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Transcript

Tyler Vawser: All right. Good morning or afternoon. We're going to start here in a moment. People are filtering into the conversation here, which is great.

Very good. All right, we've got quite a few people that are already in there. We're going to go ahead and introduce ourselves and preview what we're going to be talking about, And by the time we're finished with that and we really get into the main research, everyone will have joined. So with that, I'm Tyler Vawser. I'm the VP of Marketing here at Apptegy, and I'm joined by my colleague, Brittany Keil from the SchoolCEO team.

And what we're excited to talk about today is SchoolCEO's newest research, and what you can learn from that, and how it can impact the way that you communicate to your community, to your families, and in particular, how you can reach them more effectively.

So with that, we'll go ahead and share the screen here and jump into the slides.

And while Brittany's pulling that up, in the chat, you can send messages to me and Brittany, and we can see those. So if you have questions, someone Amy has already left a nice note in the chat for us, which is really helpful. So if you have questions or thoughts, or you want us to address something, let us know. We may not be able to take all the questions, but we will do our very best.

So today, talking about breaking through the noise, what parents want from school communication.

All right. So many of you are familiar with SchoolCEO Magazine. This is something that Apptegy has been publishing since twenty eighteen, and our focus with this is to talk about all things school communication, but with the idea that we want to do more than just communicate information, we want to change how people think and feel about your districts and your schools and your teachers and your staff. So, we're communicating all the time.

The question we like to ask is, when are we communicating that changes the level of trust and the way that people really think and feel about our schools? And so, if you've been on a webinar with Apptegy and SchoolCEO before, you know that we do a lot of original research. What we'll be talking about today is our newest original research, but there's a long archive on schoolceo.com where you can find out even more about past research, and that goes everything from principals and teachers to families and in between. So, encourage you to go to schoolceo.com.

You can sign up for our newsletter there as well as the print magazine if you are a school leader.

Brittany Keil: So, I'm happy to introduce myself. My name is Brittany Keil, and I am the senior manager of media and research for SchoolCEO. You can learn a little bit about me from this slide and also, you know, one of my stars of my life, my daughter, Rosemary. So I am a former teacher, I spent about a decade in the classroom, And I taught special education. I actually began my career in Malaysia. So if you look at the bottom of my side, you can see me learning the zappen dance in my very first classroom in Malaysia.

My daughter is five, she's in kindergarten, and something that my family loves to do is we love to travel.

One thing that is definitely going to complicate this is that I am about to have a baby next month, so we won't be traveling for a while. But that makes this webinar extra special because I get to present my work before I get to go on maternity leave.

Take a special note of Rosemary because I'm going come back to her in a story later. But thank you so much for joining us. I love the research we do. I think what parents want is either my sixth or my seventh research project for SchoolCEO. So if you like what you hear today, definitely check out more of what we've done.

Tyler Vawser: And I'm Tyler. If you've been on a webinar, you probably heard from me before.

You can read the slide on the right, but I'll tell you that my family and I, we just went to Disney for the very first time with our kids. We had an amazing time. For those of you that live in Florida, I'm so jealous of the weather you have in February. It was absolutely perfect for us.

So, I've got four awesome kids. They had the best time. They had never been on a roller coaster, but we rode every roller coaster that we possibly could. And the youngest there, Lexi, she actually rode Guardians of the Galaxy, which turns out to be a pretty intense roller coaster for a four year old, but she loved it.

So, if you haven't been to Disney, incredible experience, and we just got back maybe ten days ago, so we're still fresh from that trip.

All right, we're gonna do just a couple quick information slides before we dive into the research as people continue to join. So, SchoolCEO Conference is coming up this fall. We just announced the dates recently, and in the coming weeks, we'll be talking about the speakers.

The conference itself is actually going to touch on some of what we'll talk about here today, but in particular, how school leaders, especially public school leaders, can connect with families in an era of school choice. So, we're really excited to do what we do best, which is bring both education leaders and private sector leaders into a conversation together about how do you reach families, how do you reach moms who are making a lot of the decisions, and also how do you change that narrative that can make it harder to enroll families about public education? So, really excited to announce those speakers coming soon, and you can find out more through SchoolCEO's website, or if you go to Apptegy's website, you can click on the conference link there.

I mentioned the newsletter earlier. Again, is on schoolceo.com. We'll go ahead and skip this one.

We also have a podcast. We are finishing up season three, which has really been all about school brand and about a comprehensive guide to school marketing. We go really deep into each topic, and it's a little bit more like a documentary, almost like This American Lifestyle. So each season we change things up.

We're about to finish season three. Season four is coming out later in March, and we're gonna change up the format yet again. So if you're an avid listener, you can look forward to that. If you haven't listened to it before, dig through the archives, you can really catch up on season one and season two, which were more interview format, and then season three was that documentary style.

Alright, so this is the research that we're going to be talking about here today, and Brittany is going to be doing a deep dive. What was so exciting for us here is that the last few studies have looked more at people that work within the school system, so school communicators, teachers and staff, principals and superintendents. This research focused specifically on families across the US, so we had responses from over forty eight different states, and we had fourteen hundred responses of families with students ages four to eighteen. So this research is available online. Many of you likely got the magazine in the mail as well. If you didn't and you'd like to, again, go to schoolceo.com. But all the research that we're presenting today comes from this latest issue of the magazine.

So kickoff question, and you can kind of just answer rhetorically or you could send us the chat, but how many businesses do you think have your cell phone number?

This is almost comical today because we all know that it's a lot. So yeah, someone, Kim just said too many thousands, way too many, a lot of good responses so far.

Infinite, yeah. So this is what's really interesting is that when we think about communication today, it's easier than ever to communicate with each other, and that actually means it's actually harder, right? Because it's so easy, the efficiency of sending text messages and sending voice calls and all these things has created a lot of noise, which makes it harder to create good signals. And the same is true for schools. And so, while you might think about trying to get parents' attention for your school, vacuum, you're actually competing with all types of businesses, right? Like if you place an order online, you get a text and an email, and sometimes a second email when it ships, or a second text when it ships, and so it can get really noisy really quick just in our everyday lives.

Jody just said zillions. That's the best answer so far. So some quick stats, right? Again, this is just to make the point that you instinctively already know that we send approximately six billion messages per day. The average person receives one hundred and twenty one emails per day, and on X or Twitter, right, six thousand posts are made every single second. So this is a lot of noise, and this is really the challenge for you as a school leader, as a school communicator, to figure out how are you going to compete with all this noise that's taking place.

So, these are just some of the messages you get every day, right? So, last day to donate, my kid's school, the PTA fundraiser is this Saturday, half off today only, winter weather alert for your area. So, all these things, right? Like, we get text messages from our kids' dentists because our kids don't have cell phones, right? So like there's messages about everything and everyone in our family all the time. And so your text messages, your emails, it gets really full really quickly. So someone just asked in the chat, do you consider this over communicating?

I think this is what we're going to dig into the research is where do parents prefer to be communicated with, and how can you stand out amongst all of this noise and really create good signals?

So, in communications, we have to find a way to break through the noise, right? I've said that word a few times here already, but this is really key, is that we're always communicating information, and so the question is, what is the right way to break through that noise? Is it just more information? Or are there ways to communicate that go beyond conveying information and instead build trust and build connection and community?

All right, so the effing debate. I kind of joke that this is what I say if the audience is falling asleep on me. Hopefully that hasn't happened yet. It's probably not what you're thinking, so don't feel like this isn't safe for work or something.

But when we say the effing debate, what we actually mean is efficiency versus effectiveness. And so, go ahead to the next slide there, Brittany. A lot of times when we think about our work, when we think about communicating with families, we focus most and most often on efficiency. How do we get this message out quickly to a lot of people?

And now there are circumstances where that's absolutely critical.

But what we can see both from, you know, how many text messages we're getting from businesses and how many messages we're sending at schools, what we find is that the more efficiency, sometimes there's less effectiveness. And so while it can be efficient to send a lot of messages, it can actually reduce your effectiveness over time. And so what we want to really do is think about how do we create a really effective strategy that is also efficient, but puts effectiveness ahead of efficiency first and foremost.

Your entire job depends on effective communication. And really, whatever role you're in, this is true, right? Even my role as a dad, my job depends as a dad on good, effective communication with my wife, with my kids, with other family members, with their teachers. And so there's really no role out there, professional or personal, that isn't made better through effective communication.

So I'm gonna turn it over to Brittany, and she's gonna walk us through the agenda and the research. And as you have questions, feel free to put those in the chat, and I'll help Brittany flag those down in between slides.

Brittany Keil: Absolutely, and if I have to do some follow-up, that is an absolute joy for me. So if you have questions about the data or something specific, feel free to email me or put things in the chat, and we'll get to it. So we're about to do one of my favorite things. We're going to dig into some data.

And, you know, we're going to go through some very specific questions that we asked in our survey, and then we're going to make things tactical. So we're not just sticking with the data, we're also going to talk about what this means for you as a communicator.

Before we do all of that, though, I want to kind of start with a bit of a story. So the survey, I can give you the overall broad thing. So we did this at the end of the year last year. We had fourteen hundred responses from parents from families of, sorry, families of students aged four to eighteen. We had responses from forty eight US states in all major geographic regions. So this was a pretty big study as far as like interviewing parents, and, you know, this is a representative study of families across the country.

But what I also want to draw your attention to here is our cover. So as you look at this cover, and this is the cover of where the research is, you see a very cute kid. And then behind the kid, you see a lot of I want statements. So when our team was developing the idea for this study and developing the idea for this magazine as a whole, we were thinking about how many desires parents are fighting at all times.

They want things for their kid. They want things for themselves. They want things for their families. And a lot of this is difficult because there's just so much going on.

But what do parents want most?

A happy, healthy, safe kid. And that's why this cute kid is featured right here. And this has been very relevant to my life lately. So two weeks ago, my family moved from Little Rock, Arkansas to Seattle.

And so that little girl that I featured in my slide, had to transfer schools from Little Rock, Arkansas, a very small school that she had actually attended since she was two, to a new larger public school where she is enrolled now enrolled in kindergarten.

Making this transition was really hard for us. My husband was starting in a new role in his job. We were moving to a new community, we were moving to a city, a coastal area, we were moving closer to family. But what I found myself thinking about in the middle of the night was how my daughter, Rosemary, would do in her new school and how we would choose a school that was a good fit for her when we didn't know anyone in the community who could give us advice about the schools.

So I actually did ask some of our family members about schools, but there are not a lot of kids in my husband's side of the family. And so they didn't really have a lot of good advice for us. They actually recommended a Swedish language school that they had seen driving by, and my family doesn't speak Swedish, so I don't really know why that was good advice.

Anyway, so I did what all good parents do. I turned to the internet. I looked at homepages. I looked at district websites. I looked at comments from parents and news articles, and I tried to do my very best to try and figure out what area of the city would be a good place for my family to land, both for our jobs and also for our daughter.

So while we were on a house tour one time with a landlord, I asked the landlord how the local elementary school was. And he said, Oh, everybody loves it. Next to Briar, I think it's probably the best elementary school in the area. Of course, as a parent and as an achiever, I heard that phrase next to Briar. And I immediately wanted to know more about this one elementary school, Briar Elementary.

I researched it, the homepage looked great. The family communication looked great, looked like a place that we would be interested in sending our daughter. So we ended up finding a rental in the area. It was a good fit for our family in lots of ways, but we decided to go ahead and enroll our daughter in Briar Elementary.

As optimistic as I was, I was so nervous at this moment. How did I know I was making the right decision for my daughter and my family? This is a huge decision, sending my sweet little girl, tiny little five year old big backpack lunchbox with Pokemon on it into a new community. Like, how could I support her? How could I trust the school district that I was choosing?

The moment I finished the enrollment page, I started getting touch points from the district that started building that trust in a way that I totally didn't expect. Even though I work with amazing school communicators every day. The same day that I filled out the online enrollment form, I got a call from my daughter's secretary. The call wasn't to confirm enrollment or anything. She was just checking in on us to see if we needed any help finishing the form because I hadn't yet.

After we finished it, we got a call from the principal offering a tour wanting to know what our plans were. When they found out that we were moving from across the country, they wanted to connect us to community groups so that we could feel more supported. They even sent us a list of hiking trails that are popular with their families with kindergarteners, because hiking is big in the area. But if you have a little kid, sometimes that can be pretty inaccessible.

So touch points upon touch points, emails upon phone calls. By the time we first walked in my daughter's school, I already had a sense of trust.

We went on a school tour, the tour went well. But then the first day of school, I again had that sense of doubt, that sense of fear.

As I watched my little girl walk, big backpack, leggings, ponytails, you can picture it. She's five, she's adorable. I couldn't help myself from saying to the principal, I'm so sorry, but I hope today goes okay. My daughter, she's going through a lot.

I'm about to have a baby. She's not going to be an only child anymore. We just moved. And the principal looked at me and she smiled and she said, It's my job to help kids go through a lot.

And in that moment, I felt this overwhelming sense of trust because what I want as a parent is for my daughter to be safe and happy and for her to flourish.

And although we're only a week into the school so far so good. And so as we talk about parent communication today, I want us to continually think about how our communication methods build in to the multitude of important desires of what parents want.

All right, now some data.

So we started our survey with three questions. First, through which communication channels do families prefer to receive important information? Second, which school or district employees do families most trust to relay important information? And then third, how does communication influence family satisfaction and trust with the school district? If you've been paying attention to school PR lately, you know just how important this third question is.

Satisfaction and trust in an era of school choice are absolutely everything. And so this is definitely something we wanted to make sure we got right.

So first, we wanted to understand how families currently experience school communication. We asked them through which avenue do you most learn essential but non emergency school related information for the first time.

The top five answers were as follows.

So school or district website, email or newsletter, the district or school app, automated calls, text messages, and then farther down the list, social media. Our team wasn't too surprised by this finding, except maybe that social media was so lowly ranked, especially since it absorbs so much time in our conversation around school communication.

Something to consider here, though, is this is how people recall their districts communicating to them. I would be absolutely fascinated to lay this across an actual documented communication plan, which is something that I can't do, but you can do as a school communicator. So think about how this aligns to your own reality of what you communicate with your district.

And an interesting implication of this graph is that there is no overwhelming lean toward one channel, meaning that going all in on text messages or social media or even emails or newsletters might not be the best fit for your community unless they're particularly homogenous.

So then we asked our respondents to how they preferred to receive essential communication. And notice how important the website is to accessing new information. We often say that your district homepage is your district's first impression. And that was certainly true for my experience with my school district. But it turns out it's also one of the preferred places for families to look and return to for new information. Again, social media is way down there, but we'll get to that.

Families prefer your school website over any other communication channel.

So if you're one of those communicators who's put a lot of really thoughtful time into your school website, it's worth it.

So does that mean that no other communication channels matter?

Absolutely not. So more than half of our parents actually use their district apps regularly.

So school apps are gaining steam, and this is something that I wasn't quite convinced of before this study. I knew they were important, but as someone with a kindergartner, I hadn't experienced that myself. And I was curious to see what parents across the country would say. So in the world of school communication, apps are pretty new, but our data shows that families are bought in.

So we asked our parents about the experiences with their district's branded apps. So these aren't third party communication apps like ClassDojo or GroupMe. These are actually apps that the district runs themselves. And nearly half of families reported that they both downloaded their school app and use it regularly. Seventy four percent, almost three quarters of families report that they have downloaded their app and use it at least occasionally. And only about fifteen percent of families said that they hadn't downloaded or didn't know if their district used an app at all.

But what are families looking for when they go to their school app? And it turns out a lot of things. So we did let people select more than one here. So you'll see those percentages do not add up, that is okay. But they most often reported wanting to know things about upcoming events, information and curriculum, what their child is learning and updates about their child's grades.

I was a little surprised to see athletics so far near the bottom. But I think maybe, you know, maybe there are other communication channels that the athletics departments use.

So if we go back to this graph from earlier, district apps aren't just one of the top three ways parents currently learn information. They're also one of the top ways that parents prefer to learn information. So if you have a district app, and you should be using it as a powerful tool for engaging with your families. And if you don't have an app, this might be something that you consider for your own communication strategy.

And while I have this graph up here, I do want to talk about social media. So social media is one of parents least favorite ways to learn new information.

I was curious about this, especially because I've heard from so many school leaders, not just about how time consuming social media is, but about how much it preoccupies their strategy, especially when it comes to reactive communication. So when we think about this graph, I do want to do a callback to some previous research that I've done on school communicators.

So in twenty twenty four, school CEO partnered with INSPRA, the National Public School Relations Association, to research the school, the work of school communicators, including how they spent their time.

So in this study, we found that while school communicators ranked social media as the second most time consuming task on their plate, they didn't view it as particularly important to being effective in their roles. I'm going give you a second to look at this chart and think about your own work.

So in our conversations with school communicators, many expressed frustration around this topic. And while social media is time consuming, they feel a need, schools in general feel a need to post frequently so that families and other stakeholders know that the district's active and that things are happening. But out of the ten options, social media is one of the least preferred communication channels for families. And only about two percent of parents chose it as their most preferred communication method.

And if, as our research indicates, parents don't actually care that much about social media, maybe comms teams shouldn't spend so much time managing it, at least when it comes to parent communication. So should your district wholly abandon social media? I wish I could tell you all yes, but probably not. For people who don't have children in your school, social media could be an incredible window into what's happening.

But you don't have to view social media as the primary channel for communication and families. Instead, you can shift some of the time and attention you're spending on social media toward the channels that your families actually prefer, like your website, your app, or text messages and emails.

Tyler Vawser: We have a question in the Q and A, Brittany. Kevin asks, do schools use social media to provide information for parents or general promotion stuff that both parents and non parents need to know?

Brittany Keil: I think there's a mix of this, honestly. I've seen schools rely on social media, for quick, timely updates, like as far as like snow days and things like that.

But I've also seen more school districts turn to general updates.

I think it depends. It depends on the school district. I know that school districts without lots of sophisticated tools, or maybe who haven't invested in the kind of responsive website that a lot of bigger school districts can have, do use social media in this way.

Tyler Vawser: And one thing I think it's important to note, especially around like bonds and other campaigns that require the community's involvement is to think about, you know, you have a sixty five year old or expected parents that do not yet have kids in the system, they're not going to be in your SIS. They're not going to get the text messages or they may not be as likely to visit the website until they have a moment like Brittany talked about. And so, you want to think about social media maybe more for that audience and less for parents because you have so many other ways to engage parents. And we'll talk about this later, but, you know, how can you survey that group about how they prefer to be communicated with?

Brittany Keil: And this is a, you know, an anecdotal piece of data, but my daughter's school uses social media as the first or her former school, sorry as their first line of communication for weather related outages. So, you know, it is something, especially I think, for really small schools that people still rely on.

Tyler Vawser: There's a couple other comments that are really, really smart. Kim mentioned that their social media focuses on sharing information to the community, so the community can see inside of the schools. I think that's a really good point. And again, they don't always have that view because they're not in the building, they're not interacting with teachers and staff as much.

And so you really want to use other communication channels in that way. And I think one thing that we've seen too is that school apps and district apps that allow anyone to download it and they can see the news there without a login, that can also be a really impactful way to share, like push notifications through an app to someone that's not otherwise on your SIS list. And one other comment I'll make on this is on our podcast, we had an episode about social media. And one of the suggestions and one of the challenges is to think about how we use social media.

Usually it's like social media is this creative space where we share positive stories.

But we don't always think that way about more traditional channels. And we did a webinar on this back at the end of twenty twenty four.

You've got your text messages and your voicemails, and those tend to be schools closed because of snow or kind of just the business agenda is how we use those traditional channels. But those channels too, like social media, can be used to share really positive stories and you can make those more creative, and that actually disrupts the noise of those channels only being used to talk about board meetings and weather events. So my encouragement to you is use social media, be careful of how much time you spend, but take the creativity that you put into Twitter or Facebook and or Instagram and see how you can bring that into those more traditional communication channels to reach the parents and those that are within your SIS system.

Brittany Keil: Tyler has a very creative principal of a school that his kids attend who leaves lots of very wonderful voicemails that are very popular among parents.

Tyler Vawser: Yes.

Brittany Keil: So in addition to asking about which communication channels families prefer, we also wanted to understand which school or district employees families most trust to relay important information.

And who do you think they said? You'll probably saw the slide. Teachers. So overwhelmingly, parents said that they preferred to hear about teachers, and there's a couple of good reasons for this.

So in previous research, we've discussed about how crucial it is that district personnel at all levels, from the classroom to the central office, work to reinforce the best aspects of your district's brand. And while national research has long held that principals have a particularly powerful role in maintaining your district's credibility, our latest study uncovered something new and something challenging for me as an education researcher. Parents want to hear from their teachers too, and even consider them to be one of the district's most trustworthy sources of information. And so to clarify, this finding doesn't mean that superintendents, communications directors, or principals aren't communicating valuable information, but the information that teachers share is typically more specific and personalized.

They are more likely to have those kinds of relationships with families where families know what to expect from them and also trust what they're going to say. When families hear from superintendents or communications directors, they may expect something to be more general or less pressing. But when they hear from teachers, they're looking for something specifically about their child.

So as you think about your communication strategy, keep this finding in mind. Superintendents and comms directors can and should still communicate valuable information.

But when you have an update with you don't want to miss, you don't want your families to miss, how can you bring teachers into this part of your communication plan? And how can you make sure that teachers are on top of what's going on with your district's brand?

So like we said earlier, the role of communication can't be overstated when it comes to establishing trust with your community. But when it comes to how different communication strategies actually move the needle on trust, there hadn't been a lot of research before this study.

So that's why a core question we had going into this research is how does communication influence families trust and satisfaction with their school districts? So to try to get at an answer here, we asked parents how satisfied they were with their school district and how much they trusted the district. And we also asked them questions about their perceptions of district communication. How satisfied were they with their communication?

How often did they receive communication from the district? And how relevant was the district communication to them and their child and their family? How did they perceive communication from the district? And did they think of it as mostly positive or negative?

And out of this came a lot of really exciting findings.

So before I give you the answer to the question, I do want to share one more interesting thing. So we asked our respondents, do you perceive information or communication from your child's district to be mostly positive or mostly negative or a mix of both? And over seventy percent of our respondents said the communication from their child's district was mostly positive. And just under twenty percent said that was mixed and only nine percent of respondents reported communication from their district to be mostly negative. So back to my original question, how does communication influence families trust with their district? But you probably see where we're going to go with this.

When parents get frequent communication from their district, and when that communication is positive and relevant to their child, they are more likely to be satisfied with their child's school district. Parents who were satisfied with their district's communication were also more likely to trust their district.

Often we hear school leaders and communicators worry that they're blasting families with too much communication, but our data actually doesn't support this fear. The more frequent communication actually led to higher parent satisfaction, as long as the communication was both positive and relevant. So what do you want to avoid? You know, what could possibly impact this trust? Only sending neutral or negative communication, only sending generic information, and then communicating infrequently.

Infrequent destroys parent satisfaction. This was a really exciting finding for me because I think that it really shows the impact of the work that so many of us do around school communication.

So let's review.

Families prefer your school website over any other communications channel.

More than half of parents use their district apps regularly. Social media is one of their least favorite ways to learn new information.

And over half of parents indicated that they prefer receiving important but non urgent updates through app, website, newsletters, and not text.

And parents trust teachers to communicate valuable information above anyone else.

And parents who are pleased with their school communications are more likely to trust and be satisfied with their schools.

I'm going to pause there just in case we have any questions in the chat.

Tyler Vawser: Yeah, Monica just read a question. Is there any insight on communication differences or different preferences between elementary? So thinking pre K through five, and those that have secondary, so secondary families, those with sixth to twelfth grade.

Brittany Keil: This was something that we wondered about too. So elementary families definitely prefer more communication from their district, which makes sense, than secondary parents, especially if the children are older. However, there's a drop in satisfaction around the middle grades, where families aren't yet used to a decrease in communication or maybe more communication going through their child, going from the elementary grades to the secondary grades. So if you've got sixth through eighth graders in your district, that's a big transition point, especially for families. You know, they've got a lot of teachers, the teachers are relying on them more to communicate to their parents. You might need to help a little bit so that it looks more like the experience that the families had at the elementary level.

Tyler Vawser: And real world situation, my kids go to an elementary school and kind of the word on the street about the middle school that they will feed into is that they're not as good as the elementary school. And as I've dug into that with parents, they basically comes down to they just don't communicate like the elementary school did. And exactly what Brittany just said, the expectations are really high because the elementary school does that really well. And the middle school just doing a little bit less and maybe not as positive and not as frequent. And so I think that's a really good note to middle school principals, in particular for sixth grade families, thinking about how you kind of bridge that change in communication.

Brittany Keil: And, you know, like I said, I was a teacher for ten years. I taught tenth graders, which are like the baby est of elementary Or sorry, of secondary school, you know, high schoolers. And I love them, but they have sometimes a really hard time relaying and retaining information to their families. I have a nephew right now who we attended one of his swim meets, I asked him if he could share the schedule.

And he said, Oh, there's no schedule. The coach just tells us a week ahead of time. And I was like, I have worked in schools. I know that is not how schools work.

I know that's not how athletics work. But in his, you know, Fortnite brain, that's how it does.

Tyler Vawser: Another question was, and this is a great question, is how were parents selected to be the serve, who sorry. How were parents selected to be surveyed? Were they only surveyed if they were Apptegy clients? So the second half of that question is no. So this was a nationally represented survey. We use a service that is able to put these questions out to parents across the country, and they opt in and they answer the questions. And we have some fail safe measures to make sure that it's legitimate parents and we qualify that.

Brittany Keil: Yeah, we actually have no idea whose clients or what kind of communication methods their schools use. So no, we did not just survey our clients. Although that would be interesting to compare with the national data, we'll say.

Tyler Vawser: Laura asked, Is there a difference in what parents want from their district versus what they want from their school?

Brittany Keil: We had a hard time with families figuring out how to define district communication versus school communication, because we didn't wanna muddy things too much.

We were worried that if we focused too heavily on one or the other, that we might confuse families, especially since, you know, in our previous research, we found that families sometimes can't tell the difference between district communication and school communication, especially if it's coming through text messages or an app that is a little bit of both.

But I think that this question probably shines the most in who do you expect, who you trust to communicate from the district. So teachers and school based communication are in general more popular. I think that's because people perceive them to be more personalized, but that doesn't have to be the case.

In the article, which I encourage y'all definitely to read and feel free to reach out to me about questions, but we talk about how personalized communication has become a real expectation in the age of AI and the age of really sophisticated marketing funnels on the private sector. Most schools are at a disadvantage for this because obviously you don't probably have, based on my previous research, a marketing team of fifty plus individuals, personalized communication, or at least communication that is perceived to be relevant and personalized will help your district communication.

Tyler Vawser: We'll talk about this a little bit later, but next week I'm presenting at NCE with the superintendent and chief comms officer at Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland, one of the largest districts in the country, and they have done this really well, where they're just very good at getting voices involved, and one of the things that they talk about is you need obviously like a district communication strategy, but you also need, you know, there's a difference between this community and that community that have different schools, and while they're maybe under the same district, you need to create some distinction in how you communicate because expectations are different, backgrounds are different. And so I think having an overarching strategy is very important, but then also tailoring those tactics as it were to individual communities is so important.

Brittany Keil: And we're gonna dig into this in a minute, but also thinking about how can you prepare teachers since they are so trusted to represent not just their schools, but the districts as well.

All right, I'm gonna keep going just for the sake of time, but again, questions are so fun, so please keep them coming. So what can you do? And this is where we're going to get really into the tactics.

So first, we highly recommend that you conduct an audit of your communication channels.

So our data was national, but we know that every community is just a little bit different.

So some questions that we got in the survey or that we recommend that you ask yourself is, does your website offer a good user experience? Is it up to date?

Do you offer a district app that allows families to access info about events, curriculum, and updates all in one place? And then given families' indicated preferences, are we over relying on social media or text? And I didn't touch a lot about text messages in the earlier part of the presentation, but we're going to go ahead and dig into that now.

So we had an open response question that was, what do you wish your child's district would change about their communication? And interestingly, text messages came up a lot here. So here's a couple of quotes. I want better information on the school website that's relevant, up to date, and easier to navigate. I wish they had an updated app that they posted content on regularly.

And then anything major should be a text, but anything that's minor or the rest can be a newsletter or something else. A lot of families see text messages as urgent communication, I. E. The school district is closing early, something is happening you need to know about right now. And so relying as text as a more non urgent communication method can stress some families out.

Our second recommendation is to align communication at all levels, and we know this is easier said than done. So once you've taken a look at where your communication stands, you need to start developing a strategy for how you can bring that work into alignment across all levels of your staff. So in our conversations with school communicators, we often hear about how challenging it is to keep track of who is communicating with families and when. And that's not to mention that all of the school adjacent communication that families may be receiving, such as emails from the booster club or the PTA or automated alerts from different school softwares or apps.

Parents also may not understand the difference between certain communication channels like text messages or push notifications, for example. I actually have a personal experience of this. So I was meeting with a parent when I was a teacher, and, you know, I asked her what she thought of my weekly newsletter. And she was like, the weekly newsletter is fine, but I all of the other emails you send, how many emails do I get from you a week?

Twenty, twenty five? I was flabbergasted. I only sent one email. What was she talking about?

And after some deep conversation, I realized that she had signed up for an alert in our SIS where every time a grade was put in, or Gradebook, sorry, she would get an email. She thought those emails were coming from me. And so when she got my weekly newsletter, she thought that I was just sending yet another of many emails, many of which aren't very important, especially since I would put my bill work in every day. And so it'd be a small five point assignment that she would get an email about every single day.

So of course, you don't want to overwhelm your families with too much communication. But as we learned in our survey, families actually have a higher level of satisfaction with their district if communication is more frequent, as long as it's perceived to be positive and relevant.

So in districts where it does feel overwhelming, it's possible that the communication just may not be aligned at all levels. Frustrating families who are trying to find a logical pattern if there is none.

So this means that to the best of your ability, you need to find a way to track what communication is being sent out to families at each level, at the district level, the campus level, and even the classroom level, and then build a strategy about who communicates what and when.

So a way to break this down is to make a list of your district's communicators and establish what information is communicated by who, when and where. I'm going to share a couple more open responses, answers with you, and these do seem to contradict one another. Gonna tell you why I agree with both, even though what they're saying sounds like they're saying different things.

I wish the district would streamline their communication, focusing on consistency and clarity, engaging with parents through multiple channels like email, text, and an app that you can ensure important messages aren't missed and everyone stays informed.

Right?

And then the second, one change I'd wish is for more proactive and consistent updates about events, deadlines, and curriculum changes, ideally in a centralized, easy to access platform. This would make it easier for parents to stay informed without having to search through multiple emails or different portals.

Remember the slide from earlier? When I suggest that you need both multiple channels without overwhelming parents and asking them to sit through a sift through a ton of information, I'm suggesting more a strategy that's in response to parents' preferences. I'm suggesting that we move beyond efficiency to effectiveness.

So if parents prefer websites over social media and our data suggests they do, then how can you build a system for keeping your website up to date? If parents are already using regularly school apps, which nationally we see that they are, what would it look like to have a district app that serves as a one stop shop for information? And then think back to that one open response answer from earlier in the presentation. Anything major can be a text, the rest can be a newsletter or something else. So don't stop sending texts and emails, but really get strategic about what you use them for and when. Strategy is less less efficient, but far more effective.

Tyler Vawser: I think there was a question about newsletters. Did the survey distinguish between, like, classroom, like, teacher newsletters, district newsletters, or was it we we didn't make that distinction in the questions?

Brittany Keil: We didn't make that distinction in the question. Again, we didn't want to overwhelm our respondents with too many nuanced versions of communication. Again, I would be curious about that distinction, but that's the challenge of a researcher. How do you make your survey short enough that people take it and take it well, but long enough that you get the kind of data you need to really dig into things.

So our third recommendation is to get to know your own families and their preferences. So our survey was nationally representative. But as I said earlier, there's an important caveat. The best way to know what your school community preferred is to ask them directly. Your own family's preferences are dependent on a lot of factors from their socioeconomic situations to the ages of their kids, as we kind of talked about earlier. One way to learn this information is through a communication survey, which we cover elsewhere in this issue. You can look on page thirty eight if you have your hard copy in front of you.

Knowing what your community prefers and how this varies at different campuses and among school levels is the most powerful step you can take toward meeting your families where they are.

I encourage you, if you want, you can follow the QR code if you don't have your physical copy in front of you. I do not. Mine is in a box somewhere, and I frantically looked for it this morning and was unsuccessful. But we talk about designing a communication survey. And I actually worked with Tiffany Kinch out of a district in Kansas who just ran one for this exact purposes, where she wanted to understand communication channels. So I highly recommend it.

Tyler Vawser: One comment I'll make real quickly, and this is gonna come up when we present at NCE, but Anne Arundel, of course, very large district, they do all the types of surveys that you're familiar with. But Bob Mosier, the chief comms officer, talks about you don't always have to overcomplicate it, and so they've had some schools that on back to school night, they just get a really big poster board with sticky notes and a Sharpie, and they'll ask a question, right? How do you want to be communicated with? And people can fill it out and they put it on there.

One, like good experience, right? Because it's different than clicking on a mouse on your computer screen. It's more tactile. It's also immediate.

And so, think you need multiple ways of surveying people, but especially for principals, and we have research about their involvement in school marketing and communication too, but those principals can really get that direct feedback very quickly from their specific parents that are coming into the building, right? So design a strategy that involves digital surveys as well as in person surveys where you can get that more immediate feedback and it's a little bit more real when people are putting pen to paper.

Brittany Keil: This is also a good opportunity to think about your teachers as communicators. So your teachers are doing a lot of outreach with families. They're already talking with families. Like, what are they hearing about the district communication? You want to make a space where that feedback can be shared as well.

So when you're planning communication survey, there's a couple of questions to think about. First, why are you doing it? What is it for? What do you need to ask? And how will you distribute the survey? And then when should you conduct the survey? There's a lot of good discussion in the article about the best time of year to conduct a communication survey, because sometimes you want to do them at the end of the year so that you can plan for next year, but also families are so overwhelmed and tired by the end of the year that they may not be as responsive, and so thinking about really what's most strategic for your purposes.

I also recommend you leverage tools like AI to lighten the load of the data analysis.

If you're not doing this already with your open responses of your surveys, I can't recommend it enough. It's absolutely fantastic. It's like having a whole team of researchers.

So our fourth recommendation is to involve your teachers in your communication strategy. So in our findings, we found that families trust their child's teacher among all other district personnel to communicate valuable information. That means that teachers are some of your most powerful communicators. But what is your district doing to make sure that they're prepared and prepared to train to communicate both effectively and within the bounds of your brand?

So a couple of years ago, School CEO studied the role of teachers in the district's communication strategy.

And in twenty twenty two, we did a study called Who Speaks for Your Brand that established that teachers already think of themselves as brand ambassadors and view promoting the district's brand as part of their jobs. So in response to this statement, I feel it's my responsibility to improve district's reputation when I speak with someone about the district. Seventy two percent of teachers said somewhat or strongly that they agreed, and less than ten percent of teachers disagreed. This was a similar number for classified staff as well.

But here's the problem. The same study found that teachers were rarely trained on their school or district's branding and communication strategies. So nearly a quarter of teachers received no training whatsoever about their school or district's brand.

Your communications team's biggest hurdle is not getting teachers invested. They're already invested. It's keeping them up to date and on brand and equipping them with tools to make this easier. So this means you need an effective internal communication strategy, not to mention a plan to train teachers and other staff members on your district's branding and messaging priority. However, it's absolutely worth it. Not only are they incredibly trusted by your community, they're also already invested in making sure they're doing this well.

Tyler Vawser: And I put the link to that survey and research in the chat as well. So if you're not familiar with that yet, definitely take a look. Especially important for communication instructors as you think about how you can train them, right? Don't leave it to chance. Don't leave it to just, you know, onboarding or back to school in August, but think about how you can consistently train them throughout the year about what matters most to you and what message you want to put out about the district.

Brittany Keil: And some of my favorite examples of teacher training are not necessarily full out formal, full blown PDs, but rather bite sized training pieces that happen throughout the year. I know an assistant communicator, again in Kansas, named Ben Booth, who sends out biweekly recommendations for teachers about branding. Sometimes these are updates about what's going on in the district, but other times they are just like, Hey, your email signature should look like this, does it? This is how you change it. Or, Hey, here's where you can find our brand guidelines. If you've been using our logo, this is where you should get it from. And so just making sure that you're continually training teachers, especially as teachers have turnover every year, change positions, change schools, They need that constant reinforcement.

Our respondents had a lot to say about wanting to hear more from teachers. So these are just a couple of open responses. I hope my child's teacher can send me more messages.

I hope teachers can increase the frequency of their communication, and I hope the teacher can call me more and communicate with me. I hope the school and the teachers can cooperate more closely so that the parents will feel more at ease.

This relationship is something you should absolutely be thinking about. And this is, you know, I don't want to say this is an easy lift. There are a lot of teachers, especially if you're a communicator who's a shop of one, which I know about forty seven percent of you are, but it's definitely worth your effort.

Tyler Vawser: One thing that we're gonna talk about at SchoolCEO Conference, so two of our speakers, maybe I'm previewing too much here, but two of our speakers come from the private sector where they actually help private sector companies sell new products to moms. And one of the things they're gonna talk about is about how the main fear that moms have is actually this fear of doubt, right? And Brittany even mentioned it about her experience of moving from one state to another and enrolling in a new school is this sense of doubt, right? And I think, you know, this is true of all parents, but in particular, how do we address that doubt with moms?

Both sending their kids to a new school, but just engaging with the teachers in the school all the time. And so at the conference, they're gonna talk about how do you reach moms? You're not selling products to moms, but you need to know how to address their concerns, what works well with them, and then really get inside of their minds to better address what communication they want to hear from the school and from the teachers and even from the district.

Brittany Keil: So in review, we have a couple recommendations. First, make an audit of all your communications channels and align them at all levels, and then get to know your unique family's preferences and consider conducting a survey if you haven't already. And then the fourth is just to involve teachers in your communication strategy. I kind of already previewed this, but we're now a week into our new school district. My daughter last night, she was talking to her grandparents, and they asked her if she missed her old school. And she said, I miss my old school, but my new school is way better.

And that is the kind of validation any parent wants to hear straight from the very, you know, my daughter is not trying to impress anybody, she's just calling it like it is. She's very happy there, and as a family, we're very satisfied. And part of that is communication, part of that is just the incredible programs that they're communicating about. Because even if great things are happening at your district, if nobody's communicating and sharing, then families don't know.

So we have a couple little wrap up things.

Tyler, do you want to share about this? I will not be presenting in New Orleans because the chance that I would have a baby in New Orleans was way too high. But I think that Tyler, Doctor. Bedell and Bob Mosier will do a fantastic job.

Tyler Vawser: So a lot of what you heard today will present in New Orleans. So if you're a superintendent or you're attending or your superintendent that you work for is going, please let them know about this. It's going to include the research that we talked about today. But more than that, it's gonna show you very much how Anne Arundel County Public Schools has been doing this really well. And just a little bit of a preview of it, I think one of the things Anne Arundel has done so well is that they don't build a communication strategy and then push that to their community. Instead, they do a really good job of engaging their community to shape the communication strategy.

And so, they'll talk about how they've engaged the community on all kinds of challenging topics, And while not everyone in their community, of course, agrees with every decision that's made, they understand the reasoning and they had a seat at the table. They had an opportunity to voice their opinion. Not everybody takes that, but all of that, along with surveys and along with how they communicate, even something as simple as a snow delay or a snow closure, has really built a lot of trust with the community, right? The goal is not to get your community to agree with one hundred percent of your decisions, but that when you make a decision, even when they disagree with it, that they trust you. And so we're gonna talk about this research in more detail, but really get more hands on about what this can look like within your schools.

Brittany Keil: And if you're not familiar with Maryland, know, Anne Arundel is a very large district, and it's also very diverse, and there's a lot of school choice in Maryland. So, you know, they are thinking about this from a highly strategic lens that parent satisfaction is important. And I'm really sad I don't get to go to the session. So if you are going to NCE, please go for me.

Tyler Vawser: There's been a few, oh, sorry, there's been a few questions about the resources from this. So can we get the slides? Is there a recording? The answer is yes.

So we'll provide that in the coming hours or days where you can access this recording, as well as the slides, and that way if you wanna present it back to your cabinet or to others within the district, you certainly can. And then our team, especially Brittany and school CEO, we're always doing interviews with school leaders and others that work in schools to understand what's going well for you, what challenges are you facing? And that really informs the magazine and the podcast and all the work that we put out there. So if you have questions, you know, sign up for our newsletter, but also reply to that newsletter or find us on the website and send us an email about what questions you have because SchoolCEO and Apptegy, we're all about making this about you and making sure that it's helpful and useful.

Brittany Keil: Yes, we get one hundred percent of the responses to our newsletter. You can also email me at brittney@schoolceo.com. I always like to end these sessions by saying, you know, this is the end of a presentation, but I hope it's the beginning of a conversation. If you've got something you wanna shout out about your district, we are in the business of making schools look good, feel free to reach out and thank you so much for coming today.

Tyler Vawser: Thank you everyone, really appreciate it and talk to you soon.