Show Notes: 

Read our original research: A Seat at the Table to learn more about this topic. 

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Episode Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Eileen Beard. On the last episode, we discussed one of school comms teams’ biggest obstacles to doing their best work—small budgets. In the next three episodes, we’ll comb through the results of our 2024 survey: A Seat at the Table to discuss some other obstacles school comms face. First up, I want to tell you what we found out about the size of most communications teams. Spoiler Alert: the problem is not that most communications teams are too big. Here’s SchoolCEO writer Brittany Keil on the reason we conducted this study and what we found. 

Excerpt: This might not come as a surprise, but the SchoolCEO staff has a favorite team. It’s not the Bengals, and it’s not the Seattle Storm. It’s the team that develops when a superintendent and their district’s communications professionals work together hand-in-hand to build their district’s brand.  

In the world of K-12 education, school communications professionals inhabit a uniquely challenging—and uniquely rewarding—role. And while the work of a comms professional can look wildly different from one district to another, its importance is only growing as we adapt to a changing educational landscape. Now more than ever, schools are competing on every front. Where once a district’s continued existence was determined mostly by the ebb and flow of their local population, districts of all sizes must now fight to thrive or even to survive. 

Schools have not been immune to the global decrease in institutional trust, and with education becoming increasingly politicized, schools have had to work particularly hard to retain positive brands in their communities. When districts have successfully maintained strong brands, it has often been a testament to the hard work of their communications teams. 

Communications professionals play a critical role in a district’s ability to rise to current challenges and to build a memorable brand. They can head off public relations concerns with dexterity and help executives on their teams communicate clearly both internally and externally. For districts who are able to employ them, communications pros are nothing less than a godsend.  But what do communications professionals need to thrive?  

Despite the fact that communications professionals have been a fixture in many school districts for decades, their work is surprisingly under-studied. Beyond the thoughtful and thorough work of NSPRA, the National School Public Relations Association, there is very little research into a field that is both well established and only growing in importance.  

At SchoolCEO, we have spent years researching elements of school communications, marketing, and culture, mainly as they relate to superintendents and teachers. But here, we are going all in on the study of communications professionals, especially with regard to the following questions: Which communications professionals have  a “seat at the table,” or access to executive decision-making? Do communications professionals have adequate and productive access to their superintendents? How does a communications professional’s executive access (or lack thereof) impact their work for their district?

With these questions, we are striving both to build upon what we know best—the superintendent’s part in school communications and marketing—and also to shine some light on the school communicator’s pivotal role in a district’s ability to thrive.

Here, we’ll dig into how our respondents see themselves, their work, and their goals. We’ll unpack how superintendents can support their communications directors. And we’ll offer recommendations for you to take the work already happening in your district to the next level.

Our anonymous survey was distributed via email to our own lists of communications professionals and to NSPRA’s member network. It was open for about three weeks and, coincidentally, we had received exactly 600 responses upon its scheduled closure.

Our sample population included communications professionals from 47 states and all major geographic regions of the United States. About 37% of our respondents hailed from the Midwest, 13% were from the Northeast, 27% were from the South, and about 19% were from the West. Our sample included respondents in their early 20s who were in their first year on the job—and professionals nearing retirement after decades in the field. 

Almost half of all communications directors work as a team of one. As our team combed through data from 600 communications professionals across the country, we were struck by how much a single statistic can convey. After all, communications workers are tasked not only with telling the stories of a multitude, but also with communicating internally to staff, managing website and social media updates, and interfacing with the press. To think that all this work is—47% of the time—done by a single person is astounding.

Even teams with more than one person were still likely to be small, with 32% of comms professionals reporting being on teams of only two or three people. Communications pros working on teams with more than five people accounted for less than 15% of our respondents.

[End of Excerpt]

So there you have it. Most communications teams are very small and spread very thin. But what can you do about it? There’s one big thing: you can recruit people outside of your team to help. Ask your parents to advocate for you IRL and in the comments section. Invite staff into the storytelling process. And even students. We’ll talk a lot more about ways to get others involved—including how to train your teachers and staff to become brand ambassadors, in future episodes, but first, stay tuned to hear Pts. 2 & 3 on our findings from A Seat at the Table research. 

Thanks for joining me.