Finding a quality school-home communications platform is a great way to create bonds and connect with families. However, when it comes to engaging the school community as a whole, you need to build a wider scope of communications—through social media, your website, and newsletters. Creating interesting and useful content through these channels is a great way to connect with your school community, develop a brand that your community recognizes, and build trust.
To discuss why it’s so important to build a vibrant brand that engages your community, we hosted a webinar with school communications experts: Jen Todderud and Ashton Brellenthin. Jen and Ashton had a great conversation about how schools can create an impactful brand, establish consistent use of that branding, and successfully engage school communities.
Creating An Impactful Brand
The first step in engaging your school community is building an impactful brand that draws in families and community members.
Jen said that the key to creating an impactful brand is dependability and clarity in your visual branding. This means identifying things like motto, branding colors, icons, and logos. By keeping these visual elements consistent, you communicate professionalism and can promote trust and unity throughout your school or district.
In addition to the importance of visuals, Ashton noted that identity is equally as critical. Pinpointing your district’s identity is important because your brand is ultimately based on how your school community reacts to this identity and how you make your school community feel.
Consistency Across Different Communication Channels
Once you pinpoint the visuals and identity of your brand, consistency is key to creating an engaging and recognizable brand. Ashton pointed out that this not only goes for school emails and newsletters, but it is also important to carry themes and branding across all different channels, including social media and digital and print communications.
If consistency is so important, how do we make sure we are communicating a consistent brand to the school community?
Jen and Ashton both recommend creating a brand reference guide––including pre-determined color palettes with color codes, easily accessible high-quality logos and icons, and preferred fonts.
It can also be beneficial to set up templates for social media posts and print materials to avoid constantly having to recreate branded content. In ParentSquare, educators can create templates for a variety of different communications, and branding colors and fonts can be preset into these templates for accessibility.
Jen uses templates and consistent graphics on her district’s social media posts to celebrate the accomplishments of staff and students. Templates are also useful for sharing sports schedules and events. In addition, Jen utilized ParentSquare’s post template feature to develop a “Friday 5” weekly staff newsletter template that can be quickly and easily completed and distributed each week.
Using Stories to Elevate Your Brand
Because parents can choose where they send their children to school, storytelling and sharing the moments happening in your school each day on social media can make your brand stand out. Ashton noted that consistent and authentic storytelling helps to build trust within your community, which ultimately leads to loyalty. This is crucial in school districts where families have many options for choosing which school their child attends. Schools need to be visible and open with storytelling in order to engage the school community and retain enrollments.
Storytelling on social media can happen in a variety of ways, through images, videos, and finding ways to highlight student and staff accomplishments.
“I use it as an opportunity to share the things that we are doing, and that we are doing well,” Jen said. “Make sure that you know what your community values, and then showcase that.”
Where to Begin
While building a strong brand is key to engaging your school community, you don’t have to do it all at once.
Jen recommends that communications leaders start by making sure branding is accessible for staff so they can actually use it and be consistent with all guidelines. By sharing the reasons behind your choices for branding elements, you can build an authentic brand and increase staff usage of branding in their communications and posts.
Ashton suggests identifying what’s most important in your community and what’s going to get the most buy-in from your stakeholders. What your school community is passionate about is key to your branding.
To view the conversation in its entirety, check out the webinar recording here.
Resources
Click here to download “The Complete District Communications Playbook
Part 1: Elevating Your District’s Brand”
Get our helpful brand guide template you can use to create and share your district or school brand guidelines
