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Episode Transcript

Welcome to the SchoolCEO Podcast. My name is Eileen Beard and I have a hypothetical for you. Let’s say you're gearing up to design a communication strategy for the next school year. Maybe you didn’t have time to build a longterm strategy for the previous school year. Maybe you did, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. How and where do you begin designing a new plan? You assess your current situation, mapping out what you're currently doing, who you're reaching, and what gaps exist.

This means taking inventory of:

• All your current communication channels (newsletters, social media, website, automated calls, etc.)
• Who you're actually reaching through each channel (and who you're missing)
• What messages you're sending and how often
• What feedback loops you have in place
• Where your reactive patterns typically start

Most school communicators are so busy responding to immediate needs that they've never had the chance to step back to see the full picture. Without this baseline understanding, any strategy you build will have blind spots.

The audit should reveal bad patterns like "we only communicate when there's a problem" or "we're reaching the same engaged parents repeatedly while missing working families entirely." It also shows you which channels are actually effective versus which ones you maintain out of habit.

Once you can see your current state clearly, you can make intentional decisions about where to focus your efforts. You might discover you need fewer channels but used more strategically, or that you're missing entire stakeholder groups who later become sources of reactive crisis communication.

This foundational step transforms communication from a collection of random activities into a strategic system designed to prevent problems rather than just respond to them.

Feedback is essential to comprehensively auditing your communications so for a refresher on designing your own survey, here are some tips from SchoolCEO’s Senior Mgr of Media & Research, Brittany Keil. 

There are five questions that you have to answer before you can begin: why, who, what, how and when. Let’s start with why. Strong surveys are usually built with a specific goal in mind. Draft a statement of purpose outlining exactly what you want the information from your survey to help you accomplish. You can start by finishing this sentence: “Once I have my survey results, I want to be able to…” 

Some examples of purpose statements include:

“I want to understand how and when families like to receive important district updates” or 

“I want to decide whether or not to launch an internal newsletter.”

Now, who are you going to survey? If you’re determining whether to launch an internal newsletter, it makes sense to reach out to teachers and staff. To understand how families like to receive district updates, you should obviously survey families. While it’s fine to cast a wide net with your audience, make sure to include some demographic questions so that you can disaggregate your survey by different populations. For example, asking families what grade their child is in will show you how a child’s age impacts their family’s communication preferences. 

Next you have to answer the what. Consider the content of your survey itself. What questions will give you the information you’re looking for? How many should you include? 

While there are many types of questions you can ask, they usually fall into one of three buckets: multiple-choice questions, open-response questions and scaled questions. Each has their purpose, and a good survey includes a mix of all three so that you have a wider breadth of data to inform your decision-making. However, it’s generally considered a best practice to include only one or two open-response questions per survey. This way, your participants don’t get bored or fatigued and begin skipping questions. You also have to consider fatigue when deciding how long to make it. Shorter surveys typically have higher completion rates and may be more accessible to busy families and teachers—but longer surveys allow you to ask the same question multiple ways to understand the answers more deeply. 

Now, how are you going to survey members of your community? Would it be most helpful for your survey to take place on paper, through a digital platform, through in-person interviews or some combination of all three? Paper surveys are useful if you have your audience in front of you at an event or if they’re not particularly tech-savvy. Online surveys can capture people’s responses no matter where they are and may be the best way to reach busy parents.

Finally, choosing the right time to conduct a survey is crucial—especially for teachers and families, whose lives change drastically throughout the school year. The timing is also dependent on the purpose of the survey. For example, if you wanted to learn if families were satisfied with how they received updates about course schedules, you wouldn’t want to do it in the middle of the scheduling process. Instead, you might poll families after it ends so that their experience is fresh on their minds and can help you better design the process next year.  

In general, avoid holidays and periods of high stress, such as the weeks before graduation or right after school starts. Alternatively, you might consider conducting a “pulse survey” by sending the same short survey multiple times throughout the year. That would mean that crafting a communication strategy for the following year would start a whole year ahead of time, but getting feedback from the same group over a prolonged amount of time might paint a fuller picture of a problem, if there is one. 

Thanks for joining me.