Do you feel overwhelmed by the waves of emails, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, and LinkedIn updates that come crashing in on your shores? I recently overheard two teachers talking about an opportunity at our school that both deeply valued and in which both wanted to play a significant role. However, life had intervened, and they both felt that the role that they were playing was dramatically less than the role that they wanted to play. They mentioned that the information that they likely needed to play a more significant role was buried in some emails . . . emails that one of the teachers confessed to only having skimmed. This is a symptom of a lack of having a formal communications plan. I’d like to share with you why your school should have one, and how you can go about authoring one.
If I were to approach heads and senior administrators at schools and ask them if their school had a communications plan in place, I suspect that the answer would be yes. I’d likely get some recitation about a series of dates by which various communiqués are sent home to parents, in either mail or email form. But sending a mailing to parents does not necessarily constitute communication,and a system of such mailings does not constitute a communication plan.
You see, in order for communication to happen, there must be at least two people involved. Doubt me? Well, here’s the authority of Wikipedia on the topic. There are at least two problems with this. First, we make the mistake that parents are actually reading and understanding the communications. When you consider that it’s likely that only one parent is reading your communications – and that that parent may be a non-native speaker – your communications have become decidedly less clear and less effective than you originally intended. Even for those international parents who speak English fluently, you may have leveraged subtle nuance or slang that isn’t easily understood.
Second, your message must make it through the tidal waves of other “communications” that families are receiving on a daily basis. There has been much news in the press about whether various types of ads are becoming too graphic. Realize that the reason that advertising has had to become so graphic is so that the ads stand out from all of the other information that people are processing. When your message is a drop in a vast ocean of information, it may not even be seen or heard.
With this second notion, there is some tension, to be sure, surrounding the E. F. Hutton effect. (If you’ve never heard of E. F. Hutton, please take the time to click on the link for a great vintage commercial.) If a school doesn’t communicate frequently, they run the risk of being completely overlooked in the ocean of information. However, if they communicate too frequently, they worry that they will lose the E. F. Hutton effect: that the frequency of communications will cause a loss in the power of the words when they speak. In other words, there is a fear that frequent communications will cause those communications to be ignored, that E. F. Hutton will lose his voice.
Keeping both of these issues in mind – the clarity and frequency of communication – I’d like to share some thoughts on how schools can improve their communications.
First, communicate with greater frequency. With respect to frequency fears, I’d like to propose the radical notion that the E. F. Hutton era has ended. While there are still singularly important communications – such as the Presidential State of the Union address – even those singularly important communications have lost their impact. Those who choose to live in the world of E. F. Hutton are choosing to live in a world that no longer exists, or, at best, one that is quickly fading. While schools certainly need to be worried about the boy-who-cried-wolf phenomenon, I’d like to remind schools that the boy in the story was a liar. It was the lying that caused his message to be ignored. I would hope that most of your communications are truthful.
If you’re still not convinced but you’re willing to embrace doubt, there’s a simple solution. Send the more frequent communications from a generic mailbox such as [email protected]. Then, reserve the headmaster’s email address for those precious few E. F. Hutton messages.
Second, keep your message clear across communications. Most of your communications are going to be skimmed these days. Therefore, if it was valuable enough to say in the first place, it’s valuable enough to be repeated. Now, bear in mind that you’ll need to change things up so that the message doesn’t look identical to ones that have been sent previously. If it appears as though you’re sending the same message again and again, your constituents will quickly hit the delete button so that they can move on to rest of the tidal wave of information. Remember, it is the message that is consistent, not the wording.
Third, break down your communications into smaller parts. An article on FastCompany actually advocates that every email should be just five sentences long. How long is your summer email to parents? Can it be measured in pages? If your emails are too long, they run the risk of either not being read or not having the desired action taken. Instead, match the communication medium. If you’re tweeting something, you’ll have to do it in 140 characters. Likewise, don’t treat email as though it’s a place to write a tome, because it isn’t. Instead, break your message into smaller parts and deliver them over multiple emails.
Fourth, sequence your communications. Now that you’re writing shorter, more actionable emails, take the time to sequence them. If parents don’t need to place orders for textbooks until two weeks before school starts, don’t send them the link to the online textbook store at the start of the summer. Timeliness is a huge motivating factor, and parents need to receive information when it is actionable. If you send it at a time when it is not, your information is likely to languish in the wasteland of read emails in your parents’ inboxes.
Fifth, remember that your goal is action. Some reading this are no doubt worried that parents will complain if the email volume from the school suddenly increases. This is a valid concern, to be sure, as you do not want to alienate your parents in your communications efforts. I would suggest, however, that your goal of your communication is to motivate the parents to some desired action. It might well be worth it to endure the complaint – so long as you are not alienating your parents – in order to achieve a desired end. More likely, though, the complaints stem from the message: a message about which they don’t care, a message that is too long, or a message that has no clear action.
For tips on how to go about developing a communications plan for your school, the University of Kansas has a wonderful section on developing a communication plan in their Community Tool Box, a service of the Work Group for Community Health and Development.
