If you’re not telling your story, someone else is.

You may have heard this quote before. Schools have a wide and varied audience, and people will certainly talk. How you control your message will often determine how your program is perceived. Because you’re going to be “selling” the school technology plan, and because more and more marketing and communications happens electronically, the technology department typically shares responsibility for marketing and communications efforts in schools. Many school CTOs also supervise the PIO (Public Information Officer).

When crafting your message, it’s a best practice to start with a story. Notice all of the videos shared in the unit thus far have shared data and information about the school programs, but they are also telling a story about a student or a school. Storytelling captures attention and imagination, and allows a more Human connection to what’s happening in a school.

When telling a story, it’s critical for everyone in an organization to be telling the same story, from the same or different perspectives. If stakeholders are sharing different stories with different and contradictory outcomes, your message will get muddied or lost. Transparency in your process also helps everyone speak the same language and can garner buy-in for your vision. Shared leadership models are a significant enabler for transparency in schools.

Defining Your Audience

When creating your school’s PR plan, the first step is to determine the audiences that a school will be communicating to. These are typically internal, as well as to students, parents, grantmakers, governments, and the larger community. Each of these audiences has a unique set of information they need from a school. Therefore, the next step in a PR plan is deciding what each stakeholder group needs to hear, and how best to get that information out to them.

Determining Your Approach

Once you’ve identified the information that a stakeholder group needs, the next step is to get that information out to them. Part of this is picking the right tool for the job - a text message alert is probably a good way to get school closings out to families, but not necessarily to get out the honor roll list (also, if you overuse media like a text alert or a phone call, they will lose their impact and be ignored). Posting information in the newspaper and working with local media is a great way to engage the larger community and video in general is a great medium to tell stories. Posting information on your school website is necessary, but traffic typically needs to be driven to a website and stakeholders are more likely to engage with your school through social media. Some things will depend on personnel - with a small staff, it may not be possible to produce content frequently. This is another place where shared leadership can support your work. However, if content isn’t posted consistently, your audience will stop looking for it.

Social media tends to have the broadest reach, as most parents and students use at least one form of social media. It’s a great way to reach people and to tell your story. It’s also a great way to promote engagement through hashtags that multiple people can post to. Social media also tends to be a space for quicker communications (a photo from a classroom, a score update for a game, etc.) and communications can be much more informal (or even sassy). Cultivating a brand for your social media account is a great way to promote engagement and outreach. With both hashtags and comments, you need to monitor pretty consistently and address issues early before they spin out of control. Also, note that responding offline to social media posts selectively (say, for example, about bus route issues) can constitute selective delivery of government services and can be problematic.

Cultivating Your Brand

In addition to your social media brand persona, cultivating your brand persona in all of your marketing materials is critical. Your brand persona is the visual style of all of the materials you produce. NC State’s Branding site, for example, contains information about the fonts, colors, styles, language, photography, and logos you’re supposed to use to make a work look distinctively NC State. Having a similar guide for your staff to use to create content, including PowerPoint slides and handouts, can help unify your brand across schools. A Media Kit, such as this one from Slack, can also help support external organizations in sharing your stories.