Sending information to staff is easy. Making sure they actually see it, engage with it, and act on it? That's the hard part.

In this session, we'll walk through five practical principles for internal communication that staff actually use and we'll be joined by a district leader sharing what's worked for them heading into Back-to-School.

Related Resources

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Your School District's Intranet Isn't Broken. It's Just Not an Intranet.

A K-12 staff intranet isn’t a static page where documents go to die. It’s a staff hub: one trusted place where district updates, campus communication, and internal resources stay current and where leaders can see whether messages actually landed.

What Would It Mean If You Actually Knew Your Staff Got the Message?

Most district leaders assume internal communication is working. Here’s how to find out and what to do about it.

Transcript

Monica McClellan: All right, cool. We're heading pretty steady here on participants, so we're going to go ahead and get started. Hi, everyone. So welcome back if you joined us last month.

This is a three-part series webinar, but if you missed last session, no biggie at all. I am going to do a quick summary.

Monica McClellan: Sorry, one second. Hi, Marissa. Well, welcome if you are new.

Monica McClellan: So today's session is all about reaching every staff member, every staff member, strategies for internal communication that actually land. So whether you found out about this webinar through a website, an email, or through the Apptegy platform, the goal with this webinar in today's session is to dive into

Monica McClellan: what we've seen our top districts do with internal communication. And specifically, there's five things that we've seen work. And so this kind of like five principles or system is what we're going to dive into. And then we have Matt here, which we'll introduce in a second.

Monica McClellan: to kind of do, a quick summary on what's worked for him specifically in this district. So, with that said, let's go ahead and dive in, and I'm gonna give a little bit more of a summary, like I said in our last session, to build on top of all this. So…

Monica McClellan: First things first, doing some housekeeping. We are recording this session, so you will get a replay in your inbox, most likely tomorrow or Friday. So if you have to hop earlier, if you want to send this to other folks within your district, definitely be on the lookout for that.

Monica McClellan: Secondly, there is a chat function which some of you have already found and probably already know about if you've joined a webinar through Zoom before. And then also there's a Q&A section. So as questions pop up throughout the presentation, please, please, please use those. I find webinars are much more effective if you guys are asking questions throughout the entire presentation because it's a little bit more engaging.

Monica McClellan: We definitely have some folks here while I'm presenting be able to answer those questions, and then we'll definitely have a Q&A section at the end. So please keep that top of mind as well.

Monica McClellan: Alright, let's get into it. So, first of all, we'd love to hear from you. So, a couple of you, have already thrown in the chat, but if you can, please throw in, your name, where you're from, your role, in the chat, so we can just see where everyone's from.

Monica McClellan: And then for folks that weren't with us last month, in our first session, my name is Monica McClellan, I'm product marketing here at Apptegy, so basically that means I help products, that Apptegy builds, I help market them, in the most simplistic terms.

Monica McClellan: And then help people adopt them within the Apptegy platform. And then the special guest we have today is Matt. Matt, do you want to talk about who you are, where you're from?

Matt Schrank: Yeah, my name is Matt Schrank. I am from South Dakota. I am the technology coordinator and teacher and.

Matt Schrank: girls basketball coach, and sometimes communications director, amongst other things, at Garrison School District. I did see a South Dakota come through the chat, so I think it was from Madison, which is… oh, Murdo, a couple South Dakotas, so that… that looks awesome.

Monica McClellan: Yep, Matt wears a lot of hats, which is not surprising, so.

Monica McClellan: Love, love to see it. So many good places.

Matt Schrank: Yeah, we are in the district of just less than 500, so I think sometimes you get asked to do a little bit more to keep the train on the tracks, but that's fine. I'm ready for it.

Monica McClellan: Yep. Yep. I'm seeing some New Jersey, South Dakota, Texas. Yeah, we got people, Colorado, we got people all over the country.

Tennessee. Amazing. And that kind of brings me to my first.

Monica McClellan: Point here. So as I mentioned, I want to do a quick recap of what our first session landed about and to build on the foundation. So here at Apptegy, obviously what we do all day long, which is my favorite part, and Mitch, who's here, who's in our last session, our favorite part here is talking to districts. We like to dig into what are their pain points.

Monica McClellan: How can we help them? What can we build here at Apptegy that helps solve those pain points? And the number one thing that we kept hearing across the board

Monica McClellan: For the last five plus years is we need to solve internal communication. We need an internet. We need somewhere we can better communicate with our staff. And so we took many different data points to understand really and dig into what this pain point was so that we can then build something that solves the overarching pain point.

Monica McClellan: We host SchoolCEO Conference every single year. If you don't know about that, go to our website. Definitely, definitely come. It's in September in Texas this year, so if you don't have tickets yet, I already highly recommend.

But we use that session as a way to get in front of our districts and talk to them. We have multiple phone calls

Monica McClellan: every week to talk to districts about these pain points. We have a cab set up, meaning we have a couple of different districts where we talk about and really get into the nitty gritty on products and what would solve things and what wouldn't. We have some awesome AI tools that kind of gather a bunch of different calls that we've had with AEs and our

Monica McClellan: CSM teams to kind of conglomerate all those together to understand, here are the top pain points that we're seeing when it comes to internal communication, and here are the systems and things that they're utilizing right now within their district to help solve those pain points.

Monica McClellan: So when we are building tool to kind of help solve this internal communication.

Monica McClellan: standpoint, we are definitely using this data to help inform us. And so last session, we talked about kind of like the problems, the pain points, what's maybe falling short. And in this session, we're going to be digging more into what is the system or principles, like I mentioned, that kind of help then

Monica McClellan: alleviate that pain. And what is the product that we created to help solve all of the pain points.

Monica McClellan: So, first of all, we talked about this hierarchy. We talked about sharing is not communication, and communication is not engagement. And so, there's a lot of different layers and levels to that. Basically, sharing is… is what exactly it sounds like.

And most districts

Monica McClellan: fall into this sharing category, right? We spend a lot of time on internal communications, and we're just sending the email, we're posting the document, we're sending that out, right?

Monica McClellan: And then we're wondering why staff don't act on it, don't know it, right? And when I say act on it, it means anytime you're sending something out to your staff, it requires them to do an action. It requires them to open the email or open the response, digest and read whatever you sent them, right?

Monica McClellan: And real impact requires all three layers. So not just sharing it, but actually being able to communicate with them two-way after you send that all in one place.

Monica McClellan: And then also to be able to engage, who actually read it?

Monica McClellan: Who's actually following up with questions and commenting and reacting to that message? So where we see most districts land is in that sharing component, some in that communication, hardly ever in that engagement layer where you can actually see who's reacting and commenting all in one place.

Monica McClellan: And then second, the biggest piece, right, is what are the solutions or band-aids that districts are using right now? We knew that the solutions out there right now weren't working, otherwise we wouldn't have gotten so much feedback on, hey, this is a huge pain point we need after G to figure out.

Monica McClellan: And so what we're seeing is a lot of people using intranet. When I say intranet, it's like a static website where they can, you know, staff can log in. It's maybe like a website where they can navigate, but it's a lot of just like links and things and resources to a, you know, database of stuff.

Monica McClellan: Then you have drives, then you have email lists, you have a lot of fragmentation, some districts using texting, a lot of different things in different places, and again, it's optimized for sending, right? We shared it, we did it, we posted it in the drive, we have a link to it.

Monica McClellan: But the systems themselves cap the district at the lowest level of the hierarchy, right? So because of all that chaos, fragmentation, and sharing, that… that definitely doesn't land as far as these top districts and what we're seeing and what they've figured out when it comes to internal communication.

Monica McClellan: And so in the last session, we kind of had you guys do some homework if you did attend.

Monica McClellan: with 3 questions. So if you attended last session and you have those questions, definitely keep thinking about those. Hopefully, you have those answers. If you did not attend, here are the 3 questions, and definitely think about them as we go throughout the webinar.

The 1st one is, where do staff actually go for trusted information?

Monica McClellan: If there's multiple places, if it's fragmented, chaotic.

Monica McClellan: Something to definitely, like, raise a flag there.

Monica McClellan: Can you measure whether they've seen what you sent? And so that comes into the other hierarchy, right?

Monica McClellan: And then lastly, could a brand new hire find what they did on — what they need on day one?

Monica McClellan: So today's session is about how to actually move up that hierarchy. So how to go from where we're seeing most districts, which is sharing to communication into real engagement. And here's the thing. You've done most of this work already, but just not for staff, maybe.

Monica McClellan: So let's look at Let's dive into a little bit more.

Monica McClellan: most of you here, have what we offer here at Apptegy, which is outbound communication. So this is the most important slide of the day, so stay with me on this.

Monica McClellan: If you think about what you've built for your families and communities, parents, students, over, let's say, the last, like, 5 years, 10 years, could be 2 years.

Monica McClellan: With here at Apptegy, you have a district-branded mobile app.

Monica McClellan: Not just a website, but a true mobile app with push notifications. You have a way to send targeted messages. So where the second grade parents get that one update, the high school parents get a different one through a different thing. You have read and engagement analytics.

Monica McClellan: You can see exactly which campaigns are landing and what are not, right?

Monica McClellan: You have two way conversations where families can reply and you can respond. You of course have multi language support, right? Because everyone has different language needs. Most of this is mobile first, right?

So it should be a frictionless experience for families. This is real engagement, right?

Monica McClellan: right from an outbound perspective.

Monica McClellan: You're not just sharing information. You can measure it. You can optimize it. You know what works.

Monica McClellan: So then if we pivot, and you look at what your staff actually have, right, you have email.

Monica McClellan: the majority of people have email, and they have more email. That's, like, their number one way to communicate. Maybe you have some texting thrown in there, which isn't great, because that's just more fragmentation, and you can't actually see who's saying what.

Monica McClellan: You maybe have an internet. Maybe no one checks it. Maybe they do, but they're not really sure if everything's updated.

Monica McClellan: You have, like, that static page for internal resources in there, but there's no targeting, there's no measurement, there's no two-way, it's just sharing into a black box. So the question…

Monica McClellan: That we want to sit with, right, is why give families a vastly better communication experience than even your own staff?

Monica McClellan: Why is outbound so polished and inbound so broken? And maybe that's why a lot of you are here is because you recognize that. You're like, I saw this outbound communication for the most part. Like maybe there's some tweaks here and there, but I know my internal communication, the foundation of what we have within our district hasn't, we haven't necessarily solved that pain point.

Monica McClellan: And maybe that fragmentation and chaos is just creating more friction for that outbound experience, right? Like, if your staff and the communication internally isn't

Monica McClellan: tight-knit and locked in, and you have a good strategy and process there, then the outbound communication isn't going to be as strong, because not everyone is on the same page, or not everyone saw that resource or that update, and that's creating some more friction.

Monica McClellan: So that's what today we're going to dive into a little bit more about. And so before we do that, I want to hear from you guys first. We did this in the last session, but I really like to get a poll and understanding from you all on what your current setup within your district is. So I'm going to launch a poll here.

Monica McClellan: Give me 1 second, I'll give you guys, a couple.

Monica McClellan: a minute or so to answer this, but what is your communication reality right now with family? So, how would your family communication today compare to your staff communication? So, five being amazing, and then one being, not so great.

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

Monica McClellan: You guys are really fast, which is amazing.

Monica McClellan: Okay, I think we have.

Monica McClellan: majority of folks who answered. Okay, so it looks like most of you would rate your family communication pretty high. So we're at about a 55% of you think, you know, four, which is pretty good. And then when it comes to internal communication, most of you are sitting more of that three to two range, which is what is to be expected.

And so hopefully you guys are like, that's why I'm here. I want to dig more into

Monica McClellan: What do I need to know going into back to school? What structure, what processes do I need to build?

Monica McClellan: So, let's get into kind of more of the meat, too, of this, of, like, that system, that process that I had talked about.

Monica McClellan: And so these are the 5 principles that we're going to talk about throughout the rest of the webinar. Each one builds on top of each other. That's important to note. They're not going to be something that you can do one of these and not have them work.

And again, this is where we took all of the data points that we've been working on internally and put together this plan based off of here the pain points. But then the districts that had figured out internal communication. This is what was working for them. And so we

Monica McClellan: bill our StaffConnect product, right?

Monica McClellan: which we'll talk more about in another session to mirror this system process. But this is definitely something that you can still do within your district without that. And so I'll dive into more of these.

Monica McClellan: one trusted place, two-way communication, targeting, accountability, and then mobile first. So, let's start with the foundation piece of this. So, the first principle

Monica McClellan: One trusted place, which when you, when we talk to districts, consolidation is like the number one thing that we hear, right? Like we want something, some vendor or some place that can handle all the things that we need to do, especially when it comes to communication, because it's too chaotic. There's just too much going on. And if we don't know where to look, that's where we're falling, right?

Monica McClellan: And so

Monica McClellan: A lot of you guys have, you know, directing your families to that one mobile branded app for your district. You consolidated that, right? And so now I think when we're seeing on the staff side, that's not the case, right? We're still seeing that chaos of we expect you to check your email and the internet and the Google Drive and the bulletin board and your text and

Monica McClellan: So on and so on.

Monica McClellan: And so this, again, none of these are groundbreaking. It's all common sense, but what works together is this system all building on top of each other. So starting with one trusted place is the winner here. And so some of you have an internet, and that's great.

Monica McClellan: But then the question becomes principle number two, this two-way engagement piece.

Monica McClellan: You have two-way engagement communication, right? Most of you have two-way set up with your community. Some of you have community experience, which is another product we launched earlier this year. So your community is easily able to get information back and forth, right?

You have your website has all this great information, but if they have follow-up questions, they can easily access you.

Monica McClellan: and get that information all in one place within the same platform.

Monica McClellan: On the staff side, ask yourself, do you have that same place? Because if you have an old-school internet like SharePoint, for example, it is just one static page that you're updating with resources. But you don't have that two-way piece, right? It's just that black box.

You're crossing your fingers. You're hoping that they read the information. You're hoping they digest it.

Monica McClellan: everything goes out, nothing comes back in. Or maybe there's one-off conversations that are coming in, but you actually don't really know, okay, how did everyone else digest this information? Did those same people have that information, or did they even see it?

Monica McClellan: Right? That's where things fall off. And so, staff communication, when they can react, when they can comment, when it's in a thread and all in one place, that's where adoption happens. That's where that beats just the read receipts, and that two-way

Monica McClellan: is next level. And so what this looks like in real districts

Monica McClellan: is specifically when we come to adoption, because that was another piece, right? If you have an Internet, but it's outdated, or it has so much information, it is inundating your staff members. Maybe they completely disregard it. Right?

You need a place where they can actually

Monica McClellan: are familiar with it.

Monica McClellan: And they actually know how to use it. It's simple, and the information that's in there for them, they can easily adopt. Because as you know, if they're not adopting it, they don't welcome it, they don't use it, then there's no point of adding. You've just added another tool to add another tool, and you actually haven't fixed the problem, right?

Monica McClellan: So having a trusted place, having two-way engagement, being able to engage both ways so you know that they've actually seen and digested and can follow up in one place with that information, and then within that dish… within your

Monica McClellan: specific space, they can actually adopt it because it's something they're familiar with. It's a place that they're used to familiar with is the thing that's going to actually land.

Monica McClellan: with with your staff. So

Monica McClellan: So now let's build on top of that, right? So what are the three principles?

Monica McClellan: that build on this foundation.

Monica McClellan: targeting.

Monica McClellan: So, this is Marketing 101, but for your marketing folks, or non-marketing folks.

Monica McClellan: You need to have spaces that are built out that are based on building level, based on role, based on team, based on club, whatever it may be, but it needs to be a relevant space. So when you're communicating to that group, which I'm sure most of you have different email lists, you guys are familiar with this. I need to just talk to this group of people, my math teachers.

Monica McClellan: or whatever, you have that list that you can pull from. But remember, this is a system that we're building on top of, so…

Monica McClellan: Is it one?

Monica McClellan: one place for all their information. Is it 2 way?

Monica McClellan: Your bus drivers obviously don't need that same update that your teachers do, some of the frontline staff. So when everything goes to everyone, this is where that inundation comes, right? Staff learn fast that most of it isn't for them, and they stop opening everything.

Monica McClellan: If they see all that information, they just, again, get inundated, overwhelmed, and it's too much, right? They're already doing a thousand things over here and talking to the family members, but internally, when you have urgent, specific messages that need to get to the right audience, making sure that it's targeted and to that right audience is super important. And so sending less

Monica McClellan: actually means more, and this is where people start paying attention more, right? So it needs to be targeted and relevant to them.

Monica McClellan: And then principle four is visibility and accountability. So this is where having read receipts, engagement data, this is where you're taking it to that next level.

Monica McClellan: This is where visibility is critical, because you're not just saying, okay, I'm throwing out into an open box, I'm sharing. Maybe some of them are commenting, reacting, but that only gives you a piece of the puzzle, a specific

Monica McClellan: I need to be able to see everything, and I need to understand who's engaged. So if you're sending out an important message, you have maybe some of that read receipt information, some of them can engage. But if you see, okay, this whole cohort of people haven't actually looked at my message, you can follow up with them individually all in one place.

Monica McClellan: So having that visibility and accountability is huge.

Monica McClellan: Some of the examples that we've seen districts say is, like, okay, I'm gonna post this update, give me a thumbs up if you've actually seen it, digested it, or thread any questions within this specific,

Monica McClellan: announcement. And so that's worked really, really well for some of our districts.

Monica McClellan: And then the last one is obviously mobile first.

Monica McClellan: like, we see this across the board when it comes to frontline staff, like, they're obviously moving around all day long, they don't have time to sit at their computer, or they're checking really quickly in between periods, it's very stressful, they have to log into something new.

Monica McClellan: But having a mobile-first experience, like our district mobile app for,

Monica McClellan: for the community, for your students, but then also having one for staff, is huge, right? So they're being able to log in, see that all the information in one place,

Monica McClellan: it might not exist across the board for all the tools that you're using. And so, having a mobile 1st functionality here is huge. And this is something that we've seen a lot of districts give feedback on.

Monica McClellan: So when you look at the whole foundation of it all, you have the first one that's all in one place, that two-way engagement, which garners then hopefully adoption. And then you're seeing that targeted messaging. So it's very specific to the group that you're talking to, right?

Monica McClellan: with that accountability and then that mobile first. So taking this system in this process, we created something called Staff Connect. And so some of you might have had or seen Staff Connect that launched previously this year. We're going to talk about that in another session and we'll do a full demo on it.

But basically for those that have or haven't seen it, it is our secure staff hub and it centralizes district updates.

Monica McClellan: resources, staff-to-staff communication, all while enabling engagement so leaders can actually see what's being read and discussed.

Monica McClellan: And so Staff Connect is great because that's what we took this system. But again, you can still implement this same system maybe without Staff Connect. So it's something to be thinking about before back to school. But if Staff Connect is something that you're interested in taking advantage of before back to school, definitely, definitely let us know.

Monica McClellan: What,

Monica McClellan: What we have here today is Matt. So Matt introduced himself, obviously, at the beginning, but he was one of our first beta users with Staff Connect. And he's here to talk about his communication process, the structure, and just overall what worked for his district and what didn't.

Monica McClellan: And so getting into again, this was a district that we found had some pain points, was really excited to take care or take advantage of Staff Connect, given a lot of feedback around their communication issues.

Monica McClellan: And so with this kind of structure and process and principles in place, they were able to take advantage of Staff Connect and improve some things. And there's definitely things that we're still working on, too, when it comes to internal communication.

Monica McClellan: All that being said.

Monica McClellan: Hi, Matt, I'm gonna run through some questions for Matt to answer, and then from there talk through what's worked and what hasn't worked for them. So 1st question for you is, what did your staff communication actually look like before you use Staff Connect? And and why did you decide to change it and kind of talk through that 1st process.

Matt Schrank: Yeah, it kind of started with our admin group discussing, you know, I think, I think any, anybody that works in an admin position or with a group that is on an admin team, you hear constantly from your staff that,

Matt Schrank: the number one thing that is failing is communication, usually, from whether it's top-down or aligned or not. And so…

Matt Schrank: We had a hard look at our communication style throughout our district, and we noticed that as far as internal communication, we had, you know, email, obviously, like you said earlier, a lot of emails that got sent, some that often got, unread or, you know, skimmed through.

Matt Schrank: But that was probably our number one, was just internal communication, was email, but then we also kind of found out that we had a middle school group that had a middle school text thread, that they communicated, whether it was

Matt Schrank: you know, a student issue or anything. I mean, they have their own text group, that they went through, and then we also had some teachers using Snapchat,

Matt Schrank: we had kids that needed alternative placement or, you know, go down for some title services, and they were sending Snapchat features or whatever, and so we found out that not only, you know, for me, I get a lot of emails throughout the day, and so my inbox was just full of everything, so there was a good chance that I was going to miss something, but we were also noticing how many different

Matt Schrank: communication styles we had throughout the building. And so I guess for us it was we needed to make a change as far as just finding a tool that was one umbrella where everybody could communicate, and you knew where the internal communication was gonna happen. And so we

Matt Schrank: already had the Rooms feature, and so for our district, we already utilized the,

Matt Schrank: external communication, I guess, and we felt like that was going really well. The Rooms feature obviously being with where we could communicate with our families and our students, and then we heard about the Staff Connect coming up, and so we sat down and thought, wow, if we can get our internal and external communication under one umbrella, we felt like we could solve a lot of issues. We talked with our staff about

Matt Schrank: you know, if anything would ever happen, you know, and you have a text group, those are FERPA records for students, and so if anything were to happen, and they need to subpoena your phone, you know, all those things go together, so I felt like that hit home with a lot of

Matt Schrank: a lot of staff members, like, you know, that was, oh yeah, this is a… this… FERPA law tells us that's a student record. And so the… the all-under-one-umbrella place, was the…

Matt Schrank: the… I guess the…

Matt Schrank: the worm to the fish that… that got us interested in StaffConnect to start. And so that's what really excited us about it, and we wanted to see what the features were, and so us getting that beta program was… was… was really exciting.

Monica McClellan: And then what did the kind of rollout process look like? How did you get staff to actually use it? What worked? What didn't work?

Was there pushback or resistance? Talk a little bit more about that.

Matt Schrank: Yeah, so we were, I mean, unique, you know, getting to beta test was exciting for me. I've been the tech person in the communication department. Not as exciting, I think, for staff when you ask them in April to start to communicate in a completely different way.

Matt Schrank: We, we were able to start late March, early April, was when we rolled it out, and we had to train our staff on a new tech feature, and

Matt Schrank: And say, hey, we know you've been using email and text, but we're asking you to do something different. But, it…

Matt Schrank: based on everything that we said earlier with our communication issues, our staff was pretty incredible. I gave them a bunch of shout-outs, and I know through our beta conversations, too, I couldn't be more happy with our staff. They kinda… they jumped in right away, and they started using the feature, and…

Matt Schrank: I think it had a lot to do with the fact that they already used Rooms, or a majority of them did, and so those two features are very similar, and so they were able to pick it up pretty easily. But I think that with the reason why it worked out really well was because our admin and our leadership

Matt Schrank: bought in right away, and so that communication from the top down was a big part of it. The expectation was everyone's gonna use it, not just, you know, staff members, and so the fact that our principals were sending everything out, whether it was

Matt Schrank: You know, messages to an individual, or if it was, you know, a small group message, or if it was a whole post throughout an elementary staff, or through the whole staff.

Matt Schrank: I just felt like the rollout was fairly easy, and it actually made me more excited about our back-to-school rollout, just because if we were able to do this in April, I gotta imagine starting in August is gonna be

Matt Schrank: even, even easier. So, it was…

Matt Schrank: I think the hardest thing for us was that timing, but the fact that they're already using a different way to communicate was hard to get them, so there was a little pushback there, but our staff did really, really pretty good.

Monica McClellan: Yeah. And would you say when it comes to adoption, was it something they stuck with or is there still like things that you're kind of working through? Because obviously when you roll something out and you're sticking to it at first it's like, all right, we got to do it. But then it's very easy to kind of waver back as well to being like, this is the way I've been communicating.

And so I know that can probably be a sticking point and something probably a lot of districts here have dealt with, like we got this brand new tool, we want to roll it out. We want folks to

Monica McClellan: to use it, and they do it first, but then they kind of start slipping and going back to their old habits. How do you get people to continue using that same tool without slipping back to maybe texting or

Monica McClellan: Snapchat is wild. I've never heard of that. I'm sure maybe there's other people here that have. But, like, how do you prevent them?

Or, you know, you're like, I'm starting to see people slip. Like, how do you kind of get them back into using the tool or this process or structure that the district wants to move into?

Matt Schrank: Yeah, so I guess the biggest surprise, I guess was just how quickly the staff bought in, or the majority of staff. You know, we definitely had pushback, but we also had ones that we knew we weren't going to win over in April, and so,

Matt Schrank: But the amount of people that either reacted to a post, or that replied to a post, or that sent messages.

Matt Schrank: was really cool, but it also justified, I guess the superintendent and I's… our vision for our internal communication going the way of Staff Connect, so we felt like that justification made us even more motivated. And so, you know…

Matt Schrank: we are actually… we went through… our superintendent went to a different district, so we have a new superintendent that started July 1st, and so I onboarded him the 1st of July when he started, and he was sending out messages on the 2nd already. And that ease of use, I guess, again, kind of came back to

Matt Schrank: This is really exciting for me because it just justifies, again, my vision, again, for our internal communication, but we have a lot of staff that are eager to hear from our superintendent, so him sending out messages and posts, have… have…

Matt Schrank: you know, not everybody in the summer is looking at this, but I would say 80% of our staff were able to see those posts, throughout the summer, and so that tells me that they still have the tool right there, like you said, the mobile tool, whether they're on their computer or not, they're getting it on their phone, and they're taking a look at those messages, and they're replying to them.

Matt Schrank: So that was the biggest surprise, was I told him, I said, yeah, you know, it's July, I don't know how many people you're gonna hear from, but for our new superintendent to use it right away and to get some feedback right away, probably makes it easier for him to move forward with this as well.

Monica McClellan: Yeah, yeah. So definitely hearing from a leadership perspective, like that's where your messaging that in the end of the day is hopefully where people are then going to start getting that. That's the only one place you're posting, right? And so.

Matt Schrank: Right.

Monica McClellan: the leaders are using it, that's hopefully going to trickle down, which is cool. Yeah.

Matt Schrank: And I and I guess, you know, in the staff side of it too, you know, you're I we did I guess I just asking some teachers like that middle school group, they created their own group of, as a message group.

Matt Schrank: just forcing them to try to not use the text message feature, and so I know at the end of the year, they were using that. They just put their own group together as a message group, and they were using that back and forth, pretty exclusively. So that… that, we're hoping, just takes off in August when we get started again.

Monica McClellan: So, talk a little bit about, kind of, like, your piece of advice. If there's districts that are trying to set up this kind of system or Staff Connect with internal communication, like, what's your…

Monica McClellan: Piece of advice. It sounds like definitely like leadership across the board need to be bought in. Not just the super, but like under them. Like if they're sending out important information, like your staff need to be there, they need to know what's going on.

That's the one place that they're getting information. But like what kind of advice would you give other advice I would say, would you give for those that are trying to be like, I need a strong internal communication system going into back to school because right now it is.

Monica McClellan: intense and there needs still, there's a lot that needs to communicate kind of based off this system. What would you recommend?

Matt Schrank: Yeah, I mean, I think I do have to say it again, even though you just said it, is my superintendent and I, we kind of went through and really pushed this, but we knew if our principals did not

Matt Schrank: adopt it and use it, as our number one communication tool, that it was not gonna work. And so, it does… it does start with the leadership, making sure that everybody's using it, and I think

Matt Schrank: that is number one priority, even for me as we start in August, is to make sure that we're not going back to old habits, that we're continuing to push that this is the feature that we're going to use, is this internal communication piece.

Matt Schrank: I, I think once, once they get into it, it helps a whole lot more. But it does start with the leadership, for sure. And then the other, the other side of it too, is the read receipts are a big part of it for the principals. I think them knowing that they're able to see who saw it.

I know you mentioned it back in that when you're talking about the principals of, of this, feature was.

Matt Schrank: Being able to follow up. I think principals being able to follow up into a staff member and saying, hey, I saw that you read the message. You might have forgot, but just being able to follow up and say, I know that you saw it. Do you have any feedback for me?

I think that's a big part of it too. But the rollout feature, whether it is a staff member, an admin group, or even transportation group.

Matt Schrank: It it reaches all the levels evenly. And it's not like.

Matt Schrank: You know, if you want to create a separate message group, you can create a separate message group. To me, it's it's it's a place where everybody can go and they can communicate internally. And like I said, for us, we have that external piece too with Rooms. They go hand in hand.

And for our staff, I think it's they see a place to communicate internally and externally at the same time. And it saves them saves them a lot of time.

Monica McClellan: Yeah. And for those that don't have Rooms, Rooms is another place where we're sending communication directly to the community, right? So to the students. And so Staff Connect is built very similar.

So what Matt's saying is obviously easier adoption. And then Matt, talk about like maybe a phased approach. Like obviously if there's larger districts out there that have huge student body or sorry, huge staff

Monica McClellan: And maybe this isn't something that they wanna roll out fully to their staff.

Matt Schrank: Mmh.

Monica McClellan: Can it be phased? Like, what does that look like? Specifically with the system, like system or staff connect, obviously just being able to get people on a piece of this and then build on it throughout the school year. Is that, is that an option that you've seen work within your district, even though?

Matt Schrank: Yeah, we obviously started with our admin group just to play around right away to make sure that we were familiar with it before we did throw it to everybody. And so that, I mean, we were the ones that wanted to sell it to everybody to make sure that they were on board with it. But we also kind of went with small groups too right away. We did, we added groups for, you know, our all staff and our high school, our middle school and our elementary, but we kind of knew the ones that were looking for something.

Matt Schrank: something, too, and so we kind of threw some small, like, we have a student support teams group that we put together, to help out students. We put our small groups for ones that we knew were going to use it right away in all the right ways, and so we put those small groups right away. That way, they could kind of

Matt Schrank: again, I think it's a leadership thing, they could help and trickle down to others that maybe would need a little bit more time with it. And so, that… it really is, the world is your oyster when it comes to that. If you have an idea, you really can put as many people as you want in it, or…

Matt Schrank: more or less. I know I made an all-staff one. Instead of intranet, we called it the DragonNet, where the Blue Dragons in Garrison. And so I would just, I would kind of post and put, I mean, not even really relevant things to school, but just some fun things that people could constantly be checking.

That way they knew they were getting notifications or not getting notifications, and that's kind of how we started it.

Monica McClellan: Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Matt, for for sharing this incredibly valuable. I think for folks in this audience who are thinking about communication as a whole, I think leaning into this kind of system is super helpful if you guys are interested. I guess real quick before we jump into kind of like next steps, but if you're thinking about those questions that we asked at the very beginning.

Monica McClellan: From our first webinar, I think if you're, you know, in the right direction, I think the three things that we definitely see districts start moving towards is definitely, making sure your staff have one place for stressed information as they get into back to school.

Monica McClellan: Whether it's an internet or some sort of landing page, whatever it may be, and that staff knows where to go. Coming back to kind of like that new hire, right?

Monica McClellan: Do they know without asking anyone? I think this was when we did a poll on this, the first in this first webinar, I think that was probably the lower score of like a new hire doesn't know where to find information on day one versus like, hey, here is the one trusted place that you can go to, you know, when they first come, go poke around, find everything you need there, which is super helpful.

Monica McClellan: And then engagement data. Is that visible to leaders? Do you know who's actually reading and digesting? Can they comment?

Can they react?

Monica McClellan: I think those are 3 things. If you don't know the answers to these questions, like.

Monica McClellan: poll your staff, like, ask them, like, are these things that you know? Like, do you know the trusted place to go? If you had a new hire on your team, would they know where to go? Obviously, from a leader perspective, you would know if you have that data or not.

Receipts are super helpful, but then having that two-way is next level.

Monica McClellan: So quick thing before we do Q&A, our next webinar around Staff Connect is August 12th. So we're actually going to do a live demo of Staff Connect. So what Matt's talking about, his experience that's in Staff Connect.

Monica McClellan: So if you want to learn more about that, we're going to have Mitch back on, who is from our first webinar, and then we'll have someone else from our team, Zelda, who's amazing, to actually walk you through what the actual tool looks like and then what the implementation and setup will look like. So definitely, definitely, you know, scan this QR code and you can register from there. And we will definitely send out an email with this information.

Monica McClellan: like I said, either tomorrow or Friday with that information as well, so if you lose track. Okay, we have a couple minutes for Q&A, so please feel free, questions in the chat, either for Matt or I, and there's also…

Monica McClellan: a Q&A box, so you can throw either in there.

Monica McClellan: And we can definitely, we're here to answer them. I think Barrett already answered a couple. It looks like, Monica.

Matt Schrank: So.

Monica McClellan: I'm sorry.

Matt Schrank: Sorry, I'm up here. I did answer one from Carol about, I didn't really mention it. That was the other thing that we thought with email, because it does sound a lot like just replying to emails, but we felt like at our district, like our emails just get full of spam and, you know.

Matt Schrank: salesmen, people sending out a lot of messages. And this, we know now as Staff Connect, is this is a place we go where it's just staff messages. We know that what's in there is important. So it… it does become different than email because you're not getting… you're not missing something because you know that it is actually internal communication and not somebody else from…

Matt Schrank: Buffalo wildlings trying to sell me some some wings. So.

Monica McClellan: Yeah, I think that's a great call out. So basically, Carol, I think having that targeted space, that area, right? So Matt already said they had like within Staff Connect, they had a space for the whole district, right? Where there it's very like, hey, very broad.

This is what you need to know. Maybe there's like more specific resources for the whole district and then there's individual spaces.

Monica McClellan: Based off of maybe the building, maybe the role, maybe there's certain clubs that were set up, like he'd mentioned.

Monica McClellan: The group that had the texting thread, they moved into Staff Connect. And so the difference there is all of that space was with that targeted group. And then you have a live feed where you can post updates and they can comment, they have reactions, and then you have resources specific to that group. So all the math teachers come together.

Monica McClellan: And, post about their specific curriculum, or whatever it may be. So, Carol, if you're interested, we'll definitely be going into deeper… dive in deeper a little bit there, around what that looks like in the next session. So, stay tuned.

Monica McClellan: The link for the next session, Barrett just posted in the webinar. Of course, if you want, like, a one-to-one custom demo right now, of course, just go to apptegy.com, and fill out a contact form, and they will…

Monica McClellan: be sure to… to get back to you and scheduling something so that you can get something one-to-one. The next session for August 12th will be more of just, like, a group, here's what you can look at, totally up to you.

Monica McClellan: I think there's two good call-outs here, too. It'd be nice to see… Nancy said it'd be nice to see a learning on dealing with negative comments on this platform, so I'm assuming maybe negative comments from staff, perhaps? I think one thing to note here is that

Monica McClellan: This is permission based, so you can have set certain permissions based off the spaces you create. So if you only want certain people to be able to post and things like that, you can. It's very customizable. So maybe in some groups you don't necessarily want all people to be able to comment and react.

Maybe in other groups you do so negative comments.

Monica McClellan: And maybe, Matt, you can speak to that, but

Monica McClellan: seeing that too much with some of the districts just because there's that permission base and then you can set up flexibility depending on what kind of space it is to make it hey just broad this is what you need to know versus like I want to engage with you. Then of course you can always delete comments but of course you want to be able to have a little bit more professionalism in these types of groups.

Matt Schrank: Yeah, I haven't seen it yet, so I'm actually anxious, too, to see the first one, but I would say that we would probably, you know, delete that comment if it was too nag… you know, if it was obviously very unprofessional, and then that would be a discussion with,

Matt Schrank: with a principal.

Monica McClellan: Yep.

Monica McClellan: And then Barton asked tips on getting multiple different department heads on board for using Staff Connect. I think some of the things that Matt said, I think using a phased approach for sure. I think what's great is our onboarding team really handholds you and creates custom groups. So if you have an old internet or something that you're using now, we definitely help you migrate.

Monica McClellan: what you currently have into StaffConnect, into our hub, so…

Monica McClellan: We can customize it and set it up to what makes you and your district in your department head comfortable. And then there's different checklists and things like that. So it's built again, like a lot of our other Apptegy products. So it's easy for them to go in and just see what it's like and play around with it.

But I think there's also some creative ways that we can get them excited about it.

Monica McClellan: Especially that engagement piece. So, Barton, come to the next webinar, too, because we will have some tips when we're actually in Staff Connect that you can see, that will hopefully get people, pretty excited about it.

Monica McClellan: Okay, so we currently, I have, sorry, a couple more. We currently use Google Chat. How is this different? Similar?

Great. We definitely have, clients that have used Slack, Google Chat, things like that. I think Google Chat is great. But what I see is it's not all in one place, right?

So you have resources, documents, updates, communication, messaging, live feed, all in one with staff members.

Monica McClellan: And so Google Chat, I think you have like a messaging window here, then you have email back here, and then you have a Google Drive that lives over here and not everything compiled into one place. So again, I think, Bob, come back to the demo where we can actually fully show you from start to finish what this looks like.

Monica McClellan: 'cause there's definitely some, differences there.

Monica McClellan: However, maybe you are like, Google's working for us. And if that's the case, that's great. But maybe there is some like use cases where it's, you know, not working or it's people aren't bought in or they haven't adopted it. I think the great thing about Apptegy is we now have that external communication, which most of you are familiar with.

We've talked about, right? That's how you're communicating to staff or sorry, to your community. We now have inbound communication. We launched community experience earlier this year.

Monica McClellan: where staff etc, sorry, community is asking you questions.

Monica McClellan: And you're giving them answers, and then we also now have Staff Connect, so it's that internal piece. So literally, all communication is happening in one platform within Apptegy. So that to me is next level, because you don't have…

Monica McClellan: 5 different vendors you're keeping up with, Apptegy, Google, this intranet, you know, all of the different apps that you're trying to monitor, everything is in one place.

Monica McClellan: Alright.

Matt Schrank: Joan had a great question in the Q&A. Does this give you a place to host staff-required forms or informational documents? And that's something that, I mean, like you said, the next month is going to be showing the features a little bit more, and that's something I never even touched on, but our elementary principal uses it as a space. You can add pages within

Matt Schrank: Your Staff Connect room, so in her elementary room, where she has all her staff.

Matt Schrank: She has all of her agendas, posted in there as links, resources, and then she also has, we went through standard-based grading, and she has all the links to certain standard-based grading. So she has all those documents stored in there, and they're just links, within there. But again, it's a place for her to go.

Matt Schrank: Any of the staff members can go in there, and they can click on those links, and… but it's all within her Garretson Elementary School. Whoever has access to it can get to all those.

Monica McClellan: Cool. And then one last question. Tammy asked if Staff Connect is available now or if it needs to be turned on. It is available now.

Tammy, if you go to your account rep and ask them about it, they can talk to you about next steps. Be on the lookout. I appreciate you guys. I know we're a little bit over.

Be on the lookout for the email that we're sending with the webinar link.

Monica McClellan: in this recording. And then, of course, if you guys have any questions, like I said, please, please reach out to your rep. And please tune into the next webinar, August 12th. We definitely want to dive into more about what this actually looks like in practice, instead of kind of building your own system on your own.

Monica McClellan: All right, everyone. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Bye Bye.