The back-to-school season is one of the highest-stakes windows of the year for school communicators — and one of the most chaotic. Whether you're a one-person shop or leading a full communications team, the weeks before and after the first bell set the tone for how families, staff, and community members experience your district all year long.
In this webinar, we'll give you a practical playbook for hitting the ground running. Drawing on SchoolCEO's research and reporting on what communicators actually need to do their jobs well, we'll cover the strategies — from building content banks and template systems to coordinating with principals and district leadership — that help you stay proactive when everything around you is reactive.
You'll walk away with a clear framework for the season ahead, including how to plan your calendar before the noise hits, how to set up your channels and workflows for efficiency, and how to tell your district's story right from day one.
Whether you're a veteran comms director or you're new to the role, this session will help you start the year with a plan for success.
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Transcript
Brittany Keil: Alright, well, let's go ahead and get started. Welcome to a Summer Comms Priorities, a playbook for… a playbook for communicators. As you can probably notice, Greg and I are bringing in some, summer energy. We thought that this could be really fun, could be really interactive, and the goal is for you to have lots of bite-sized, takeaways, either from us or the other folks, the incredible folks in this room.
Brittany Keil: To kick things off, though, we can go ahead and introduce ourselves. Greg, did I miss anything with our.
Greg Turchetta: Oh, let's roll.
Brittany Keil: Alright.
Brittany Keil: So, my name is Brittany, if we haven't met, I love research and education. So my career has kind of meandered between marketing research and education. I spent 10 years as a classroom teacher. I taught high school special education.
I always like to make a joke that it's the cute ones, but the thing is, I really believe that. Love high schoolers, love, special education, and I currently volunteer doing intervention with my daughter's school, because I love it that much.
Brittany Keil: It's just fantastic.
Brittany Keil: I've got two wild children. I have a 1-year-old named Beatrice, she's in the Seahawks jersey there. Ever since she was born, she's, like, loved footballs, and it's weird, because we're not, like, a super football-y family, but I think I know where she's headed.
Brittany Keil: And then her big sister here, next to the K-pop Demon Hunter, stand-up thing at H Mart, is Rosemary. Rosemary is a natural environmentalist. She's been posting posters all around the neighborhood.
Brittany Keil: That say, less buildings, more nature. I'm not sure what the call to action is, like, do we knock the buildings down? I don't know. I'll work with her on that.
Brittany Keil: what you should know about me is I head up SchoolCEO Magazine's research, so everything that we do that comes, you know, from surveys, from data, from long conversations, all of that starts with me. And if you don't know this already, every single thing we write in SchoolCEO Magazine, comes from a conversation with a school communicator or leader. So if you've got a story you want to share, please do, email me after, I'd love to talk with you.
Brittany Keil: One quick thing, too, so Greg and I were planning this webinar, and we were thinking, like, how do we make this feel different? Like, school communicators are, you know, on the summer, but we know how much work has to happen in the summer. Still, like, we want y'all to have an experience that is, you know, a little bit different than the day-to-day of the schools.
Brittany Keil: So it got me thinking about summer school. So one thing that I did in my many years in the classroom was I always taught summer school.
Brittany Keil: One reason for that was because I got a stipend.
Brittany Keil: Another reason for that, it was a great, place to make relationships with some of my most challenging students. But the secret about summer school is it is super fun. My class was always fun, it was always interactive, we were always playing games, because I knew that giving them a good experience was not just
Brittany Keil: a better way to help them learn in a smaller environment, but also, it felt like a duty to their childhood to me. Like, they're still kids, it's still summer, like, we want to make this fun.
Brittany Keil: Similarly, you guys are not in summer school because you are not behind, you are super ahead, obviously, you're in this webinar, so we're gonna view this as extra credit, but we're gonna try to keep that, summer school energy.
Greg Turchetta: Absolutely. Tip of the drink to the comms people in the room who made it through this school year, who are now in summer, and it's an additional tip of the drink to you for being willing to do the extra credit work with us right now. If we haven't met, there's a lot of friends I see in this chat, so always great to see you guys. I'm Greg Turchetta, I'm the Strategic Communications Advisor here at Apptegy.
I spent 10 years in the chair you're sitting in, so, I've lived the pain. Brittany and I were talking earlier about, you know.
Greg Turchetta: to me, it's about fun, right? Like, if you can't gamify, and you can't make this work fun, and you can't have fun with your team, you gotta find a way to do it, because that's really what it takes to get through some of the…
Greg Turchetta: ridiculousness you deal with day in and day out.
Greg Turchetta: Pictures on the right. I'd love to bring you new things that I see that I think are setting the standard, right, for schools in K-12.
Greg Turchetta: This is Memorial Day… actual Memorial Day, my family, we went to Disney World, and in Magic Kingdom, they have used AI to take the photo experience to a whole nother level. It's called Memory Maker PhotoPass Magic Shots. Here's how I've tripped across it. We're walking down Main Street, USA, in Magic Kingdom there, and, you know, the people there are waiting to take your picture like they always are, and they're like, okay, one of you put your hands up.
Greg Turchetta: And everybody else, look up. We're gonna put balloons in your hands. Sure enough, that's the result.
Greg Turchetta: The other picture was in front of Pirates of the Caribbean, which I was holding a physical bone, and they put the dog in the picture.
Greg Turchetta: I tell you that because if you've ever heard me talk at conferences, the Disneys of the world are creating expectations of our parents that they then translate to you. I don't know how you compete with that, but I wanted to show you that it exists.
Brittany Keil: Oops, sorry.
Brittany Keil: Alright, so in the chat, if you haven't already, we'd love for you to put your name, your location, and your favorite summer activity. Obviously, webinars, is a given, so moving on from that.
Brittany Keil: But, I think we can go ahead and get started. So, what Greg and I have today is we have 10 tips that we think should be on your summer to-do list, and we're gonna talk through these. First, we're going to be talking through, an experiential standpoint. So, like, what have we seen from communicators who are having real success with these tips?
Brittany Keil: And second, what can we do, in this group, to share expertise about what works? If something works really well for you, this is a great opportunity to put it in the chat. If there's something that you're struggling and have questions, also a great opportunity to put in the chat.
Brittany Keil: Some of my best, absolutely favorite moments in this work are when I'm able to connect somebody who has a solution with somebody who has a problem, because that is how the real work gets done.
Brittany Keil: For this first, this first thing, we're gonna talk about summer content ideas, and I'm gonna tip it off to Greg to…
Greg Turchetta: Oh yeah, this is a big one for me. I had to learn this lesson the hard way, but we get this summer, and we start getting focused on, okay, we gotta go back, we gotta reevaluate things, and we'll get into that in a minute. But the content machine still has to eat, right? It's June, it's July.
Yes, summer school's going on, we can go get more pictures of cute kids.
Greg Turchetta: But what's the work that will actually move the needle in the summer? And to me, I found that answer in the maintenance department.
Greg Turchetta: And think about it this way.
Greg Turchetta: when schools are out, your maintenance department, this is their Super Bowl. Like, they're doing all the big work during the summer, and they're cramming it in, and if you've ever sat through a cabinet meeting and you heard them talk about it, like, there's just so much to get done. Like, they don't take vacations in the summer.
Greg Turchetta: What a great content opportunity to show the improvements that are being made around your district. Get the cell phone out, go over to the elementary school that's getting a new cafeteria. Go to the middle school that's getting a new media center. Even an air conditioning system being put on the roof of a school is news, and here's why.
Greg Turchetta: there's a content void in the summer everywhere, right? So if you're putting this stuff on social media, your parents are going to be looking at it, they're going to be looking for it, and
Greg Turchetta: Everybody wants to know their schools got better over the summer, right? And if it's just physical, that's great, too. But it's also an enrollment play.
Greg Turchetta: Because if I'm… if I'm at, you know, you know parents are lurking constantly trying to make these moves, and they may be quietly in the shadows comparing two elementary schools, but you post that this… this school got a new, gymnasium to it, and that might be a tiebreaker for somebody going, yeah, I want my kid to be in that school. So it really… all of that can even impact enrollment.
Brittany Keil: Absolutely, and this brings me to one of my favorite points, which is enrollment marketing is happening all the time. Yes, ma'am. So I moved from Little Rock, Arkansas to Seattle, last year before my daughter's kindergarten year.
Brittany Keil: I was so nervous, to have my kid go to kindergarten for the first time. She's my oldest, this was totally new for me. A lot of us read the book a couple years ago, The Anxious Generation. I'm starting to think that the parents are actually the anxious generation, because I was checking the school's social media.
Brittany Keil: And, app every single day, to see if there was something I was missing, something that I needed to know. But the single thing that gave me the most peace of mind.
Brittany Keil: was a video that my daughter's elementary school's principal posted of the kindergarten teachers playing ukulele at the end of the school year.
Brittany Keil: Yeah, the post was simple, it was like, here's some ukulele at the end of the year, we can't wait to meet our incoming kindergartners. What did that do for me? That showed me the environment that I was actually preparing my daughter for, and not the horrifying environment that my worst anxiety was imagining for me.
Brittany Keil: This is an opportunity for you to touch base with some of your, you know, community that has their eyes on you, even if you don't realize it.
Greg Turchetta: And then new building leaders. This is a huge win. When I joined education, I didn't realize how often principals and APs turn over, right? Whether they get promoted to the district office, they move on, they retire.
That's a big deal, right? New leadership at a building level is a really big deal when it comes to culture.
Greg Turchetta: But those changes all happen July 1, right, when the contracts kick in. What a great time to have a building leader pull out their cell phone and say, hey, it's Mr. Turchetta, I'm the new principal here at Turchetta Middle School. I just want to introduce myself to you, hope you're enjoying your summer, hope you're reading, right?
No summer slide.
Greg Turchetta: But what does that do?
Greg Turchetta: it creates a relationship already through social media, because when in reality am I going to meet that principal? Maybe at open house, when they get up and talk. I might be hearing from my neighbors, oh yeah, there's a new principal coming to that school, which gives a little apprehension, a little anxiety.
Greg Turchetta: summer content, it's great to do that. So I told all my principals, shoot a video, put it on social media, I want the letter or the video from you on your school homepage, because God, we're going to talk about school homepages in a minute, but anything that can freshen them up is a great idea, but even at the high school level.
Greg Turchetta: Think about, like, your AP of discipline, right? You have an assistant principal of discipline. All they do is call parents and say their kids behaved badly.
Greg Turchetta: What if that person was the face of the video showing, like, the new parking lot at the school? Or anything about the school, a change in some kind of procedure, but it's positive?
Greg Turchetta: That changes relationships just from a 30-second video, and it doesn't have that with parents doing this.
Greg Turchetta: I think it needs a win.
Brittany Keil: Absolutely. So, before we move on to our next tip, I'd love if anyone could drop in the chat if you have an especially successful piece of summer content. One thing that I talked to a communicator about just last week, she does a Humans of their school district.
Brittany Keil: video series, and she uses the summer to catch up, especially with a lot of the 12-month employees. So, the maintenance folks, a lot of the people in the front desk, like, this is when she records their episodes for later posting, because she knows that they have a little bit more bandwidth.
Greg Turchetta: Another idea while you're typing is, how about the top 10 pictures of the 2025-26 school year, right? You don't even have to do that. Somebody on your team could be in charge of just, what are some of those images that are just scroll stoppers that'll make me look at it, make me feel positive about your school? Again, it's a backdoor enrollment message, cloaked in fun.
Brittany Keil: Alright.
Brittany Keil: Maria says, we often ask our staff to share fun summer adventures, love it!
Greg Turchetta: Yeah.
Brittany Keil: So we can, pop back to the chat in a little bit, but looking at our second tip, we've got evaluate and re-evaluate. I feel like we're preaching to the choir here. This is something a lot of you may be already doing, but this is the space that you really want to be, you know, this is the time you want to take to see what strategies or tactics are working, and what aren't. Real quick, it looks like we've got a lot of, summer content ideas coming in.
Greg Turchetta: These are great. TJ, that's exactly right. Shadow each department. Let me take it one step further.
In my last district in South Carolina, our chief of operations, he went to every job site, right? So I got him to shoot videos of him being the talent, and we actually… his name was Will, and we called it Will's Wanderings.
Greg Turchetta: And so Will would just pop up on camera with his hard hat on, and he… he knew more about the project than I would, so it was a double win because it made him feel great, it showed… it let the expert talk, but it also brought more storytellers to the party.
Brittany Keil: Kevin, I absolutely am so excited to watch this video. I feel like catching admins at the end of the year meeting is a perfect opportunity, especially once they've sort of, gotten to, you know, refresh themselves a little bit from the hectic of the end of the school year.
Greg Turchetta: And Kim, I love the idea of pulling something out of the annual report and repurposing it, because I don't think… I'm not a huge annual report fan. I know we have to produce them, I don't think they're read as often as possible, but what a great idea to reuse that content.
Brittany Keil: Oh, I also love featuring the high schoolers interning in the community. If you, you know, something that was true in my communities, I often saw a lot of my high school students working in the summer. I feel like that's another place to showcase them. And, you know, it's usually a good way to, you know, show everybody, like, what's going on in the school, even when things are closed.
Greg Turchetta: And Don's, they serve… everybody serves free meals over the summer to kids, right? Most districts do that, but how many of you post the numbers of meals being served? How many of you show the workers that are actually there doing that work? I think that's a great idea.
Brittany Keil: And an alumni spotlight series, I love it!
Brittany Keil: Alright, so when we're thinking about evaluating tools, these are just a couple of four things, sorry, a couple of many things, that you can evaluate over the summer. First, your social media. It is a very rare opportunity to have, you know, the chance to do a real deep dive on how things are performing in social media. We all know what the impressions look like, we all know what the engagement looks like, but what is actually happening with your trends?
Brittany Keil: AI has made digesting and parsing this information so much easier. I wholly recommend you, you know, have AIs look at your social media channels, especially your public-facing ones, and see exactly what's working. They'll pull out some insights you didn't expect.
Brittany Keil: Same thing with your website or your newsletters, and then your content strategy. Greg, do you want to touch on that a little bit?
Greg Turchetta: Yeah, I want to go back to social media just for a second. How many of you are getting rid of X? Like, just not even using it? How many of you can or cannot use TikTok, right?
There's certain states where you're not even allowed to. Yeah, I'd dump X immediately. We often talk, right, Instagram, those young elementary school parents, Facebook, still the older generations.
Greg Turchetta: There's that can't use… there you go, alright. But on content strategy,
Greg Turchetta: I could go off on a whole webinar on this, because I have before, but you're going to hear me say enrollment, enrollment, enrollment, especially this time of year.
Greg Turchetta: we… this is something I just want you to take a look at. I think, personally, that as comms people, we spend about 80% of our time teaching parents how to do school with process communications, and we'd only spend about 20% of the time on why they should choose our schools, and I think our schools emulate that same formula.
Greg Turchetta: How do we flip that over the summer? Because most of you, and I know a lot of you, are in states where enrollment is becoming an issue fast. How do we change our content strategy so enrollment is baked into everything, not just at kindergarten registration season, at school choice season?
Greg Turchetta: That's something, and a summer project in our comms plan, I really think we need to look at.
Brittany Keil: Also, in talking about social media channels, I talked to a school communicator last week who told me that she built totally different strategies around Facebook and Instagram, because she realized that all of the responses on Instagram came from students, and all of the responses on Facebook came from families and community members.
Brittany Keil: She wanted to make Instagram a, you know, more fun place for students to engage, especially because this is a high school, a secondary school district, and I think it's interesting to look at who's engaging with your content, and how can you better optimize that content for them.
Greg Turchetta: And if you get those results, have your students do the posting on Instagram, right? In their own voice, if they're talking to each other, your following will go up, your engagement certainly will as well.
Brittany Keil: Alright.
Brittany Keil: Number 3, Greg, I'm gonna push it to you.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah, this one… this one bothers me. I… it's… I travel the country talking to school districts, training school districts.
Greg Turchetta: And right behind enrollment, I think the issue is, how do we get our schools to do more… not better, but how do we get them to do more strategic communications, right? They're so pressed for time, you know, we put the tools in their hands to make it easy, but what's that bigger strategy? You know, what are we missing? You know.
Greg Turchetta: If you've ever heard me talk before, I used to like to visit schools and tour it with the principal and say, let's just go find content. Walk around anywhere, we'll find a story, we'll shoot it on our iPhone, we'll post it on your social media to prove to them that there's a hundred stories they walk by every day.
Greg Turchetta: Because that's what causes their accounts to go dark on social media, or I… you show me a great school website, and I will show it off around the country, because I haven't found any that are that great, that you go, this is the example, because it just isn't a destination or a priority for them, unless you keep pushing them on it, and we know how that goes, but…
Greg Turchetta: how do you go around? And this is a question for the chat. What is your system over the summer to catch up with the schools that I call, that are in the Witness Protection Plan, right? They're just not posting enough, they're not doing enough, they're just… they've gone dark.
Greg Turchetta: And then, equally as critical, I can't sit here and tell you we need to do more enrollment marketing without giving you more storytellers to do it.
Greg Turchetta: And so, how do we create more of them? We know where they are, they're the students, they're the staff in the buildings, but that's gonna take a lot of effort, it's gonna take a plan. Do you need help with that plan? I'd love to help you, because I've run that plan before, and I think it's the… it's the critical step moving forward.
If you're a department of 1, 3, 5, 10, you don't have enough storytellers. You just don't.
Greg Turchetta: And then, do you have the right tools, right? Are the staff using the tools you've provided? I was just in West Virginia last week working… every district in West Virginia is an Apptegy client, all 55 of them. So I spent a lot of time working with them and training them, and it's like, how do we get the usage up, right?
You see the power in what we're trying to do, but how do we get them to do more and more frequently, more effectively? And that last piece is critical.
Greg Turchetta: Right? My standard was always 5 minutes a day is all I need in communication from a school. Quick couple of pictures, couple of posts, storytelling. Just get it out real quick, right?
That's the gold standard. Too often when you say we need more, they see hours.
Greg Turchetta: And then website maintenance, right? How do we get school sites updated and keep them that way all year long? How do we get the district page? Like.
Greg Turchetta: I'm gonna, I'm gonna call you out right now. If you still got graduation pictures up right now, you're missing enrollment.
Brittany Keil: Hey, it's still gr- or, it's still graduation up here, come on.
Greg Turchetta: People still graduating?
Greg Turchetta: Or it happened last week.
Greg Turchetta: If it was last week, that's it. Statue of limitations over. It's time to flip. Get back to telling me why you're there.
Also.
Greg Turchetta: Graduation. Can I go off on a 20-second soapbox?
Greg Turchetta: The number one proof of performance we have is not kids in caps and gowns on stage. It's hearing from kids in caps and gowns saying why this high school and these teachers transformed my life. Why I'm gonna be a biology major in college, and I hated science up till last year. Those stories, 10 or 15 of them per high school, game changer.
Brittany Keil: Absolutely, and something else on, you know, graduation, and I think that we've gotten a lot better about this, but this is where you can really showcase the output of your CTE programs. A lot of kids are leaving your CTE programs with careers ready to go. My own brother left high school with two welding certificates. He now, is
Brittany Keil: high up at Peterborough nationwide. All of that happened in high school. He's never been to college, and I feel like he is the success story, and the many people like him, to show off what schools and CTE programs can do.
Brittany Keil: I also, you know, urge you to take a look at the 12-month employees who might have a little bit more time on their hands, because they can help create resources for their peers. I, as a teacher, worked very closely with my curriculum, my curriculum leads.
Brittany Keil: And my curriculum leads were those who could help us with branding and marketing. You know a lot of teachers like to brand themselves, they like to brand their classrooms, that's one way that they like to build connections with, with their families. How can you enable the curriculum department to support this in a way that further supports the district brand?
Greg Turchetta: Kevin's back at it, sending more videos to us. Kevin, if you could email that to me, I would love to have these to include in my presentations. That's greg.turchetta@apptegy.com
Brittany Keil: Love it. Also, yeah.
Brittany Keil: All right, anything else? We also have a sign of comms champion per campus. Y'all, we know that, y'all aren't, you know.
Brittany Keil: Very few districts are able to afford to pay a school communicator at a campus level. However, building communications champions happens in the summer. This is actually something that you can start to reach to teachers out before they come back for the year. The kind of people you want to be your communications champions, and let me tell you, this was me as a teacher, they're already working on their lesson plans.
In June, in July, they already know what their year looks like.
Brittany Keil: And whenever you, bring them in as a communications champion, they're able to fold that work into their broader, focus for the summer.
Greg Turchetta: Brittany, one more thing on that slide. The principal meetings. If your district has a monthly principal meeting, this is where change gets made.
Greg Turchetta: So, I was always a fan of, and I still am, bring best of show to the principal meeting. So, if it's social media, if it's a homepage post, if it's the graduation story, whatever it is, bring it and celebrate it and show it. Have your superintendent or your other executive leaderships go, that's amazing, we need more of that.
Greg Turchetta: Now, every school has just been told, that's the standard, that's the priority. And that… that comes downhill a lot harder than the comms department saying, we need more content.
Brittany Keil: Alright, and now a customer service audit. If customer service is something that your district has been talking about, I want you to know two things. First, you are not alone. I've gotten more requests, than any time in my career for book clubs around unreasonable hospitality.
This is something that districts are talking about nationwide, and I am so glad, because I think this is critical to retention, this is critical to enrollment, and district perception as a whole.
Brittany Keil: It also, something to know is our newest issue of SchoolCEO Magazine is all about hospitality and customer service, so if this is something you're interested in, we are going to have some hard, real resources, just in the next couple of weeks.
Brittany Keil: Fun fact, our deadline is tomorrow. So, you know, yes, I planned a webinar the day before my magazine deadline, go me! But I'm, you know, I'm very happy to talk about this as much as possible.
Brittany Keil: So where should parents and guardians go for answers? This is a hole that we see again and again, and Greg talks about this in depth, in his article for SchoolCEO Magazine this year. You may think that parents are going to call your front desk.
Brittany Keil: And some of them do, but parents have a lot more opportunities to find answers than they used to. First, they're going to, look to AI. They're going to simply ask the AI what they should know about your school district, or, like, when does school start? When do the meal programs go?
Brittany Keil: Second, they're going to call your school at a time that they may not be open, or at an office that may not be open.
Brittany Keil: I saw this again and again,
Brittany Keil: when I was a teacher, we would have people call, our usual attendance line, but that was closed for the summer, and the front desk was open, but there was not a good changeover. And then second, they're going to try to get ahold of your district at 11pm at night, because that's when they're thinking about things. That's when they're thinking about what they need to, plan going ahead. So where do they go, and how can you make this an easier process?
Brittany Keil: Greg has a couple of audit questions that you can take into this work.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah, and let me… let me be the jerk in the room for a second. Parents are now at the… moving at the speed of now. Like, if they want to get a banking question answered, they can go to Bank of America's website, talk to a chatbot on mid… midnight on Tuesday.
Greg Turchetta: If I buy something on Amazon, I can find out when that package is 6 houses away. 6 houses! If I travel and check a bag, I know everywhere that bag's gonna be.
Greg Turchetta: At a school district, maybe you have the bus tracking app, and I can figure out where the bus is gonna be. But where do I ask the question? So that is the first audit question. Is there a single clear path for the most common parent questions?
Is it to the teacher? Is it emailing the principal? That can't be it.
Greg Turchetta: Is it to the district office? And how many of you were like me, that when you were in the district office, the front desk was constantly calling you to come down and talk to an angry parent because they didn't know where to put the angry parent? And you ended up taking on a curriculum issue, and you're like, hold on, okay, okay.
Greg Turchetta: That is an enrollment issue, and we're seeing it over and over again, that poor communications, and by poor communications, doesn't mean we're great at sending information out.
Greg Turchetta: Do we have the system set up to answer the questions that come in and track that they're getting answered? We have a presentation, brand new presentation on this, we're debuting at Enspra in a couple weeks. And this enrollment and customer service, to me, are the two biggest issues in K-12, and they're directly interrelated.
Brittany Keil: Absolutely. And I will say, like, as a parent, I…
Brittany Keil: I mess up a lot of things. When I was a teacher, I would be like, why can't the parents be more on top of things? Now I'm in that seat, I totally get it. Last year, when I was registering my daughter, for school, I somehow created not one, not two, but three Skyward accounts.
Brittany Keil: That's the SIS that our state uses.
Brittany Keil: And, I had had a previous Skyward account that, from when I was a teacher at another district, it… things got very confused, and I did not know who to reach out to, and I was so desperately afraid of the kindergarten filling up.
Brittany Keil: That I was banging down the doors of the elementary school, anyone that I could talk to. They were lovely, they helped me, but you have to think about these people who are just truly lost, truly overwhelmed, and really need your help.
Greg Turchetta: And here's the other thing. Many of you probably do school audits, right? You walk in and you audit the branding, the marketing, and the feeling when you walk into an office. I audit it for culture.
Greg Turchetta: And within 6 seconds of being in the lobby of any one of your schools, and when we said customer service, one of your schools probably popped into your mind, and some person probably popped into your mind that's a little rough around the edges and shouldn't be talking to people, but does it all day long, and everybody knows that, and we just kind of look the other way. That's customer service issues. So, in the 6 seconds of learning in an office, I can tell you the culture of the place based on the feeling I get from every interaction.
Greg Turchetta: Right?
Greg Turchetta: We can tell whether that building has great leadership, whether there's a teacher shortage because there's a cultural issue. We can tell if there's an enrollment issue. It's all interrelated, and that's why that customer service piece is absolutely huge, which is when you take it
Greg Turchetta: I think we went ahead, Brittany, didn't we?
Brittany Keil: Yeah, I feel like we're a little crunched on time, so I was gonna.
Greg Turchetta: Okay, hit it.
Brittany Keil: Yeah.
Brittany Keil: So, our next was about evaluating your tools, not for efficacy, but for the data that they return to you. I'm going to glaze through that, because we're running a little bit over, which is fun, because we're here just having good summer fun and good conversation. But something that you should know is that your customer service tools should give you feedback, not in weeks, not in months, but in days and in moments. You need to know when families are,
Brittany Keil: Bob Mosier, can't wait to hear it. You need to know what the hiccups are when they happen, and not when you run a report weeks later.
Brittany Keil: So now to Greg's favorite topic right now, enrollment marketing.
Greg Turchetta: You gonna wind me up and let me go?
Brittany Keil: Mmm, actually.
Brittany Keil: I don't know, so I will say, I was talking to… I was talking to a couple of communicators earlier this week, and we were talking about how enrollment marketing is starting to not be the icing, but the cake itself.
Brittany Keil: And I think that this is going to be a trend that continues. And what I say, what I mean when I say that is I think that enrollment marketing was this, like, cool, flashy new thing, 3 or 4 years ago. Now I think it is an essential function of every district.
Brittany Keil: I'm bet I'm preaching to the choir, the folks in this room, don't leave a stone unturned when it comes to enrollment marketing, but this is something that I think is just going to continually to heat up.
Greg Turchetta: They're leaving one stone unturned. You have to lead this effort.
Greg Turchetta: If this was academics, and academics was falling at the speed enrollment is, you'd have a task force, right? If you had budget problems to the level that some of these districts are facing because of the enrollment loss, you'd have a task force on that. You need a task force on enrollment, and you, the comms leader, are uniquely qualified to lead it.
Greg Turchetta: Why? Because it is a comms function. It's marketing. You have registration, physical registration in your district, but who's doing marketing for enrollment?
Like, a flyer here and a postcard here doesn't count. I mean a real legitimate plan, because it is the biggest issue there is. And then.
Greg Turchetta: some of the districts we work closely with, you can see building school-based marketing plans is the next step of that. But…
Greg Turchetta: Oh, I like that, TJ! He says, I just launched a new layout on our district site solely because I listened to Greg at SUNSPRA, and I'm excited to see how this impacts our enrollment. I bet you it will help, TJ. I bet.
Awesome, glad to hear you did that.
Brittany Keil: But Greg makes a good point. When a lot of families are looking for enrollment, they are looking at the school-based sites and not the district site as a whole. So you don't need to just optimize your district homepage, but also your school sites. If you have a decentralized methodology where you have, you know, school owners own the school sites, they need to be in the know and understand that this is absolutely critical.
Brittany Keil: There's a question we have on the side, like, is enrollment marketing a comms function or an admin function?
Brittany Keil: I…
Brittany Keil: think that it can be a mix of both, but I think that comms needs to take the lead, and this is why.
Brittany Keil: I talked to a school communicator yesterday from Frisco ISD in Texas. First of all, she blew my mind. She was incredible. I hope to hear, you know, I hope to talk to her more.
But one thing she told me is that every single comms campaign that she runs, she is able to quantify how much money she is bringing into the district.
Brittany Keil: For example, her superintendent tasked her with a preschool, a pre-K enrollment campaign. She had a budget of $600 that resulted in $2 million in student, enrollment. This is the kind of show and tell that comms districts need. I know you guys are stressed, I know that you are pressed, and I know that you are, you know, restricted when it comes to resources.
Brittany Keil: These types of campaigns are something that you can show a return on investment that is directly tied to your efforts and benefits almost every single part of the district.
Greg Turchetta: And if your comms budget got cut in an across-the-board budget cut this summer, let me come talk to your superintendent, because you're the only people that can help dig your district out of this hole, right? The rules are changing. The funding models are changing, and not in your favor.
Greg Turchetta: So it is… it has got to be a red light going off kind of moment that the districts say, we have to do something different.
Brittany Keil: Alright, moving on. In the chat too, if anybody is looking into the new federal, funding around, like,
Brittany Keil: what is it? It's like a tax advantage donation to… Barry, I might need your help here, to a nonprofit associated with the district. I'd love to talk to you. Just, it's very new, it's very fuzzy and confusing right now, but if your district is looking into that, I'd be happy, to learn what you're seeing.
Greg Turchetta: Alright, number 7 on our list, this sounds awfully simple, but I hosted with Rick Kaufman last week an NSPRA Crisis Communications Plan, webinar, and he had a cohort of people that have gone through, like, an 8-week process with him, and it's phenomenal, and if you haven't done it, I highly recommend it.
Greg Turchetta: But at the end of it, when we were done talking about it, a couple people said, honestly, I don't have a plan. I came to a district that didn't have a plan.
Greg Turchetta: So this assumption that… I'm not going to make the assumption anymore that people have a plan. If not, that is your summer project. Because, as we know, one bad crisis and all that trust you've spent years developing goes out the window.
Greg Turchetta: And one of the best training pieces I was ever given was from the South Carolina Department of Law Enforcement, who said.
Greg Turchetta: They were teaching us about crisis planning, and they said, do you have a 3D plan? And I said, what's a 3D plan? And they said, every person that's on your communications crisis plan, you should have two backups for them, and they should be trained and know their role, and then you should be able to cross them so they are cross-trained in other roles.
Greg Turchetta: Because if you've been through a crisis, you know crises don't happen when everybody's sitting at their desk and everybody's present and accounted for. People are on vacation, people are at conferences.
Greg Turchetta: That is why that part is critical. And then you have to train people on it. Your team, your cabinet, your key stakeholders, I would be in the middle of a Monday team meeting, and I would stop the meeting and go, okay, we have a code red.
Greg Turchetta: I'm not here, she's not here, go.
Greg Turchetta: And I would tell them it's a test, but you have to get people comfortable with that.
Greg Turchetta: You also have to build in your communications plan, if you've never been through it, is if your staff has kids that are in the school that's currently compromised, they may not be able to function as part of your plan. They're emotionally incapacitated.
Greg Turchetta: factor that out. And then the biggest piece of all of this, the one question that kept me up late at night was standing in front of a microphone with the superintendent, and a reporter says, Greg, do you think if the messaging had got out faster, more lives would have been saved?
Greg Turchetta: And if the answer to that is yes, we failed.
Greg Turchetta: Right? How… so getting confirmed information to you to get out as fast as possible was my number one priority, and it was the one system I spent the most time working on.
Greg Turchetta: Because that has to speed up. We're not working at the speed of cabinet, we're not working at the speed of wordsmithing a document. We're working at the speed of now in an emergency. And that is critical.
So, what if you're on vacation? Your plan has to work without you in it.
Greg Turchetta: Sherry says, do you have an example of template of a good crisis comms plan? I will find you one, Sherry, because I knew that question was coming. There's several districts that I would emulate,
Greg Turchetta: But I'll reach out to you with something on that.
Brittany Keil: All right, and on the federal tax, sorry, I want to, like, get the language right. It's the,
Brittany Keil: Federal Tax Advantage Plan, I will drop a link, in the chat. It's very fuzzy, with a lot of things, like, a lot of things coming from the, you know, federal education department with new programming, but there are some specifics being, you know, hammered out as we speak.
Brittany Keil: Alright, and now, AI's helping or creating risk. So I feel like I have been, along with a lot of school communicators, on a journey when it comes to AI. First, there was a lot of suspicion. There was a lot of fear, there was, like, I don't know.
Brittany Keil: Then there was a lot of excitement, like, wow, 40% of us are, you know, teams of one. What can this do? What can this, you know, magnify? How can I multiply my efforts in ways that were, you know, impossible ever before?
Brittany Keil: Then, I think we hit a peak, and now there are some, you know, questions that need to be answered. And maybe your journey looks a little bit different, but I think the summer is a really good time to look at a couple of things. First.
Brittany Keil: You want to see where AI helps, and where you should continue to run AI. So obviously drafting announcements or newsletters, social posts, a lot of those highly, time-consuming, but not necessarily strategic points.
Brittany Keil: Of your time, summarizing long board documents. I honestly don't know how I did research before AI. I do, I remember, but I'm glad I don't have to go back. Because the sheer ability to analyze data, and Barrett, I know you're kind of like, I don't know about that.
Brittany Keil: With the help of AI has been absolutely incredible. And then responding to routine inbox questions faster. I used to have a lot of, library of Google templates when it came to every single question I could possibly ask. I've now automated that process even quicker, so that I actually have a recommended template that it pulls for me.
Brittany Keil: But, with the time that you have, you also have a lot of questions that you have a little bit of space to address. First, does your district have an AI use policy? NSPRA did a study earlier this year and found the vast majority of districts don't.
Brittany Keil: What is your next step tier? Is this something that CTO should own? Is this something that, comps should own? I honestly think this is a task force, because not only do you need to have a policy, you also need to have a communication plan.
Again, preaching to the choir, you know this, but this is not something that everybody's gonna think about. This is our bread and butter, this is us, you know, fish swimming in the water, this is not something that's, you know.
Brittany Keil: That somebody who's not used to communicating plans is going to think about.
Brittany Keil: Second, are your staff trained on privacy risks?
Brittany Keil: I'll be honest, it's the wild, wild west out there. Even in my own daughter's school, I've seen some crazy AI-generated imagery involving our mascot. That, of course, is not necessarily something that's dangerous or unsafe the way some AI use is, but it is something that you want to understand from a brand standpoint.
Brittany Keil: Second, or third, who reviews AI-generated content before it goes out? And then, what is your ethical framework for AI in the district, communications at all?
Brittany Keil: I've talked to a lot of communicators who have varying opinions about AI and, you know, whether or not different users are ethical. And I think these are questions, that we are really positioned to ha-
Brittany Keil: Positioned to have, well.
Brittany Keil: First, like, do you want to have AI-generated avatars? This is something that a lot of districts are finding helpful when it comes to translations, but is this something that you're afraid will challenge, you know, the trust that your district has?
Brittany Keil: Again, I know a lot of districts who have been able to post videos of their superintendents speaking in different languages in ways where they acknowledge, that this is not the superintendent's, you know, native or a language that they're capable of.
Brittany Keil: And… but it still improves communication. So I've seen this work well, but I think you need to have the conversation.
Brittany Keil: Another thing that I think is, interesting is the state of New York just passed a law that any AI-generated or altered avatar must have a disclaimer. I do expect some states to follow suit. New York is the first state to pass this law. It went into effect, June 6th.
Brittany Keil: So just a couple of weeks ago, but it means that any single mailer, any ad, anything that was generated using AI, it's something that has to be, you know, obviously delineated, it has to be labeled.
Brittany Keil: The kicker here is I've been talking to school districts who are interested in using AI-generated children, and I know that sounds, like, horrifying and scary, but the reason for it, I think, is a little bit more understanding. With the dangers of AI scraping, more and more families are not allowing photos of their kids to be posted online.
Brittany Keil: This is something I understand from a parent level. This is also some… a challenge that I see schools are going to have to deal with more and more.
Greg Turchetta: Hey, Brittany, while you were waxing so poetically on AI, the chat blew up with crisis communication.
Brittany Keil: I know!
Greg Turchetta: What I'd like to do, can we commit to post-NSPRA doing a crisis communications webinar, as opposed to emailing everybody just the template, we can actually have a conversation about how to build them? Can we do that?
Brittany Keil: Yeah, sure.
Greg Turchetta: Sweet! There it is, guys. You just created a new webinar.
Brittany Keil: Yeah, yes, y'all created the webinar, we love it, and we'll be here for it.
Brittany Keil: Okay, anything else on AI, Greg?
Greg Turchetta: You killed it.
Brittany Keil: All right
Brittany Keil: Okay, AI search. So this is something I'm also very passionate about. So most districts I know are only barely dipping their toes into AI search. If you are deeper into it, I'd love to hear it.
A lot of, you know, private sector industries have special tools, and many of them are very expensive.
Brittany Keil: to help monitor how they're appearing out, in the online community when it comes to AI answers. We use a tool called PeecAI, it's P-E-E-C. I'm not yet going to recommend it, because I'm not 100% sold. Seems a little expensive.
I'll let y'all know in 6 months. But HubSpot also has similar capabilities.
Brittany Keil: But, if you don't have the budget for these kinds of tools, and if you have a free tool that you're using, please post it in the chat, I'd love to hear more. I do think that there are some good workarounds, and I'm gonna go over those in the next slide.
Brittany Keil: But, what you should know is that community members, including your families and students, are definitely using AI to get answers about your school website.
Brittany Keil: It's honestly a little bit scary, because AIs can pull things from some very strange sources. For example, I asked, I asked what, a teacher in-service date was, and the AI pulled a calendar from 23-24.
Brittany Keil: it was wrong. I almost sent my kid to school on the wrong day. But that's the danger that we come to whenever we have, A, websites that, you know, may have data that should have been archived or should, you know, be hidden somewhere, and, you know, robots that can't tell the difference.
Brittany Keil: So, some quick stats, 68% of Google searches in early 2026 ended without a click to another site.
Brittany Keil: If you are a website that views, clicks, and as, you know, part of your engagement, this is scary, this is terrifying. Second, 80% of consumers rely on AI-written results for 40% of searches.
Brittany Keil: Also terrifying, but also the reality. And then finally, 72% of users use AI at least once a day to search the internet.
Brittany Keil: I think that what this tells me, as a marketer, as a parent, is that we really need to go all in on our single source of truth. We need to make sure that our websites are updated frequently, we need to make sure that they're crawlable, and we have some, tips to help get you there.
Greg Turchetta: So let me tell you a quick little example. I tried this yesterday as an example. I picked 20… I let Claude pick 20 Florida school districts, big, medium, small, and asked it two questions. How do I enroll in the district, and what's the first day of school?
And the answer is, big districts did very well, because they have larger teams, they spend more time on the calendars, but the calendar piece became a problem early. The small districts failed, and I didn't name names, it's on my LinkedIn profile if you want to
Greg Turchetta: go read the article. But small districts, more PDF-dependent, all the ADA issues that are going to come up in the next year or two, those are your AI search issues as well. So we can kill two birds with one stone.
Greg Turchetta: put the answer in plain web page text. Don't make parents open a PDF, don't make AI try to do it, because it can't do it either.
Greg Turchetta: Make PDFs secondary, not primary. Keep printable PDFs, but put the actual dates and instructions on the page itself.
Greg Turchetta: Test pages without JavaScript, because if the page is blank or broken, it's a visibility and accessibility warning, and AI can't grab it. So on the calendar example, there were many districts that AI… Claude said, I couldn't get it from here, so I went to a third-party source and got the wrong school date. A couple of districts had 3 different starts of school dates based on third-party answers alone. It never went to the website until I asked it to fact-check it.
Greg Turchetta: And then, audit district name confusion. Ask your front desk people if you have a common county name, and you keep getting confused with other districts in other states. AI is going to do the same thing. So, what you post has to make sure it's unambiguous in page titles and meta descriptions that this is your state, your district, not the other one.
Greg Turchetta: And then, this is an ongoing project. AI scrubbability is going to become the thing we talk about the most in the next year, because it's constantly evolving and constantly has to be checked, and you have to search like a parent. Google your district. Do what I just said to do, put it in different chatbots.
I only used one chatbot, but the results were startling to me.
Brittany Keil: Absolutely, and I… with the district name confusion, this is also true, for schools. A lot of parents will go to the school district first, and I know firsthand that there is a Breyer Elementary in California, because it has pulled up some of their, answers when I'm trying to understand things about the school.
Greg Turchetta: And your parents aren't going to be that picky, right? They may just accept it as truth, and now we've got confusion and we've got frustration.
Brittany Keil: So, a couple of prompts to try. Like I said, there are tools that you can help monitor AI searchability for your district, but if you don't have those, you can do a lot just by doing the work yourself. So first, here's, are some things that I've had communicators do, and they've been really mind-blowing.
Brittany Keil: Try, I'm a new parent moving to the area, what should I know about? Put your school district.
Brittany Keil: You will be amazed at what you see. Similarly, I think my school district is the best. Prove me wrong. I had my communicators in Washington do this during a book club, and people were shocked at what it pulled up.
It pulled up news articles from years past. It pulled up, you know, web pages from other school districts that they didn't even know existed.
Brittany Keil: So if another school district is saying that they have the most programming in, you know, the state, whether or not that's true, that's something that it's going to pull when, you know, comparing different school districts.
Brittany Keil: And then third, and this is a scary one to consider because I think a lot of parents are actually doing this, not only when they select, you know, choices among homeschool versus charter schools versus public school, but also where they choose to buy a house.
Brittany Keil: I'm a parent moving to blank, what school should I choose?
Greg Turchetta: And it gives names and receipts. It will tell you, these 3 high schools are my top choices. In .5 seconds.
Greg Turchetta: the AI makes that decision, which really means this summer, we gotta dig into the dark corners of our website and make sure, and all the other departments need to do it, too, to make sure that some academic report from 2018 that was a page we should have blown out a long time ago doesn't become a source of truth for 2026.
Brittany Keil: I also would like to remind y'all not just to look at the answers, but also the sources.
Brittany Keil: AI is continually evolving with where it likes to pull from. Right now, some of its favorite things are A YouTube, so if your district doesn't have a cohesive YouTube strategy, go ahead, get started, that needs to happen. Also, Reddit. I don't expect school districts to have a Reddit.
Brittany Keil: Presence, but I do think if you have an advocate, community, this may be an avenue that you want, you know, to let them know about.
Brittany Keil: Alright, and then finally, last but not least, plan for burnout while it's here. 70% of communicators report that they have been burned out at least sometimes in the last school district, and I think that that is only going to continue to grow. This is your chance, even though you're doing 4-10s, which I… like, now, the more I think about it, I'm like, oh, that sounds rough.
Brittany Keil: Go ahead and create your burnout plan before it gets here. How do you build this, not just for yourself, but also for your team? How do you build your boundaries? I think there are a lot of good, best practices around, around burnout, but now is the time that you want to take that action.
Greg Turchetta: I got a strategy for that.
Greg Turchetta: Lean in real close. I need you to learn a new phrase. It's called, NO! I can't do that!
Something can come off your plate, okay? The plate runneth over. This is Thanksgiving on steroids. We have to get rid of something, because, I mean, hell, Brittany and I just gave you 10 more things to add to your plate, right?
Something has to come off.
Greg Turchetta: departments can feed for themselves. If you're going to bring enrollment marketing in, that's 50% of the job, probably, right there, so things have to go. It's okay to say no. One strategy for that is, get your superintendent's top five priorities.
They're probably recruitment and retention, academic achievement, fiscal responsibility, safety and security, and something else.
Greg Turchetta: Those are also your 5 top priorities. So when somebody brings in 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, you can say, I'm really sorry, Superintendent and I are locked in on these 5 things, and I've got to spend my time there. That's a polite way to say no.
Brittany Keil: Alright, so that is it for me and Greg. This was fun, this was different. I hope that this, you know, was helpful for everybody. We are going to be in touch first with a worksheet that we built out of all of these, you know, tips and resources that we talked about today.
We'll also be sending out the recording, along with other resources that, connect to the content. And then finally, I think we're going to include a note about when the crisis
Brittany Keil: comms, webinar is gonna be, because it sounds like that just happened.
Greg Turchetta: If you've got questions, we've got a few minutes, fire them in the chat, or if you've got examples of these things that you want people to look at, please share.
Greg Turchetta: Thank you, Barry.
Greg Turchetta: If you've got suggestions for future webinars, throw them in the chat.
Brittany Keil: We are having two more of our… two more of our, extra credit series. The next one is on the science in residence.
Brittany Keil: Really excited about this one. So we are actually looking at what kinds of posts, families actually engage with the most at a huge meta level, so that's gonna be super exciting. And then at the end of the summer, we're going to be digging more deeply into AI.
Brittany Keil: Awesome. Well, thank y'all so much for joining. I hope y'all have a great Thursday. That's your Friday for the 4-day a week, folks, and everybody else, please, man, just have a great summer.
We're so grateful for the work that you do, and are grateful that you showed up with us today.
Greg Turchetta: And if you're coming to NSPRA, stop by the booth, come to our sessions. Spokane, we're definitely going to come to your sessions. Teresa and Kevin, I'd love to hear about your bond initiative, and have a great summer.
Brittany Keil: Alright, bye y'all!
