Show Notes: 

Read Enrollment Marketing: Advocacy to learn more about this subject. 

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Episode Transcript:

Welcome to the SchoolCEO Podcast. I’m your host, Eileen Beard. Today, let’s talk about developing a different kind of brand ambassador—a parent who is excited to send a child to your district and will share that enthusiasm with friends and neighbors. You have plenty of fans out there, but if you want them to tell your story, you’ve got to make sure they know what’s going on in your schools. Let’s look at some ways different districts have done that. 

For Delaware Area Career Center (DACC), tapping into advocacy has helped clear up a long-standing misconception about the school. Like a lot of CTE schools, most of the community thought DACC’s programs were only for students planning to skip post-secondary education. Parents weren’t aware of all the immersive, hands-on experiences the school could provide—regardless of a student’s career trajectory. 

So DACC staff devised a plan to encourage a new narrative in the community. The career center held a small coffee chat in a DACC parent’s living room with five of her neighbors present and a couple of staff members from the school. With a neighbor hosting the chat, guests knew they weren’t being sold to or manipulated. If you can get just one parent to be an ambassador at first, it will lead to many more. 

Having this coffee chat was also informative for the DACC comms team. They realized they weren’t using the right language to explain what their school actually does. The comms director realized over the course of the conversation that the word elective made sense to the parents. It’s a term they’re familiar with, so the school decided to start calling themselves a superelective school to show the community that career education could be useful for students, even if they did plan on going to college. Soon, these coffee chats evolved into regular and reliable opportunities for promoting advocacy and sharing the school’s story. Now held four times a year, the school still invites a parent to co-lead. Even if the other attendees don’t know the parent personally, they automatically trust her more than a staff member because she doesn’t have anything to gain from recommending the school. 

And because community members have to register for each event, DACC gets their email addresses, and after every event they immediately launch a three-part email series for them. Attendees also get DACC’s monthly Explorer Newsletter, which tells them about upcoming events and encourages them to share information with neighbors and friends. 

It’s important to note that these parent ambassadors can play a really important role in supporting your schools online, as well. School communicators only have so much time to manage social media interactions. When keyboard warriors start attacking a school or district, parents armed with information can step in for you and correct the false narrative or turn the conversation in a more positive direction. 

So, once you have a healthy roster of brand ambassadors, you can use them to influence prospective families, too. To do that, Salina Public Schools (Suh-LIE-nuh) in Kansas created Salina’s Family Rep program—an initiative that connects the district’s existing families with prospective ones. Through this network, anyone considering enrolling their kids in Salina’s schools can hear all about them directly from a family who already has kids in the district.  

The way it works is simple: Each principal identifies one or two families who are enthusiastic supporters of their school and asks to share their contact information with interested families. The district also sends each family rep what they call ambassador emails. These emails are sent once a month and tie back to the district’s key messaging. And to promote inclusivity in their program and schools, Salina encourages principals to recruit at least one Spanish-speaking family per site to be a family rep. 

Of course, if you’re lucky and you play it right, you have fans who don’t even have children in your schools. Finding and connecting with influential members of your local community is a great way to build advocacy amongst people who just might help you pass a bond someday. But how can you make sure this group is actively involved in sharing your best stories? Well, leaders want to lead, so it’s about empowering them to lead. Wisconsin’s Howard-Suamico (Su-ma-co) School District (HSSD) is a great example of this. A couple of years ago, they created Leadership HSSD, an annual program that invites 40 leaders from the community to monthly information sessions related to the district’s work and answer the question, What does it look like to help? 

Each monthly session includes coffee, breakfast and a book study. Then, leaders hear from experts on a variety of topics related to the district’s work, like governance and finance; teaching and learning; communications and engagement; and special education. These educational presentations are designed to provide Leadership HSSD members with the information they need to engage in conversations with neighbors, friends, and community members.

Throughout the nine-month program, HSSD keeps advocacy top of mind. At the end of each meeting, cohorts are given a call to action. The group is asked to informally meet with another Leadership HSSD member over coffee or to share a positive story with someone in the community. When they graduate, each group also nominates other leaders in the community to serve in the next cohort. 

And so the cycle of advocacy and influence continues. Inviting local leaders to learn and make connections, and have conversations is an impactful strategy for sharing your district’s story while earning more and more advocates along the way. 

So, how can you empower your advocates to use their voices and influence to tell your district’s story? 

1. Create welcoming opportunities to inform and engage. Coffee chats at a parent’s home or a coffee shop—someplace casual, makes parents feel comfortable and therefore more receptive to what you have to say. Especially if another parent ambassador is helping lead the chat. The more comfortable they are, the more likely they are to speak up themselves and give you useful feedback. 
2. Connect parent advocates with prospective families. When a family is new to your district or still in the decision making process, introduce them to the parent advocates you already cultivated through intimate meet-ups like a coffee chat. No one is more persuasive than a parent who one year ago was in the exact same position you are now. 
3. Engage local leaders to make advocates of your community members, too. Leadership HSSD doesn’t just offer coffee and breakfast, it includes a book study. Why not pick a popular book about leadership and begin your own club? This gives leaders a chance to connect with one another while learning, and gives you an opportunity to suggest ways they can lead the community in supporting your schools. 

If you want to read more about how these institutions cultivated parent and community ambassadors, check out the link to our story on enrollment marketing from the Winter 2024 issue of SchoolCEO Magazine. Thanks for joining me!