how to fill out my W-2 tax form, and there's… that's in the intranet, like, oh, I've figured out how to use this.

Mitchell Wilston: I can take that knowledge and take it elsewhere with me within the platform, because it's all in one platform.

Monica McClellan: I just want to add to that, too, and give Mitch some props. Like, Mitch is the… his… him and his team are in charge of building out the product, and so they were very, very smart and cognitive when they built out Staff Connect to focus on how do I build this to match the other type of products we have in Apptegy, so…

Monica McClellan: you know, messaging assembles, Group Connect, rooms, like, it's all built to look and feel the same, so staff are coming into this, and they already know how to use it.

Monica McClellan: And if you don't have… go ahead.

Mitchell Wilston: Well, I was just gonna say, I see a couple questions about, authentication, permissions, is this differentiated from the Thrillshare user administration? Does StaffConnect pair with the district app? Yes. So, it is all in one platform, so if you log into our Apptegy platform, formerly called Thrillshare,

Mitchell Wilston: or the staff app, then it is the same platform. It is provisioned so that only people

Mitchell Wilston: there's user management so that the only people that can access content are the ones that you want to be able to access content. It's not a monolith intranet, although you could set it up that way. We see clients that set it up so there's an all-district intranet, you might have department-level intranets, there are some that have team-level intranets, and you only have access if you have been added to have access.

Mitchell Wilston: The authentication permission can be completely differentiated from the Thrillshare user administration. Yeah, so there are options in setting up who has access. Typically, with… if you have Rooms or Group Connect,

Mitchell Wilston: or just the foundations, you have staff users that are already in the platform, and when setting up Staff Connect, there's an option to say, like, just pull all the staff accounts that exist in the platform.

Mitchell Wilston: What we find, though, is typically those are teaching roles that are in the platform, and for intranet, you often have to have non-teaching roles, so we've built out some different ingestion flows, so you can import just from your SIS,

Mitchell Wilston: Or you could import from your SIS and your HRIS, where you might have lunch ladies, custodians.

Mitchell Wilston: groundskeepers and stuff like that, and they also need access to the internet. And you can set it up so that it's provisioned in a way so, like, you can be really picky and choosy about who has access to what. It's very well covered, yeah.

Mitchell Wilston: That's a good question, though. That was a big part of our conversations with clients, is just, like, how do we make sure everybody can access it, even non-teaching staff, and how do we make sure that not everyone can access certain things?

Monica McClellan: Yep, and I think we kind of answered this, but Hannah, just to double down on this, you may talk about this in the next webinar, we will, but does Staff Connect pair with the district app? How do staff access this? And so, yes, it's all in one, can be accessed, and we'll have a single sign-on, so they'll be able to access it just like they would any other Apptegy tools.

Monica McClellan: make sure to add that.

Mitchell Wilston: No, that's right. I wanna… I wanna talk about Valerie's for a little bit, because this is… this is, like, one of the toughest things to handle, getting staff to use a new tool and have it not be a burden. I think this is true of pretty much everything, not just, like, intranet solutions, but, if you can solve a problem for somebody.

Mitchell Wilston: it works so much better than compelling somebody to do it. So, finding the problems, and putting people into a solution, is just really, really helpful. But also, not thinking of intranet as something that is, like.

Mitchell Wilston: boring and… and something where you only use tax forms. So with the way that we've built it, we've added these engagement features, and I think different districts have different levels of, like, tolerance or, like, appetite for this, but it's set up so that you can have fun on the platform if you want. Like, you could provision a space that is, here is the pet's

Mitchell Wilston: intranet, where, like, all we do is share pet channels and talk about how cute our dogs are, which I love. And then people are having fun in it, and it feels, you know, less tedious and less like work. But if you are creating adoption because you've created fun opportunities, and that's, like, a very fun

Mitchell Wilston: option. Like, it doesn't need to be quite like that. You could have a lunch club in it, you could have all sorts of things, but finding avenues to make work tools not feel like work is really, really powerful. It gets people to use it in a fun way, and then the hardest part is always the learning curve of adoption, the fun use cases.

Mitchell Wilston: You know, help paper over the learning curve of adoption, and then they're in the tool, they know how to use it, and it's not, difficult to use for the actual work use cases.

Monica McClellan: Yep, that's a great example we've seen people do in the beta, but I have a feeling we're gonna see more folks,

Monica McClellan: In fun, different ways when you get feedback. Last question, Kay is asking, what is the cost, and is it less expensive for smaller districts?

Monica McClellan: this is based off of district size, so great question, Kay. If anyone is interested, we didn't even really get to dive into Staff Connect and what it looks like. So two things. If you want a personalized demo on Staff Connect already and just want to jump again, by all means, contact us.

We will definitely, do a deeper dive and a more personalized, demo on what Staff Connect could look like in

Monica McClellan: your district, but then we're also going to host another webinar on July 15th.

Monica McClellan: similar kind of, of, of, content. We're gonna dive into, how to reach every staff member, and strategies that actually land. So, a lot of the questions you guys are asking is, like, I don't want to add just another tool to add another tool. How do you get people to engage?

How do you get adoption? And so, that's some of the topics that we're going to dive into.

Monica McClellan: So please, please, if you can, attend the July 15th webinar. And just to sweeten the pot a little bit, if you do attend, we're gonna have 3 webinars, so there's gonna be one in July and one in August. If you do attend all 3, and you want to move forward with Staff Connect, we will be having a raffle, so if you do attend, you'll be entered into, that raffle, and you'll get 50% off a Staff Connect, implementation fee.

Monica McClellan: So.

Monica McClellan: excited to offer that to you. We… we don't typically do that. This is actually our first time doing something like this, so, please, please come. If you find this content engaging, let us know.

If you want more of this, let us know. But like I said, our next session is July 15th. I know we're a little bit over, so appreciate you guys sticking with us, and we're excited to continue the conversation next month.

Monica McClellan: Alright, thanks, y'all. Thanks, Mitch. Thanks, Barrett.