From school calendars and student connections to emergency notifications and time-sensitive announcements, with the well-being and satisfaction of so many people at stake, school communications are an essential component of any learning institution.
Not every school communication plan is created equal, however. The best plans facilitate simple and efficient message delivery and cater to the desires of their audience. Let’s take a look at some best practices that can contribute to a reliable and valuable school communication plan.
Understand your goals and your audience
Similar to how a business needs to understand its marketing goals and target audience, you also must possess a deep understanding of your goals and audience to execute a successful communication plan.
What is the ultimate goal of your plan? Underneath the logistics, you want to connect with staff, students and parents in a non-threatening, engaging way. Each strategy you implement should emerge with this principle in mind.
Knowing your audience is also critical to keeping your communication plan effective. One way to find out what your audience desires is to look at past communication. Where can you improve? What miscommunications could have been prevented? Are you reaching all of your students? Review your wins and losses and find ways to improve and also keep doing what already works.
Another simple way to understand your audience more is to survey them and gather feedback. This will also foster a deeper connection with your contacts because it will show them that you care about their opinions and needs. Send surveys easily with voice broadcasting, a technology we will discuss in the next section.
Mass Communication Systems
Popular with state and local government agencies, voice broadcasting is an affordable mass communication solution that allows you to message hundreds or thousands of people within minutes. Send important notifications, whether emergency or announcements, and keep students, staff and parents in the loop on the school’s happenings. If you use a technology called interactive voice response or IVR, send phone surveys to all of your contacts and they can respond with a simple key press or voice response.
A texting service can also facilitate mass communication for your school. Texting services work similar to voice broadcasting in that they allow you to send text messages to all of your contacts within minutes. Adding a texting service to your school communication plan is a smart decision because text messages have a high open rate and people generally do not go anywhere without their phones. Texting services are also inexpensive and easy to use.
Engagement
Regardless of the communication tool, keep your contacts engaged. Aside from the pertinent messaging like emergency notifications and announcements, think about ways you can reach out to staff, parents and students, and show them you care about their participation and concerns.
If you want to use affordable mass communication systems like voice broadcasting or texting services to engage your contacts and round out your school communications plan, sign up for a free account here. CallFire offers multiple cost-effective services to help you get your messages across to more people and do so efficiently. We are delighted to help you reach your communication goals.