Show Notes: 

Read our Storytelling guide to learn more great tips. 

If you know a great storyteller in school comms, nominate them for the SchoolCEO Excellence in School Marketing Award. Finalists receive a free ticket to the SchoolCEO Conference in September and a write-up in our magazine!

Don’t forget to buy your tickets for the SchoolCEO Conference in Little Rock, AR, this September! 

For more school marketing strategies and insights, check out our free webinars at https://info.apptegy.com/events-and-resources.

Subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.schoolceo.com/subscribe-now/. 

Visit us at schoolceo.com and connect with SchoolCEO on LinkedIn or X/Twitter @school_ceo. If you have a story you’d like to share with the SchoolCEO team, email us at eileen@schoolceo.com or schedule a call.

SchoolCEO is powered by Apptegy, the maker of the leading K-12 communications and brand management platform.

Episode Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the SchoolCEO Podcast. I’m your host, Eileen Beard. We’re talking a lot about stories right now because school comms across the country have one big strength—they have so many amazing stories to tell. Probably even too many if you consider that nearly 50% of school comms departments are on teams of one. There’s no way one person or team can capture them all. 

But how do you know which stories to hone in on? What makes a good story? SchoolCEO Magazine Editor Melissa Hite, herself an excellent storyteller, wrote a storytelling guide for SchoolCEO online. And it doesn’t require a complicated story structure, a hero and a villain or a specific arc. It really just comes down to 3 key elements: Emotion, authenticity and transformation. 

So often, when districts share what’s going on in their schools, they focus on the facts: the success of an event, the details of a new initiative, or the results of a board meeting. But they miss the emotion: the driving force that turns fact into story.

But emotion? That one’s actually pretty simple to capture, especially on film: A parent tearing up with pride, a student jumping up and down excitedly, a teacher beaming at her students. Those images speak a thousand words. 

To be authentic, don’t make up a story to manipulate your audience. Showcase the real experiences of your students or staff. Let them inside your hallways and classrooms. Give your followers a sense of what it was really like to be there in the moment a great story was unfolding. 

Finally, as a school district, you’ll want to highlight two main types of transformation in your stories: changes you make to your schools in order to improve outcomes for kids, like a new program or a building reno, and changes your schools are making in the lives of your students.

You might think this is too much to capture in a quick social media post, but it’s really not. Take a real example of a post made by Chicago Public Schools: it’s a single photo of a beaming student wearing a bow tie. The caption? “Chicago Public Schools senior Christian Bradford was making low B’s and C’s at the beginning of his high school’s IB programme. Now, thanks to his 4.6 GPA, he’s been accepted into DePauw University. He’ll be the first in his family to attend college.” That’s 44 words. It has emotion—you can see it on Christian’s face—it’s authentic—he’s a real student and he struggled to get good grades at the start of high school—and it has transformation—Now, he has a 4.6 GPA and he’ll be the first in his family to attend college. 

But you could tell the same story in even fewer words, too. Picture a photo or video of Christian smiling in his graduation cap. Maybe his parents are even looking on? And the caption simply says, “Once struggling CPS student now the first in his family to attend college.” 13 words, one incredible story that shows the world the change one school district is making in the life of one of its students. 

By the way, if you know a school comms person who weaves an excellent story, please take the time to nominate them for the SchoolCEO Excellence in School Marketing Award! Finalists receive free admission to the SchoolCEO Conference this fall and individual write-ups in our magazine! I’ll include a link to the submission form and conference details in the show notes. 

Thanks for joining me.