7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications. Good communications should not be a secondary priority

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1 7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications Good communications should not be a secondary priority

2 Ambitious Minds 7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications Primary schools have to communicate with parents, and prospective parents. They must also engage with a range of stakeholders including Ofsted, sponsors and supporters whether business, religious or the local authority, and the wider community. They must compete to attract pupils and there is a need to raise additional funds which is best done by creating as large a pool of contributors as possible. Primary schools have significantly fewer staff than secondary schools, which reduces the chances of having an enthusiastic and knowledgeable member of staff who knows how to manage a website or create an e-newsletter template, or has the free time to do such activities. But using digital channels to cheaply and effectively communicate about your school is too valuable to ignore. You still want and need to capture and convey the school s strengths around, for example, educational progress, pastoral care and personal development, across a range of platforms. Where to start? What is realistic and what is required? How do you make sure that your limited energies and resources are well-directed and not wasted? Follow our 7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications to start making a difference in your school today: 1. Get started with a plan 2. Target your audiences 3. Spread your web of information 4. Develop your social networks 5. Communicate directly 6. Get your school in front of other people s audiences 7. Call in the experts 2

3 7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications 1. Get started with a plan Let s assume you ve identified a need to communicate more effectively. The trigger isn t too important. Perhaps one person too many has said your website needs some TLC, applications are a concern, the school down the road does it better, or you ve joined a new school and want to make your mark. Having decided that something needs to be done, you have two related questions to answer: - what is that something which needs to be done? - where do you start? First, though, pause to take a breath and consider the much more fundamental questions: what are your aims, who do you want to communicate with, and can you sustain the activity you have in mind? Identify your key goals Keep the list short and specific. There are lots and lots of reasons to communicate better and more effectively, but it is worth identifying and concentrating on your top priorities. For example, it may be that your key aims are: 1. to keep your parents fully up to date with what is happening in the school 2. to increase the number of applications to your school 3. to raise the profile of your school and its activity among the local community With that focus, you can then move on to the best channels of communication, frequency, tone and so on. Get a plan Creating a communications strategy isn t about spending weeks carefully crafting a document which can be proudly filed away on a shelf. It should be a resource which captures quite simply what your aims are, who the key contacts internally are (for example, who can make changes to the website and post on social media accounts). The strategy should also highlight key issues and times of the year, for example the period when the new admissions information will be available, which will enable you to begin planning in plenty of time for how you are going to create a co-ordinated approach across your digital platforms. 3

4 Ambitious Minds 2. Target your audiences Despite how much some of them may want to, it is impossible for every parent, prospective parent or potential future teachers to stand at the back of the classroom during lessons, sit in the dining room over lunch and monitor the playgrounds through breaktime. Instead they must rely on your communications to provide this window on your school life. This includes sharing useful information in a timely and appropriate way, getting your messages across, highlighting the exciting, interesting and educationally-positive things that are going on in the school. Identify your audiences There are lots of different groups that you will want to communicate with at different times, including: Parents Pupils Staff Governors Prospective parents Local community Businesses Secondary schools Nurseries Ofsted Local authority Partners Volunteers Potential recruits Alumni Each requires a different mix of techniques to communicate with them in the most effective way possible. Adapt your tone and techniques Not everything is of interest to every group or is suitable for every channel. There is also a different tone required depending on whether it is a tweet about a cake sale or an telling parents about uniform changes. Prioritise You will want to communicate with all of these audience segments as often as appropriate, but it may be that time or other constraints make that difficult. Once you start improving your school s communications, don t be too concerned about prioritising some groups over others. Decide which groups are most important that is, which groups you need to communicate with to meet your key goals and focus on them first. 4

5 7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications 3. Spread your web of information Parents have an expectation of being kept informed regularly and the best way of doing this is through the school website. While a secondary school can have a target of updating its news daily, it is more realistic for a primary school to aim for one or two updates a week. They don t need to be long and detailed, taking hours to produce and polish. Shorter pieces added more regularly are much more effective, and easier to maintain. Bells and whistles or is it just noise? If you have a site that can be updated quickly and easily, you will find that you re much more likely to update it regularly. While everyone would like a fantastically-designed website with lots of bells and whistles, a simple, clean site is easier to manage and keeps the focus on content rather than on gimmicks. Great design is nice to have, but great content is a necessity. A Wordpress site, for example, is designed for people with no technical knowledge and is as easy as sending an . Start, by starting Take the first step today. Take a picture of the students with their newly-awarded certificates, or of the class trip to the farm, or whatever is happening right now. Then write five or six sentences about it and post it online. The first story is the hardest to write, so get it out of the way so you can start on the second, then third over the coming days. Three things to remember: Where possible, plan your content so that you can spread the workload A picture speaks a thousand words and it s much, much quicker to take and upload a picture, so use one (or two) whenever you can! Consider using Pinterest or Flickr to easily create photo galleries Tell people it s there. It sounds obvious, but if people have got used to the site not being updated they will have stopped looking at it and aren t going to know intuitively that there are now things to read. So tell them via your school newsletter or by putting up posters in reception. 5

6 Ambitious Minds To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question. 4. Develop your social networks To answer that question, go back to our starting points what are you trying to achieve and who do you want to communicate with? Be pragmatic. Twitter (and Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and any of the other social media platforms) can be useful, but particularly for a primary school you have to consider whether they are worth the effort. Your audience is naturally smaller and, particularly if yours is a small school, then your audience may well be counted in dozens rather hundreds. If that is the case, you may still want to use social media but realise its limits and don t spend time on it that should otherwise be used on more established (if less glamorous) forms of communication. If you decide it s worth doing, do it properly If you do take the plunge, then you do need to plunge in. Dipping in a proverbial toe won t work, because there will be no chance of gaining the momentum that you need to get established. Success in social media demands time to be invested, and that needs to come first before you reap the benefits. That means you need a steady stream of tweets and you need to be social reply to other people s tweets, add comments and so on. People are then more likely to start responding to your activity. Be careful in choosing your audience Do remember that some social networks, including Facebook and YouTube, require users to be aged 13 or over and so if the school chooses to have an account it should either clearly be targeted at parents or make it clear it should only be used with parental supervision. Be imaginative Despite this, social media can be a great platform for your school s activities. Be imaginative, as it may be that because of the reliance on photos, a Pinterest page or Flickr portfolio is a more appropriate way to showcase the school than a Twitter account, which requires much more time spent on it. However, if you do decide that it is how you want to proceed, then it can be a really useful way of communicating directly with people and raising the profile of your school. For more details on how to do this, check out our guide The 7 Tips for Social Media Success at Your School 6

7 7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications 5. Communicate directly The school website and social media accounts can be really effective tools for broadcasting information, but digital communications also enable quick and cheap forms of direct communication. Newsletter v E-Newsletter As an example, compare the relative merits and effort required to produce a newsletter or an e- newsletter: Does it reach its intended audience? Newsletter Can be lost or left stuffed in a bag E-newsletter Open rates can be tracked; bounced s show who didn t receive it Does it get read? We hope it does Measure which links get clicked and by how many people. Invite immediate feedback and responses Does it provide value for money? Is it efficient to produce and distribute? Is it an attractive format? Printing and photocopying is expensive Takes time to create. A manually-intensive process Words and often poor-quality pictures. Usually black and white if produced frequently Very cheap to communicate with all parents. Especially useful when there is more than one contact for a child Can quickly utilise existing content on the website Easy to template, schedule and automate It can be with its audience within minutes of the content being finalised Can utilise video and audio, and be bright and vivid at no added cost. Can also link to other resources and information Set up correctly, the school s digital communications should not require significant costs nor any detailed technical knowledge. Put in the time initially to get the foundations right and you can reap the benefits of efficient, effective communications throughout the school year. 7

8 Ambitious Minds 6. Get your school in front of other people s audiences Every organisation is busy trying to develop their own audiences online, whether its e-newsletter subscribers, Twitter followers or Facebook friends. A great way to spread your reach is by actively looking to use their audiences and pull to promote what your school is doing. Over the course of a year there will be plenty of newsworthy events going on in your school. Charitable endeavours, sporting triumphs, community days and guest speakers are all fantastic opportunities to leverage other audiences. For example, when you raise money for a charity, send them some details and a photograph of what the children did and ask them to put it on their website and tweet about it because they re promoting themselves while promoting you, they ll happily help. Particularly on Twitter, think about who the local influencers are. Often councillors, MPs and journalists will have large and relevant followings and will be happy to retweet details of your summer fayre or fundraising efforts. Use the media to promote your school Newspapers have great penetration into their market, which makes local newspapers and their websites an ideal place for your news stories. The most important aspect of your press release is finding a hook to get a journalist interested, and your story should fit at least one of these seven characteristics: Exciting does the story leap off the page? Does it make you want to tell someone else? Data are there facts and figures which demonstrate significant change and improvement? Unusual is it about something different or quirky? (But don t call it unique, because it won t be) Community does it have a wider impact or involve people from outside the school? Achievement has it resulted in success marked by a trophy or an award Timely is it new? Does it fit in with what is going on elsewhere? Emotive does it raise a smile, make you pause for reflection, has it surprised you? How to approach and deal with the media requires a separate guide in itself check out our guide, The 7 Steps to Raising Your School s Profile for all the information you need to get started and should be part of your thinking about your digital communications and promoting the school and its activities. 8

9 7 Tricks to Transform Your Primary School Communications We can get you started 7. Call in the experts There are a number of ways we can work with your school to boost the quality of your communications: Build a new school website or refresh your existing site Set up social media accounts with the appropriate safeguards and user guides Create templates and processes for you to go off and use Train key members of staff about how to make best use of the opportunities Develop a communications strategy for your primary school Ambitious Minds can provide the expertise and enthusiasm to boost your communications and give you the knowledge and momentum you need to make a difference for your primary school. Ambitious Minds is the right partner for you We are education specialists and we understand schools, so we will not treat you like a run-of-themill business that wants better communications so it can sell more widgets. Success in the education sector is not measured simply by the number of tweets you send or the number of hits you get on your website. It is about portraying an accurate, holistic and positive image of the school, across every aspect of the school's life, and throughout all of its communications. We take the burden of the planning and execution off your shoulders, which lets you get on with the job of running the school, while we work tirelessly to spread the news of the good work that is going on in your school, day in and day out. Our experience and expertise, from years spent in journalism and managing media relations, means that we will provide a communications solution that is tailored to your needs and executed to produce the outcomes you desire. Working in partnership with you, we will shape your message and then we will spread your message. Take your first step and call us Call us now to arrange a meeting during which we can explore how Ambitious Minds can help to boost your intake through better PR and communications call Alex Turner on or alex.turner@ambitiousminds.co.uk If you have any comments or questions on any aspect of Ambitious Minds, we would also be delighted to hear from you. To find out more about who we are and what we do, please go to and let us know what you think. 9