SchoolCEO Winter 2020

SchoolCEO

Special Edition: School Bonds Part 2

The best ads for your campaign are your advocates.

OUR STAFF: Executive Editor: David Allan Art Director: Sebastian Andrei Managing Editor: Joy Spence Copy Writers/Researchers: Rheannon Burnside, Melissa Hite, Barrett Goodwin, Corey Whaley Social Media Manager/Copy Writer: Jacob Neeley Graphic Designers/Illustrators: Corbin Lawrence, Blake Organ Video Producer: Ryan McDonald Apptegy CEO: Jeston George

PUBLISHED BY:

Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Apptegy is an education technology company dedicated to helping school leaders build a powerful identity for their schools.

Learn more at apptegy.com

Table of Contents 6

The Five Stage Bond Campaign

We break down the overwhelming process of a bond campaign into five manageable stages, providing you with a map to success.

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Anatomy of a Drip Campaign

Learn how to apply one of the private sector’s most effective tactics to your school marketing.

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A Bonded Community

How Vancouver Public Schools earned long-term community trust—and leveraged it to win big with their bond.

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Storytelling

Great stories are the key to your community’s hearts. We’ll teach you how to build a compelling district narrative and captivate your audience with your content.

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Bond Expert Q&A: Dr. Kyle Ingle

A leading researcher on referendums shares what works and what doesn’t in school bond campaigns.

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Need a Boost?

Explore the basics of Facebook advertising as it applies to schools.

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Facing Exhaustion Whether you’re nearing the end of the bond process or just beginning, here’s some advice— and commiserations—from other experienced administrators.

Vol. 2 No. 2 © 2019 by Apptegy, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint or quote excerpts granted by written request only. SchoolCEO™ is published 4 times a year (November, February, May, and August) by Apptegy, Inc., 425 W Capitol Ave. Suite 800 Little Rock, AR 72201. Send address changes to SchoolCEO™, 425 W Capitol Ave. Suite 800 Little Rock, AR 72201. Views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the magazine or Apptegy, Inc. Accordingly, no liability is assumed by the publisher thereof.

Letter from the Editor Whether you’re a longtime reader or a new subscriber, welcome to our sixth edition of SchoolCEO. It’s been wonderful to see our following grow over the past year and a half. Since we have so many new readers, I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain why this magazine exists and what we are trying to accomplish.

We got the idea for a school marketing magazine when we saw a need for better information around how schools can market themselves. While school leaders receive training about administration, curriculum, and finance, there wasn’t a resource dedicated to what has become an integral part of running schools in 2020: marketing. We decided to try to fill that gap—and SchoolCEO was born.

We focus on three main areas: original research on what works and what doesn’t in school marketing, marketing ideas from the private sector, and lessons from leading superintendents doing this work in the real world.

In our last edition, we introduced Part 1 of our most extensive research project yet: in-depth interviews with 50 school districts who successfully passed bonds or levies within the last four years. We presented “deep dives” into seven of those stories, showcasing winning campaigns from across the country.

In this edition, we get a bit more theoretical. First, we’ll take you through the five main stages that make up a campaign and what other school leaders are doing to be successful at each step. The article is chock-full of ideas that will make your next campaign stand out. We also highlight Dr. Steve Webb of Vancouver Public Schools, a superintendent taking the long view in building support for his schools by investing in their communities.

Finally, we present an article on how schools can improve their storytelling: a critical part of building a modern marketing campaign. We’ll show you how to find compelling school stories and tell them in a way that highlights your district’s core marketing narrative.

Running a bond campaign is the ultimate test of how well your schools are demonstrating value to your community.

We hope these lessons can help your next campaign prove why public education is so critical to communities across the country.

Thanks for reading,

David Allan Executive Director of SchoolCEO

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Lake Arrowhead, CA

Del Valle, TX

A group of high school students known as Verses for the Voiceless have put together a poetry book to help homeless children develop reading skills. To further their mission, the group has traveled to elementary schools and homeless shelters to read to kids. Verses for the Voiceless is donating 100% of the book’s proceeds to programs and activities promoting literacy among homeless students.

(Mountain News)

Del Valle ISD has created a record label that allows students to record and produce their own musical creations.

The district will also offer classes providing students with hands-on experiences in creating merchandise, marketing artists, and other aspects of the music industry.

(Austin American-Statesman)

Mesquite, TX

Ringgold, VA

Ryleigh, a student at Motley Elementary, won a bike for being her school’s top fundraiser. But instead of keeping it for herself, she donated it to her local police department’s Santa Cop program, which provides holiday gifts to children in need. In response, the Mesquite Police Department is officially recognizing Ryleigh for her kindness.

(NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth) 4

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At Dan River High School, more than 75 students worked together to build wooden bunk beds for 22 fellow students in the area. During the project, headed by agriculture teacher Whitney Terry, student builders made custom designs and modifications that would better fit inhabitants’ needs. The students are now working on building 28 dog houses for the Pittsylvania Pet Center.

(Danville Register & Bee)

Bardstown, KY Leilani, a junior at Nelson County High School, was hired this year as her district’s first student interpreter. Before Leilani stepped in, Spanish-speaking parents often had difficulty communicating with teachers or staff. Leilani fills the gap by traveling to different schools in the district to help families and students translate documents, understand assignments, and meet with teachers.

(The Kentucky Standard)

Elizabethtown, KY Amelia Abell, a special education teacher at Morningside Elementary School, developed communication boards to help nonverbal students interact with staff. The boards, which use pictures, words, and symbols to convey ideas, are now used at every elementary school in the district.

(WLKY News) WINTER 2020

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The Five Stage Bond Campaign Lessons from over 50 school districts on the path to bond success

Starting the process of a bond proposal may feel a little like standing at the foot of Mount Everest. Looking up toward your towering final destination, you can’t fathom how you’ll ever reach it.

Whether it’s climbing the world’s tallest mountain or proposing a multimillion-dollar bond, monumental tasks are often smaller tasks strung together. A mountaineer has daily distance goals, places to stop and camp along the journey.

As Desmond Tutu once said, “There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.”

What follows isn’t a how-to guide, because as we’ve already discussed, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to bond campaigns. Instead, it’s more like a climbing route, guiding your trek up the mountain. This framework breaks down the overwhelming process of a bond into smaller, more manageable stages. Each stage serves a different purpose and works toward a different goal, but these goals build on one another to produce a successful overall campaign.

Drawing from our conversations with leading school administrators from over fifty districts across the country, we’ll break down the five stages common to most successful campaigns.

This article explores the work of both districts and auxiliary advocacy committees. We encourage school district officials to thoroughly research state requirements and restrictions for the campaign. SchoolCEO ensured that each of the districts and individuals mentioned in the article remained in compliance with state laws pertaining to bond communications.

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Stage One: Building the Proposal Goal: Develop passionate campaign advocates.

Stage One includes the process of building the proposal: everything from a facilities study to town halls to formal community surveys. Of course, this process changes from one community to the next depending on the size and capacity of the district. However, almost every superintendent we spoke with agreed that it’s crucial to take this process outside the walls of the district office, putting decision-making power in the community’s hands.

The more we invest in a project, the more we’ll get out of it. This is more than just an old maxim. It’s proven by social psychology—the formal term is “effort justification.” We believe that our effort has purpose, and if the purpose isn’t clear, we’ll create it for ourselves.

So it’s not hard to see why it’s crucial to involve your community in building your proposal from the very beginning. Each time a district asks for a citizen’s input or invites them to work through issues on the bond, that individual pours a little bit more into the proposal—taking a little more ownership over the project’s success. So through this fact-finding process, the district has an opportunity to grow their own advocates for a bond campaign.

If you need a little refresher on advocates and how to grow them, check out: schoolceo.com/advocates

What is a campaign advocate, and why do you need them?

During the campaign, you’ll deal with a few different groups of people. First, there are neutrals: citizens who may or may not support the bond—and may not even show up to the polls. Then, you have your adamant No voters. This group is actively against your bond, sometimes even working together to dismantle the campaign. Finally, you have your bond supporters. These voters will likely vote Yes, but only a few of your supporters will turn into campaign advocates.

Campaign advocates are people who not only vote Yes themselves, but also convince others to do so. What we know from looking at dozens of referendum elections is that the most powerful campaigns are run by community members—campaign advocates—not school districts. While billboards and mailers can be effective campaign tools, think about impact. What would sway you more as a voter: a billboard, or several friends proudly sporting campaign stickers? It isn’t always campaign materials that swing the vote; rather, it’s the people who stake yard signs and share photos of their “I Voted Yes” stickers on social media.

“The overall principle is: people influence people,” says Denise Lindberg, Public Information and Volunteer Program Coordinator at Hamilton School District in Wisconsin. The district passed a $58.9 million referendum in 2018. “If you have activated people to spread your message and to advocate for you, that’s the way to be successful.”

How do you get campaign advocates?

This early in the process, you might have advocates for your district, but you probably don’t have many for your bond proposal. So during the planning process, think of every engagement—every phone call or invitation to join the planning committee—as an opportunity to plant the seed for a potential campaign advocate. To really reach into every corner of the community, you’ll need to invite a diverse group of stakeholders.

At this point in the campaign, allegiance to the district isn’t important. In fact, several school leaders advise districts to invite individuals they assume to be No voters into the planning process. This diversity of feedback results in a proposal that the entire community feels comfortable supporting.

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Even if these No voters don’t go on to support the bond, they still gain an understanding of the district’s needs. As community members parse through stories of leaky roofs and research on safe schools, they begin to understand the district’s why. And as they do, the locus of power moves from district leadership to the community, inviting them to take responsibility for students’ needs.

Director of Communications Merry Glenne Piccolino from South Carolina’s Aiken County Public School District calls this ripening the issue. “I don’t think it would have been successful,” Piccolino tells SchoolCEO, “if we hadn’t brought our community along on investigating the issues.” To better spread information about a bond throughout the community, it’s important to plant these seeds of advocacy all around the district.

The process is the product.

It would be easy for administrators themselves to choose which projects end up on the proposal. After all, maintaining control keeps the proposal neat and the process efficient.

However, taking the proposal out of the hands of the community at any point in the process leaves space for cracks to form in the structure of the bond—ones that may cripple the proposal. Giving decision-making power back to the public results in a proposal that truly is community-driven, that voters feel comfortable supporting.

As Dr. Gustavo Balderas, Oregon’s Superintendent of the Year, explains, “The process is the product.” His team’s engagement and refinement work at Eugene Public Schools was extensive, with more than a dozen town halls, a formal community survey, and individual meetings with each building’s staff. Once they landed on a proposal, they’d take it back to the community and board—then refine—then take it back out. This process lasted months.

“What we did right,” says Balderas after the election, “was involving the board and the community right from the onset of everything we were doing. It is exhausting, but it’s the right work because of the benefit to kids.”

tributors aren’t evaluating the proposal anymore—they’re fighting to implement their own ideas. And while individual community members shape the bond, the community at large watches as the district adjusts to their input. When the proposal has been approved, you can move on to Stage Two.

Campaigns in Action Corunna Public Schools: Needs, Not Wants At Corunna Public Schools, Superintendent John Fattal was part of a process where the community led the revision process from the get-go. “We had maybe 35 groups in our cafeteria, five to seven people in a group,” he explains.

Leadership would introduce a topic from their bond wish list, like new turf for the football field, and have groups rate each item’s importance from 0-4. “That helped prioritize what we were going to do with the bond,” he says.

Fattal himself was in favor of installing new turf, which would have potentially saved the district money over the long term.

“There were a lot of people who wanted that,” he explains, “but the group consensus was, That’s more of a want, not a need.”

By prioritizing community needs, the process produced budding advocates for the district’s referendum. “Again, I can’t overstate how important it was to get the support of the community to sell it,” Fattal says. When it came to communicating the need for the bond, “the big piece was that core group.”

Though the editing process takes time, this community engagement can serve as marketing in and of itself. Con-

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Stage Two: Developing Your Messaging Goal: Share your proposal as a story.

Once you’ve decided on the components of your bond proposal, messaging is the next peak to conquer. At first, the prospect of building influential and strategic messaging might seem just as intimidating as starting the climb. But remember, you’ve already made it partway up the mountain.

Think back to the last time you applied for new jobs. You probably had a resume and cover letter ready, highlighting your skills and experience—but for each unique application you submitted, you slightly changed the way you presented yourself.

You didn’t make anything up (at least, we hope not), but you likely didn’t present every detail of your job history with equal weight. Instead, you tailored your application to the specific job you were applying for, emphasizing your most relevant skills and experience.

The same principle applies to building out your bond messaging. It’s not about running a “sneaky campaign” that hides information from voters. It’s about knowing your audience, both as a cohesive community and as segmented groups, and learning to communicate in a way that tells the story of your proposal.

As you start to build unified messaging, you’ll want to develop your slogan—a message your supporters can rally behind. In just a sentence or even a phrase, your campaign slogan is a simple explanation of the proposal’s why. This messaging should help unify every piece of your campaign, from hashtags to PowerPoints.

Beyond your slogan, you’ll need two other tools: audience-specific messaging and basic bond education. Using these tools, you’ll communicate the content of your proposal in a way that’s accessible to each audience.

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Campaign Slogan Your campaign slogan is a concentrated explanation of the district’s purpose, meant to loop in every potential voter. In short, it’s a visioning statement.

From the district’s perspective, creating a slogan is an opportunity to tie the district’s vision or mission statement into the proposal. For Round Rock ISD, a district with a history of academic success, the message was “Building on Excellence.” With a single phrase, the district’s communications team reminds voters of the district’s past success in order to propel the district into the future—all, of course, without advocating for a Yes vote.

Once a district has built out a slogan, the campaign committee has an opportunity to build off of the district’s messaging. The repitition amplifies the message, linking the district’s Facebook post to the campaign committees’ yard signs.

Campaigns in Action Warrensville Heights City School District: #BuildingOurFuture The year before Warrensville Heights City School District, located in an “inner-ring suburb” of Cleveland, went out for a bond, the district was in danger of a state takeover. To make the bond process even more challenging, the state’s debt limits mandated that a bond couldn’t be run in Warrensville without state approval.

Unlike Warrensville’s previous superintendents, however, Donald J. Jolly II is a graduate of WHCSD and carries with him a contagious faith in the district. He decided to prove the district could deliver on their promises.

“What we did was make a promise to the community. We’d build our first building without a bond,” Jolly tells us. And they kept their promise. Warrensville Heights secured funding for their new elementary school, which cost about $30 million, without going to taxpayers for help. The move was a huge step towards building community trust.

The district also made sure to communicate the positive changes taking place at WHCSD—like reopening a closed school, boosting enrollment by almost 300 students, and improving the district’s report card rating. “We made some very tangible accomplishments during a short amount of time that people were able to actually visualize,” Jolly explains. “It helped us put that picture of the future into people’s hands.”

So by the time WHCSD finalized their referendum proposal, the community had already witnessed broad, positive changes in the district. This build in momentum grabbed citizens’ attention, ripening the environment for a bond campaign.

When it came time for the Warrensville team to brainstorm campaign messaging, they honed in on this growth, landing on the slogan “Building Our Future.” This future-focused messaging pulled attention away from the state takeover and toward Warrensville’s growth. For parents, messaging on the future coupled with tangible change was a slam dunk, communicating that the district was on a positive trajectory.

“We are growing,” Warrensville’s Communications Director Kayla Pallas tells SchoolCEO. “We are trying to build facilities that meet 21st-century needs, and Warrensville is a place they need to stay.”

This future-focused messaging also looped in another group: adults without students in the district. “We had a groundswell of our seniors who are supportive of this measure with the increased cost of their property taxes,” Jolly tells us. About 80% of homeowners in the area are senior citizens, which surprisingly proved to be a huge asset for the district.

“It’s kind of a unique situation,” Jolly explains. “Our most invested seniors truly want to leave the community better.

When they came here, all this stuff was new. Now, it has done over 40 to 50 years of service, so they’ve invested in leaving new facilities for the future.”

Seniors didn’t just support the bond—many became some of the district’s most valuable advocates. “We have very key senior citizens who endorsed the measure, and who were part of our marketing out in the community,” Jolly explains.

“They understood the value of having new schools, and they put a very strong mandate on me, as superintendent, to continue to improve our schools.”

United, volunteers latched onto Jolly’s positive vision throughout the campaign. “We really focused on the benefits,” Pallas tells us. “Not only to our residents, but also to the students. We are thinking future forward with our district—building something that will leave a positive legacy for decades to come.”

The district’s focus on the future worked—and quite effectively. Their bond passed in November 2018 with 76.9% of the vote.

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Audience-Specific Messaging

Bond Basics

The point of audience-specific messaging is to highlight different parts of the bond that will appeal to specific voting groups. You aren’t changing the proposal; rather, you’re making the proposal relevant to each voter.

Your audience-specific messaging should tell the story of your bond—strategically prioritizing different aspects of the proposal to appeal to various community members. Part of the district’s job, though, is to educate the community on the entirety of the bond—even the nitty gritty details of your proposal. After all, anything left a little fuzzy or unclear opens the door for naysayers to jump in and spread misinformation.

Generally, the two groups most likely to show up at the polls are your supporters and the district’s frequent voters. From there, you can split this core target audience into smaller segments like parents, retirees, small business owners, etc.

As you split voters into segments, ask yourself: What does this group need from the proposal? How will the bond meet that need? The juncture of these two questions is your audience-specific messaging.

The last tool in your toolbox, then, is messaging that educates the community on the bond in its entirety. In this part of your messaging, it’s important to be systematic in sharing each piece of the proposal in a way that supports the rest of your communications.

Define your bond in simple terms.

Before you had firsthand experience running or training for a school referendum election, you may not have known what a bond was. Bonds and levies can be puzzling, and they aren’t part of most community members’ day-to-day lives.

Campaigns in Action Wickenburg Unified School District: Splitting the Message In Arizona’s Wickenburg Unified School District, Superintendent Howard Carlson’s team made the strategic decision to adjust messaging—not what was in the bond, but what was prioritized—by splitting voters into groups. “We had a retiree message, a family message, and a community message,” he tells us. His team even differentiated these categories by geography.

For retirees in the northern part of the district, who have lower expendable income, the fact that the bond wouldn’t raise taxes was a huge sell—so Carlson’s team drove the tax piece home in that area. In the more affluent southern part of the district, the team created “more of a balanced message,” emphasizing that citizens could do something good for their community by supporting the bond. By focusing on each segment’s situation and needs, Carlson could better gain the support of each group.

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So extend a helping hand to voters. Explain why the district needs to go out for a bond in the first place, breaking down tough subjects like the tax impact and broader information about the projects on the ballot. In Texas’s Spring ISD, the district’s communications team created a video explaining the need for a bond using a student’s voiceover. “I’m not sure if you know this,” says the student, “but school districts across the state only receive funding for daily operations.

That means that things like new schools, buses, and renovations require funds from a bond.” The video is supplemented with pictures, and the script avoids too many large or technical words.

Organize projects by community.

You’ll need a space to put the longform proposal somewhere in your communications. So as you organize this bulk of information, keep in mind that the closer the benefits feel to each individual voter, the more likely it is that citizens will vote in your favor. As you build out the details of the proposal on your website, break down the bond’s benefits by community: How will each campus benefit from the bond? How will the bond affect senior citizens or businesses?

A bonus tip from Round Rock ISD: Don’t forget feeder schools. Even if an elementary school isn’t receiving any benefits from the bond package, they’ll eventually benefit from projects affecting middle and high school campuses as students move through the school system.

Get ahead of naysayers.

During the campaign, naysayers use a few common arguments to cripple the bond: mistrust in district administration, alleged misallocation of funds on frivolous projects, and resistance to tax increases. To get ahead of the naysayers, we recommend that you prepare answers to the following questions, and any others raised during the planning process, before the campaign.

Can I trust the district financially?

Chances are, tax-averse community members will be some of the bond’s strongest opponents. Before they have a chance to spread negativity about the district’s finances, pump stories into the community about the success of a past bond, a project the district funded without a proposal, or how long the district has gone without asking taxpayers for financial assistance.

How was each project chosen?

Of course, some voters won’t know about the district’s extensive engagement process—so show them how the community helped form the proposal. Post an article describing a student’s idea that made it through to the final design, or share photos of community members looking through blueprints.

What will the tax impact be?

One of the biggest barriers to a Yes vote can be the tax impact on individual households. So address the financials: How long will taxes be raised? What is the individual tax impact? A few districts even shared tax calculators on their websites.

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Stage Three: Preparing Your Campaign Advocates Goal: Train your current campaign advocates to go out and grow more.

Once the district lands on unified messaging, there are steps you can take to keep advocates at the forefront of your campaign. Generally, this involves a formal “volunteer committee” or “advocacy committee” that breaks off from the district to advocate for the Yes vote.

At this point, your advocates are budding seedlings. Fragile and young, they aren’t yet ready to stand on their own.

So the preparation stage involves nurturing your fledgling campaign supporters with the training and tools they need to advocate properly for your bond—and to build more advocates. So to ensure that your advocates are spreading consistent information, you’ll want to train them on the right messaging.

The first step, though, is to cement your supporters into advocates. Sometimes, all you need to do is ask—and provide the support and tools for potential advocates to follow through.

Small Group Meetings The best thing about advocates and key communicators is that one strong advocate can produce several more. To build more supporters, school leaders we spoke with met in person with community members all around the district.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a group of five or if it’s 50,” explains Dr. Paul Mielke, superintendent at Hamilton School District. “If you get a chance to tell your story, it can make a difference, because those five people could be really influential and sway the opinion of 100 people.”

To leverage this idea, many school leaders benefited from “coffee talks” where active advocates host bond meetings in their homes with anywhere from 10 to 30 others in attendance. The talks feel intimate, making the need more personal. Given time, these person-to-person connections develop and expand, growing more and more budding supporters of the bond.

“It’s not the information that influences people to vote,” explains Mielke. “It’s relationships that influence people’s opinions and their actions.”

Teacher Cheat Sheets Sometimes bond supporters—maybe even your own staff—want to help spread your messaging, but they aren’t quite sure how to do so. To help supporters spread the word, several districts created tools to guide advocates in sharing campaign messaging. This tactic not only prepares your advocates for action, but also gives your messaging great consistency, leading to more unified campaigns.

Many leaders we spoke with were smart about engaging those closest to the district first. At Fond du Lac School District in Wisconsin, Superintendent Dr. James Sebert pulled his staff together for a presentation, inviting questions and comments. “I think the best thing that we did was meet with the staff early and often and get our 800-plus employees feeling excited and good about it,” he tells us.

Engaging staff was the first step, but Sebert sealed the deal by creating tools that helped staff deliver a consistent message. After the initial meeting, Sebert used an online platform to assemble his team’s questions and suggestions.

After days of back-and-forth, he put together a “teacher

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Stage Four: Executing the Campaign Goal: Capitalize on advocates’ sway to gear up for the vote.

By Stage Four, the summit is in sight, but the path is set to get even steeper in the last stretch. Now, it’s finally time to execute the formal communications piece of the campaign: the door knocking, posting, emailing, rallying, calling, and mailing—anything that gets your campaign messaging into the hands of voters.

Luckily, by this time in the campaign, you have the support and resources of your advocates—and likely a separate, volunteer advocacy committee—to help traverse the final distance. While the district needs to stick to the facts, this advocacy committee can more explicity ask for Yes votes. cheat sheet” for staff to reference in the grocery store, in the church foyer, or over the fence. “We really wanted our staff to have the resources and knowledge they needed to help people,” he says. “And it was the key to getting us to have a very successful 60% vote.”

Palm Cards Districts across the country echoed the idea that providing tools and messaging training was key in passing their bonds.

In Ohio, the Worthington City Schools team created miniature messaging cards. “We printed our messaging on what we call palm cards,” says Director of Communications Vicki Gnezda. “Everybody had that messaging, then we also did some verbal training with leaders so that they understood how to reframe things through the message.”

The team didn’t just provide a one-time training, but continued to develop both their messaging and their advocates throughout the campaign. “We had a really good team of volunteers representing all areas of our school district, and we, as the district, met with them weekly,” says Superintendent Trent Bowers. “They are key communicators for us— they’re really trusted.”

But let’s take a minute to think about your position in the campaign. As you’ve parsed through facilities information, met with architects, and dug into the details of school finance, you’ve gradually become more and more comfortable with the bond, its projects, and the district’s pressing needs.

However, to a voter who has never seen a bond proposal, trying to sift through these ideas is, again, sort of like standing at the bottom of Everest. And the average voter might not have a strong enough reason to brave the obstacles.

Think of your marketing, then, as providing every possible way to introduce your voters to the best parts of your bond—extending a rope down to each voter. Instead of introducing all the details of the bond right away, you want to gradually acclimate them to the environment.

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Systematic Communications In recent years, private sector marketers have become highly systematic in their communications. Each Facebook post, tweet, email, and flyer is one piece of a greater puzzle, adding substance and clarity to the overall picture of the marketing campaign.

Don’t focus on one project for an extended period of time; rotate these posts and use different channels to stay top of mind without overwhelming your voters. Then, just before the vote, you’ll ramp up your communications, almost inundating the community with your story.

Your bond campaign should operate the same way. To ease your audience into the ideas of your bond, you’ll begin slowly and systematically sharing the details of your proposal, building up to a main ask: a Yes vote. In essence, you want to guide your audience through the thought process that led you to put these projects on the ballot in the first place.

You’ll repeat this guiding process with all your bond projects, answering the burning questions your audience is probably asking: Why is this project on the ballot? Who will it benefit?

Why does the district deserve it? By showing need, highlighting the benefits to students, and exemplifying the district’s trustworthiness, you can systematically bring your audience around to your side.

For example, let’s say your proposal includes a new football field. To explain your need for the stadium, you might share images of the football team practicing in ill-suited spaces with text that describes the team’s successful track record.

Let your community get to know the team—send a story to the local media about a student whose life has been changed by the sport, and if you can, include information about the bond.

After building the case for the need across several communications channels, you’ll provide your solution. You might share a photo of community members giving feedback on the bond issue, then, a simple description of the tax impact.

And while it seems like the traditional “marketing” piece is just now coming into play, you’ve already created your strongest marketers: passionate advocates for the bond.

Campaigns in Action Vancouver Public Schools Washington’s Vancouver Public Schools systematically builds the need for their 2018-2019 technology levy. To find out more about VPS’s 2016-2017 bond campaign, flip to page 30.

To start, VPS shows examples of technology use in gym class.

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Later, they provide an overview of the bond as a whole.

In a video, teachers explain the benefits of coding in special

Throughout the process, VPS continues to show students’ success

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Using Advocates to Personalize Most of the time, traditional campaign tactics like door knocking and phone banking have advocates built into the equation. In each case, there’s an advocate asking each voter to consider passing the referendum. In an advocacy-based campaign, this idea should structure most of the district’s communications.

Campaigns in Action Corunna Public Schools: Handwritten Letters

Remember: people influence people. Your audience is more likely to listen to average community members than to you.

So as you move forward, consider how you can highlight your advocates’ voices—not your district’s—on as many communication channels as possible.

In Corunna Public Schools, Superintendent John Fattal’s team went through a voting list from the previous election and then narrowed down, name by name, the people they thought might be Yes voters. Then the team did something exceptional.

While taking the time to build in connections often takes more work, the payoff is generally greater in the long run. To get started, work through these questions:

“We wrote a personal, handwritten letter for each person who we thought supported us in the last election, reminding them to vote,” says Fattal. “We had a lot of people tell us afterward that that was a really important piece for them.”

Fattal’s team focused their effort on potential Yes voters, leveraging the influence of their advocates.

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Where is your audience getting information? To answer this question, a few districts conducted surveys or even checked in with their advocacy teams. Think broadly: the newspaper, social media, community events, even faith communities. The goal is to narrow down the communications channels where your messaging is most likely to get into the hands of voters.

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How can you plug your advocates into these channels? If you realize that most of your audience is on Facebook, then encourage advocates to share bond posts. Whether you’re sharing information on social media, in the newspaper, or through face-to-face engagement, each channel will be much more effective if your advocates act as spokespeople.

Campaigns in Action Heber Elementary School District: Getting Shares Heber Elementary, a relatively small, “familial” district in California, knew that in order to catch older voters’ attention, they’d need to capitalize on the social media reach of their advocates. So to encourage likes and shares, the advocacy team asked parents to volunteer students to appear in a marketing video for the bond. “Parents love to share pictures of their children,” says Superintendent Juan Cruz—and he’s right. The starring students’ parents became natural marketers, sharing the video and driving views.

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Campaigns in Action Northwest Allen County Schools: Leveraging Media At Northwest Allen County Schools, Chief Communications Officer Lizette Downey works to build relationships with the local media early in the campaign. “I do a lot of direct pitching to the media,” she tells us. “I would highly advise other school leaders to contact their print media editorial boards and have your superintendent and communications person sit down and meet them.” Even though the resulting coverage isn’t always positive, the connection often pays valuable dividends.

In that initial meeting, Downey explains any needs and obstacles the district is facing in detail. “That will serve you well, because if they have questions, they will pick up the phone and call that superintendent,” she explains. “That happened a lot for us, and it’s very useful.”

“I would also encourage school leaders to plan out—just based on the size of the community—some media hits of different upcoming events,” says Downey. Instead of merely announcing the annual school play, Downey looks for a personalized story. “If you can pull out a kid who has found an interest in theatre that motivated them to stay in school, I try to get those kinds of stories into the hands of the feature writers.”

During the campaign, Downey leveraged these contacts as well. “We also recruited our political action committee parents to write letters to the editor, and we had those strategically timed,” she explains. Anyone who volunteered to write a letter got some help from Downey’s team: messaging guidance, ideas, samples, and information on where to send it. “You want to make it as easy as you can for them to follow through,” she says.

Adjusting the Campaign During the campaign, misinformation is inevitable. Someone mishears the facts, or tax-averse community members organize a formal faction to unravel the district’s work. These groups are nothing to brush aside; left unchecked, they’ll cost the district valuable time and energy, spreading seeds of mistrust throughout the community.

Still, opposition is natural, even expected. While you can take steps to avoid controversy, the campaign’s strength lies in the team’s ability to pivot.

At this stage, advocates become more important than ever, slipping into conversations that school administrators can’t access. With their wide reach, advocates can alert the district about any confusion or opposition growing in the community. Using this information, the district can adjust their communications to get ahead of the opposition. Plus, if advocates are armed with the facts, they can challenge misinformation as it occurs.

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It’s not the information that influences people to vote; it’s relationships that influence people’s opinions and their actions.

-Dr. Paul Mielke

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Campaigns in Action Hamilton School District: Starting Early Superintendent Dr. Paul Mielke started planning for misinformation far before the campaign began, asking his initial planning team to write down questions they’d heard in the community about the bond. Then, he turned these questions into an FAQ sheet. “We had a pretty extensive list, probably 30 to 40 questions, and all the facts,” he says.

Parents used these FAQs to inform themselves and others.

“They were talking to their neighbors either on social media or face-to-face, making sure that they had accurate information,” he tells us.

Then, when advocates heard misinformation, they let Mielke know. And Mielke didn’t wait for that negativity to fester. “I did a number of individual phone calls,” he tells SchoolCEO. “If they found out that a neighbor was being very negative or had misinformation, I called to clear anything up. I don’t know if they voted Yes, but at least they understood the rationale for what we were doing, and why we were doing it.”

When other school leaders asked why Mielke would waste time on a single voter, he explained the power of reach. One person who is adamantly against a bond reaches many others, so quelling their distrust not only stops their negative influence, but might even grow an advocate as a result.

“If you can switch over one person who is very adamant against the bond, then neighbors start asking: What happened?” he explains. “And they become an advocate for you.”

Campaigns in Action Aiken County Public Schools: Targeting Opposition During Aiken County’s 2018 campaign, the district faced organized opposition. “I really went after negative criticism,” Merry Glenne Piccolino tells us. “We had such a short window of time. Negative information and misinformation can spread so quickly.”

So Piccolino took action. She first used her advocates to learn what the opposition was up to. “It wasn’t uncommon for someone to drop by my office with a flyer that had been left on their doorstep,” she says. “I wanted to be aware of what they were communicating and review it to determine if it was factual or not. If it was causing any level of concern, what they communicated clearly needed some explanation.”

To start, Piccolino and her team tried to address the misinformation personally. “I listened to what they had to say, and we tried to meet with them to understand their points,” she says. The opposition, however, refused to meet with the district. So Piccolino tried to learn where they were coming from in order to adjust her messaging. “On a very basic level, I studied their communications and determined where they were getting their numbers from, which fueled my communications,” she says. “I was able to explain it, debunk what they were saying, or provide some clarity.“ Then, she made this information public. “We devoted an entire section of our website to correcting misinformation about the bond campaign,” she explains. “Then I created some social media ads to correct misinformation and lead people back to our website for the truth.”

While addressing the misinformation, Piccolino kept it kind and factual. “I did it in such a way that was respectful, just like I did with any other communication,” she says.

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Sealing the Deal Now, you’re almost cresting the mountain. But instead of resting on your laurels, it’s time to invest all your resources, energy, and momentum into the vote. Treat this final stretch as a celebration and an opportunity. Election Day is when you can finally translate the positive momentum of your campaign into action.

And of course, you’ll need your advocates to keep pushing voters up the mountain. So invite advocates to post a quick photo of their voting sticker with a caption describing their reasoning and enthusiasm. Share these posts from voters.

Line the streets near your voting location with staff and supporters. In these final stages, we recommend districts leverage all their advocates one last time to drive their peers to the polls.

“At the end of the day, if you’ve got that face-to-face engagement,” says Superintendent Tim Throne at Oxford Community Schools in Michigan, “that can be the difference between: I am going to take action, or Well, I may agree, but I’m not motivated to go and act.”

Campaigns in Action North Branch Area Public Schools: Getting Out the Vote Even though it’s been nearly three years since Minnesota’s North Branch Area Public Schools held their 2017 bond election, Superintendent Dr. Deb Henton still has the voting results saved to her desktop. “And I pride myself on having a clean desktop,” she says. “It is one of the greatest pictures that I will ever have in my lifetime.”

To Henton, passing this bond held special significance: the district had failed to pass their last seven attempted referendums, going 15 years without a successful bond.

Ever resilient, Henton and her team started planning for their 2017 campaign the day after the 2016 vote fell short. She enlisted the help of Dr. Don Lifto, an expert in school bond elections, to conduct surveys with his municipal advisory

firm Baker Tilly. After conducting in-depth surveys with the firm, Henton’s team gained a little insight into what went wrong. In short: “Our parents did not vote in great numbers at all,” Henton explains.

For their next election, North Branch set out to attract parents to the polls, offering opportunities to vote long before Election Day. “One of the key factors in our victory was early voting,” Henton says. Any registered voter could swing by the school to vote during business hours. “Our school board even set longer hours on specific days,” she explains. “We were really strategic about when we had the district office open for early voting.”

The team got creative in how they encouraged voters to show up, too. “We had a petting zoo for our families,” says Henton. “And if they had an I Voted sticker on, they got a free Dairy Queen ice cream.” Of course, Henton checked beforehand to make sure that the zoo was an appropriate distance away from the polling zone. “Then, the night of our elementary carnival, we had a special table letting people know they could go vote early—and we had early voting open,” she says.

School building staff also played a key role. “Our early childhood coordinator would let families know when they dropped off kids that they had this opportunity to go vote,” Henton explains. “She’d offer to watch their kids if they wanted to go vote early.”

Fortunately, this work paid off. Early voters turned out in droves. “In 2016, we had less than 200 early voters,” says Henton. “In 2017, we had close to 800 people.” As it turns out, those early votes would make a huge difference. “The second question actually failed the day of the vote. But when you added in all the early votes, it passed,” she says.

“I would say to people that are trying,” Henton tells us, “that if you are able to be successful, it will pay you back so many times. Your efforts will not have gone without notice or in vain, and it’ll be such a wonderful thing.”

Read our interview with Dr. Don Lifto at schoolceo.com/lifto

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5

Stage Five: Moving Forward Goal: Lay the groundwork for the next campaign by maintaining trust.

We caught Superintendent Dr. Tammy Campbell on the phone right after her district, Federal Way Public Schools in Washington, successfully won their second of two groundbreaking referendum elections. “What we’re doing right now,” Campbell explains carefully, “is laying the foundation.

Our next bond will be passed based on the way the community feels informed.”

At first glance, it might seem like a bond election is a contained event: beginning with the proposal and ending on Election Day. But what Campbell illustrates is that a bond campaign isn’t over after the vote, and it doesn’t begin when the community announces the proposal. Each measure is born out of its predecessor; each election is informed by the last.

The district’s actions after the vote, then, are a critical piece of their next campaign. If the measure didn’t pass, take heart.

You have a new opportunity to connect with the community and learn: What did we miss? In the upcoming months, recommit to the listening process.

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If the vote was successful, it’s time to start thanking your voters and advocates, as well as highlighting the progress you’re making on bond projects. Even if there aren’t any physical changes to post, the main goal here is to provide updates that show the district making good on its promises.

“It’s just about having transparency and showing the taxpayers that you’re doing what you said you’d do with the money,” says Superintendent Matt Kimball of Blue Ridge ISD in Texas. “And you’re doing it as efficiently as possible.”

During the entirety of the bond process, this means taking pains to—once more—put power back into the community’s hands, asking for input and inviting the community to celebrate your district’s growth.

After all, a community owns their district. This process of making and maintaining lasting impact and connections provides an opportunity for districts to learn from their communities, and for communities to learn from their schools.

What we are doing right now is laying the foundation. Our next bond will be passed based on the way the community feels informed.

-Dr. Tammy Campbell

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Marketing 101

Anatomy of a Drip Campaign How to warm up your community to new ideas and initiatives If you want to get married, you don’t start by asking a stranger to go to Vegas—but you might start by asking them on a date. Your prospective partner will want to get to know you, spend time with you, and figure out what you’re all about before making such a huge commitment. The more significant the ask, the longer this buildup will take. (We wouldn’t recommend proposing after the first date, either.)

It’s the same with any major proposal or policy change in your school system, including a bond measure. Before you get too fired up, you’ll need to lay the groundwork—in terms of both ideas and relationships—for your proposal. A drip campaign can help you do so.

What is a drip campaign?

At its simplest, a drip campaign is a series of preset email messages designed to lead your audience toward a specific action. In the private sector, that end action is typically a sale, but in the context of schools, it might be advocacy in the community or a Yes vote on a bond measure. With a steady drip of relevant information, you’re tending to your audience as a gardener tends to his plants. You’re instilling the facts and ideas that will drive them to support you.

In the early days of email marketing, driving a targeted action was much simpler. Companies would buy a list of email 26

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addresses, then send the same sales email to everyone on that list. Only a small fraction of the recipients actually made a purchase, but either way, marketers were reaching massive amounts of people at the same time, much quicker than snail mail or phone calls would have allowed.

However, over time, this strategy proved less effective. Inboxes got cluttered. People became annoyed at the barrage of unsolicited messages­—so much so that they coined the term “spam.” Privacy laws made it necessary for customers to opt into receiving emails. Email marketers had to change.

Enter the drip campaign. Now, consumers have the power to determine whose emails they receive, opting into communications that interest them. And instead of a single sales email, marketers typically send a series of emails, slowly leading up to an ask.

You’ve almost certainly experienced this strategy yourself, even if you didn’t recognize it as a drip campaign at the time.

When you sign up for a company’s newsletter, you get an email welcoming you to their list. In a week or so, you might receive an email linking to a relevant blog post. Another week—a discount coupon.

Finally, a month or more after you opt into receiving emails, the company goes in for the ask, overtly trying to sell you something. But by the time you receive that sales email, you’ve developed something of a relationship with the company. You’ve warmed up to them. You’re more willing to do what they ask.

And it really does work. According to research from email marketing platform Emma, links in drip emails are 119% more likely to get clicks, and relevant targeted emails produce 18 times more revenue than their more general equivalents.

We’ve all heard the old adage about boiling a frog. Throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, and he’ll jump out—but put him in some lukewarm water and turn up the heat slowly, and he won’t suspect a thing until it’s too late. That’s the basic principle behind a drip campaign. Throw your audience into your bond ask all at once, and they might jump out of the pot— but acclimate them slowly to the idea, and before they even realize what’s happened, they’ll be on your side.

Drip campaign tips Make it easy to opt in.

Setting up an email list for your drip campaign will be pretty easy for you as a school leader; more likely than not, you received permission to email your students and parents at the beginning of the school year. However, you’ll want to make it easy for other members of your community—people who don’t have kids in your schools—to opt into your emails as well.

This means you’ll need an email sign-up somewhere prominent on your site, probably right on the front page. You might even use a pop-up box encouraging visitors to sign up for your email list. (Just make sure it’s easy to dismiss.)

Most of your voting base will be your students’ parents—but it doesn’t hurt to keep as much of your community informed as possible.

How does this apply to schools?

As a school leader, you’re not trying to close a sale, but you’re often working to get your community onboard with one district effort or another—in this particular case, a bond measure. With a drip campaign, you can begin planting the ideas behind your bond in your community’s minds long before they even know a vote is on the table. At the same time, you’re nurturing your community relationships.

As soon as you know what your bond measure will ask of the public, you can begin planning your drip. If you’re going out for a facilities bond, you might begin with a link to an article about the importance of environment to a child’s education. A little later, an update on the state of your current facilities, highlighting your most pressing needs. A week or two later, an announcement of the bond campaign, with info about its plans and expenditures. Finally, as the vote draws near, a message formally asking for support.

You’ll set up all these emails at the same time, ensuring that you’re threading your underlying needs throughout the campaign, but for your audience, the messages will be spaced out. They won’t seem pushy, and they may not even seem like marketing. But as if by osmosis, your community will be absorbing the ideas you want them to believe about your district and its needs—and by the time the vote comes, they’ll be primed for a Yes.

119%

increase in link clicks when included in drip emails

18x

more revenue produced with relevant targeted emails over their general equivalents

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Turning up the heat The Centerville School District is preparing for a bond vote coming up in one year. Before even announcing the bond, the superintendent plans out a seven-week drip campaign to warm the community up to the idea. The steps below represent emails she will send to parents on the district email list, as well as to people who sign up for her newsletter.

Week 4:

Ask for community feedback on your district’s facilities, providing a link to a survey.

Week 3:

Send a follow-up to the facilities study results, highlighting a few key points.

Week 2: Share the results of a recent facilities study, detailing the district’s needs.

Send an article about the importance of school facilities to student success.

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Send an email providing basic information about school funding and bonds.

Week 6:

Send an invitation to a community meeting to discuss the district’s facilities needs.

Week 7:

Week 1:

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Thank community members who attended, including a link to a video of the meeting.

Personalize your content.

Remember, a drip campaign is largely about connection. If your community members don’t feel that your email content is relevant to them, they’ll become disengaged. Private sector marketers solve this problem by splitting their email lists into segments—then sending different content to each list.

For example, imagine you buy a mattress from an online retailer. If you get an email after that purchase trying to sell you a mattress, that content will be irrelevant to you. Plus, it will make you feel like the company doesn’t particularly care about you—they don’t even know you already bought a mattress from them.

That’s why most companies in the private sector will move a customer to a different segment of their list after a purchase.

Instead of emails about buying a mattress, you’re more likely to get messages encouraging you to buy sheets or pillows.

Again, your school district’s drip campaign isn’t focused on sales, but you can still segment your lists to make sure your content is relevant to those receiving it. For example, you might separate lists by school, sharing updates about each individual facility. You might keep your outside community members in a different segment than your parents, students, and teachers, addressing their divergent concerns.

Finally, no matter the list, make sure the “From” field of your emails displays a person’s name—not a “reply-to” email address or even the name of your school district. Use your own name, or even the name of your advocacy committee’s head. Your audience is more likely to open a message that comes from a real person.

Automate your emails.

Because drip campaigns have proven to be so effective, a wide array of vendors, like Mailchimp and Constant Contact, sell products to automate drip email campaigns. While each of these tools has slightly different features and setups, they all allow you to write your series of emails on the front end and send each one at the right time.

to the group at set dates. If you’ve got people actively signing up for your email list, you can also use your automation tool to begin sending the drip campaign the day they sign up. For example, if you are trying to reach parents who may be interested in enrolling their child in the district, you could include a simple “Get More Information” form on your website. These tools can then send a series of emails at any time interval you choose, starting from the sign-up date.

This automation allows you to “set and forget,” taking a lot of the legwork out of running a drip campaign.

Don’t overdo it.

Drip campaigns are designed to slowly warm your audience to an idea—not crank up the heat all at once. You don’t want to scare your audience away (or worse, annoy them) by sending way too many emails.

A survey by TechnologyAdvice indicated that 45.8% of people who marked businesses’ emails as spam did so because they came too frequently. (Irrelevant content accounted for another 31.6%.)

So what’s the right level of contact? When asked the maximum number of times they contacted an email address in a month, more than half of marketers answered between two and five, according to a study by the Data and Marketing Association. By contrast, only 14% answered more than eight. About once a week— or even every two weeks—seems to be the sweet spot.

So there you have it—everything you need to turn up the heat on a simple drip campaign. Now, go forth and boil some frogs.

You can do this one of two ways. If you have an existing email list and you’re not planning to add people, you can set up a simple schedule, automatically sending your emails

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Building Community Trust

How Vancouver Public Schools earned long-term community confidence—and leveraged it to win big with their bond “There is a reason I do this work,” Dr. Steve Webb of Vancouver Public Schools tells us. “I know something firsthand about generational poverty.” Neither of Webb’s parents graduated from high school, and neither set of his grandparents did either. As he speaks of his students’ challenges, you can hear the passion in his voice. “Poverty is not a learning disability,” he says, “but it presents real barriers to student success in too many classrooms in our country.”

Webb is currently serving his 12th year as superintendent of VPS, which sits on the north bank of the Columbia River, just across the water from Oregon. This large Washington district, serving about 23,400 students, has experienced rapid growth and diversification over the last decade as a result of nearby Portland’s rising costs of living. Families are relocating to Vancouver for more affordable housing, which has caused a shift in the district’s demographics; around 43% of students now qualify for free and reduced meals, and roughly 14% need English learning services across the district.

DR. STEVE WEBB OF VANCOUVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS 30

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Fortunately, they have a school leader whose mission is as personal as it is professional. “If we’re serious about getting more kids across the finish line—black and brown, differently abled, second language learners—rather than focus on the symptoms, we need to get to the root cause,” Webb says. “And decades of research demonstrates the correlational relationship between poverty and student learning.”

Needless to say, Webb’s 35-year career in education has centered on students who need more wraparound support from their schools. His leadership specializes in the juncture between education, communications, and community building—earning him not only 2016 Washington State Superintendent of the Year, but also one of four finalist spots for AASA’s national title. He’s been featured as one of EdWeek’s Leaders to Learn From and received NSPRA’s 2018 Bob Grossman Leadership in School Communications Award.

When Webb took the helm in 2008, he partnered with Chief of Staff and Chief Communications Officer Tom Hagley, who’s now in his 28th year at VPS. Together, they renewed the district’s focus on community support for students. But instead of just implementing new programs, Webb gave the community the impetus to design their new schools. “What you help co-create, you own and support. That, in and of itself, is a standard practice here in the system and in the community,” he says.

Webb invested heavily in communications: not just sending stories out, but asking the community for feedback. Over time, this two-way communications work built the connection between the community and their schools. So as the need for a bond surfaced around 2015, the VPS team knew they’d need to build on the momentum of their community connections and story-driven communications. Since many schools needed to be completely replaced, the district’s bond would also come with a hefty price tag. Fast-forward to 2017, and the district would pass their $458 million referendum with overwhelming support. The long-term trust and personal connections the district had built within the community had more than paid off.

It’s clear that strengthening community trust and buy-in is an everyday focus for VPS. “Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast,” Webb advises. “It isn’t about getting out, identifying a set of projects, and then just launching a campaign. If you try to microwave the process, you’ll likely not get the kind of

result that you had hoped for.” Instead, VPS stays focused on gaining supporters along the way. “That will net the kind of results that you need at the ballot box,” Webb says.

The Community Approach Long before their 2017 bond, Webb and his team committed to operating and maintaining community schools. The fact that these programs would garner more support for the district was a bonus, but not the focus of their efforts.

The focus, as always, was the students—especially those with the greatest needs. For Webb, education is a pathway out of poverty. “It’s not a hand-out; it’s a hand-up,” he says.

“It’s about reducing the barriers that present challenges for kids to learn in school. If a child is hungry, if they don’t know where they’ll sleep tonight—it’s going to impact their ability to learn.”

According to the Coalition for Community Schools, these facilities provide expanded learning opportunities outside of the classroom, offer essential health and social services, and engage families and communities as assets in the lives of their children and youth.

As of 2018, VPS was spending about $1.7 million of their own resources annually on the community schools initiative, with community partners providing another $3.8 million in funds and in-kind support, according to Phi Delta Kappan.

One reason for the initiative’s success, however, was that Webb wasn’t spearheading the movement alone. “In the 2007-2008 school year, the district engaged in a strategic planning process that involved hundreds of internal and external stakeholders,” Webb tells us. “That series of conversations resulted in identifying strategic goal areas.

One of those goal areas focused on family and community engagement and about how we can leverage partnerships and relationships in such a way that improves student achievement.”

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As part of their move toward community schools, Webb, Hagley, and their team began to open more Family-Community Resource Centers (FCRCs) across the district. These on-campus facilities “remove barriers and connect families with available community resources” to increase student success. FCRCs conduct a needs assessment of the families in their neighborhoods and serve as local centers to “build collective capacity within the neighborhood to bring those resource supports to bear.”

Several years ago, when one of the district’s most impoverished neighborhoods faced a crisis, FCRCs came to the rescue. “Just a few weeks before Christmas, there was a landlord who issued letters to vacate an apartment complex,” Hagley explains. The apartments were home to several of the district’s families, so the local FCRC stepped in to help. “Our partners were able to wrap support around those families who were impacted,” he adds. Not only did the FCRC provide food and shelter, they also paired families with legal services and housing experts. Within two weeks, the Washington neighborhood FCRC raised nearly $100,000 for families in need. “These families could’ve been put out on the streets at Christmas,” Hagley says. “But they had a place to go.”

And the impact didn’t stop there. It also opened up a broader conversation in the community around local housing policies that eventually resulted in a new city ordinance giving residents more time to vacate their homes in the event of an eviction. The conversation also led voters to approving a housing levy to build affordable apartment complexes in the area. “It speaks to the transformational power that schools can have in communities,” Webb says.

In 2008, VPS was just opening their second FCRC. Now, they operate 18 centers and aim to provide resource services in all of their schools by the end of 2020. They even have two mobile units that serve students in the north end of the district. And they’ve also established partnerships with more than 750 outside entities—from local businesses to faith communities—to ensure these FCRCs can continue to meet community and student needs.

The district also funds full-time FCRC coordinator positions in all 18 of their centers. “That person’s job is dedicated to mobilizing partnerships—that’s their full-time work,” Hagley explains. “It sends a message to the broader community that the district’s doors are wide open.” Hagley says that having coordinators has also “provided a conduit for collaboration at the school level that goes beyond the principal.”

The VPS team believes that by investing in the lives of their students and families, they’ve won the trust of their community. The data seems to back this up. “In the voting precinct results over time, we’ve seen dramatic changes as schools

In addition to their 18 FCRCs, VPS operates two mobile resource centers.

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have been rebuilt with these Family-Community Resource Center connections and partnerships,” Hagley tells us. “The areas of town that were previously poverty-affected and had low levels of connections with their schools—those precinct results have increased dramatically when it comes to people supporting levies and bond measures.”

Building on Momentum By 2015, several schools in the district desperately needed repairs or replacement. Fortunately, the trust VPS had established with their stakeholders gave them the confidence to start planning a bond campaign. But in order to earn and maintain the kind of buy-in needed for success, the district knew they’d have to keep communicating their vision.

“People tend to focus more on getting the information out and trying to persuade voters to pass a measure,” Hagley says. “But, oftentimes, voters can’t see exactly what they would be benefiting from. They don’t have a clear vision of what the district wants to accomplish.”

VPS, however, had laid most of the groundwork before the official bond campaign ever began. They’d made it hard not to see their vision for community schools that care for the whole child. “Without question, I am absolutely confident that a decade’s worth of work translated into additional support for this bond program request,” Webb tells us.

VPS hosted bond symposia across the district and posted videos about those meetings on social media and their website.

To determine what shape a potential bond package should take, VPS stayed focused on their stakeholders. They turned to their community for help in “rethinking, reimagining, and rebuilding schools for the future” by hosting 10 formal community meetings—they call them “symposia”— and 37 onsite meetings at individual schools. Over the last decade, the district has hosted over 50 symposia on various topics related to their schools and community. With these bond symposia, specifically, VPS wanted to make sure they acknowledged every community need and concern.

And they do mean every concern—especially those of underserved demographics. “We have to design focus group conversations in very targeted ways,” Webb explains.

“We might not necessarily hear from our Spanish-speaking families unless we invite them to the table. So by deliberately reaching out to historically under-represented audiences or stakeholders, we’re making sure they’ve got a voice.”

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VPS’s two mobile FCRCs are proof that this district listens to their community. “Mobile units surfaced in a conversation through one of our symposia,” Hagley tells us. Because VPS doesn’t have the budget or need to hire more FCRC coordinators, these mobile resource centers are able to serve students in the northern part of the district who wouldn’t otherwise have access. “We’re enlisting great minds to co-create solutions,” Webb adds.

Not only did engaging with the community in these ways guide the district’s planning, but it also created “a cadre of really enthusiastic champions for each of those projects,” Hagley says. “There’s always this energy in the room when we get people from different backgrounds together to talk about how we could make this the best possible school district. It creates a buzz in their local community. If they’re a teacher, they go back and talk with their colleagues. Students talk with other kids. It builds momentum toward the bond effort.”

And even after the bond has been passed and a facility built, this initial engagement process gives students and parents a sense of ownership over the finished product. “When you directly engage students and staff members, parents, and others from the community, you create a lasting source of pride for those folks,” Hagley says. “They often come back and point to certain aspects of the school after it’s been built and say, That was my suggestion!”

For Webb, building that sense of community ownership is paramount—not just for bond elections, but for everything the district does. “These aren’t my schools,” he says adamantly. “They’re not the board’s schools. These are community schools, and our community invests in their children like no other in the country.”

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VPS consistently shares school stories to unite the district and community.

The district’s cable television program, Inside VPS, showcases school and community news and events.

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When you directly engage students and staff members, parents, and others from the community in that process of envisioning what the school could look like, you create a lasting source of pride for those folks.

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Sharing stories of VPS’s positive impact on students and the community is just one way the district earns support.

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Telling Stories Superintendent Webb sometimes refers to himself as his district’s “storyteller-in-chief”— a moniker he wears proudly. “I’m absolutely committed to a year-round communications program and have invested significantly in our communications teams,” he tells SchoolCEO. “At the end of the day, I can’t do everything from this office, but I can continue to communicate our great work, our strategic priorities, our results. That equips everyone in the organization—from a custodian to a board director—with the same sense of purpose, vision, hope, and aspiration that we want for our children in public schools. People need to feel invested. They need to feel empowered to act. That’s why it’s incumbent upon us to tell those stories.”

Being chief storyteller involves not only communicating Vancouver’s vision, but also spotlighting past and current successes—FCRCs, for example—especially when the district needs community support for efforts like bonds and levies. “All of our communication efforts are imbedded with our strategic work,” Webb explains. “It’s about telling our story related to our strategic work in such a way that helps inform and shape prospective work.”

Like most school systems across the country, VPS also faces legal limits as to how they can market their bond measures. “Any advocacy where we’re encouraging people to vote Yes will have to come from volunteer groups,” Webb tells us.

Initial community surveys prior to the bond planning process helped the district get a sense of how to reach their stakeholders. “That enables us to test some messages,” Hagley says. “Then we know what statement of facts would be most compelling to cause people to support the measure before the campaign.” After testing around 10 themes in those first few surveys, VPS found that a few stuck out to the community, like new HVACS and increased safety and security.

Voters also responded favorably to the idea of “a chicken in every pot,” adds Webb—“the fact that all schools would benefit.”

Once they determined which messages resonated most with the public, VPS hammered those themes home.

“We just repeated those over and over and over again in different ways,” says Hagley. He cites the Rule of Seven—the idea that people have to hear marketing messages at least seven times before they’ll take any action. “We’re mindful that we need to repeat the information at least six or seven different times in different ways in order to break through all of the other information that people receive every day in their regular lives.”

To deliver their message to as many stakeholders as possible, VPS implemented a whole laundry list of approaches: “pretty much everything, except for skywriting,” Hagley tells us. “We did 90 presentations to staff and community groups. We also did open houses in each neighborhood that was going to benefit from a project school, and we used our website and social media to drive people to the site.” Outside of these tools and a mobile app, the district also used more traditional methods to reach voters.

“We used outdoor signage—sidewalk signs and banners— to draw attention to passersby that this was a site of a future bond project,” Hagley adds.

VPS was transparent about their needs and where bond dollars would be spent.

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Many voters responded favorably to the idea that all schools would benefit from the bond.

The district kept their community updated and informed on bond projects, often fielding questions and concerns.

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Listening to the Kids Just as they do everyday, VPS kept students at the center of planning and marketing for their bond. “We always start with student learning and the kind of outcomes we want to achieve,” says Webb. “How do we backwards-map from those outcomes in order to achieve the kind of learning environments kids need?”

And here’s something crucial—the district doesn’t presume to know what those needs are. They ask the kids themselves. “Frankly, sometimes students have a different perspective than the adults in the room,” Webb says. “Inviting those voices to the table makes sure we don’t construct schools that don’t make sense to the kids we serve. I think it’s critically important that we empower students to tell us what they need and what their aspirations are.” Of course, that means getting input from a diverse group of students.

“We want to make sure we listen to our second language learners and to the different populations that make up an entire student body,” he says.

In all of their communications, VPS keeps students and their stories front and center.

The same emphasis on student needs and success districtwide that drove the bond package itself also anchored the district’s marketing. Telling the VPS story means consistently maintaining that focus on their greatest asset: the kids. “Visually, in all of our communications, we would always have students front and center, focusing on what’s good for them,” Webb says. “And not only students today, but generations of students. These schools are an investment the community makes to build assets that will last for 50 years or more.”

For Webb—and for VPS—it all goes back to working together to give every student their best shot at a promising, successful future. “It does take a village,” he adds, “of schools, families, and community partners interacting to strengthen opportunities for kids to learn and grow.”

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The district continues to showcase the impact their community has made on Vancouver students.

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Frankly, sometimes students have a different perspective than the adults in the room. Inviting those voices to the table makes sure we don’t construct schools that don’t make sense to the kids we serve.

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STORYTELLING

All successful marketing includes a crucial secret ingredient, a “special sauce” of sorts that makes your content sing.

It’s not a flashy logo or consistent color schemes—though those certainly help. It’s not fancy equipment like the best cameras or design software. It’s not even a dedicated team of communications professionals. No, all successful marketing has one simple factor in common: it tells a story.

Of course, not just any stories will do the trick. In your district, you’re looking for stories that reinforce your values, grab your community’s attention, and move people to action.

Stories like this one: When Alex started at Centerville High four years ago, he was nervous about the prospect of taking honors classes. But at Centerville, he found something new: teachers who believed in him, encouraged him, helped him unlock his potential.

Today, he’s graduating—with honors. It’s just one more example of Centerville Cougars overcoming obstacles.

This story could have easily been an Instagram post with the caption “So proud of our graduates!” On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with a post like that… but on the other, it’s a missed opportunity. Any district in the country could share the same post. The best leaders uncover and share the emotional, authentic stories that reinforce their district’s unique messaging. In other words, they tell the stories only their schools can tell.

In this article, we’ll give you a crash course on how school leaders can use different platforms to tell better stories. We’ll start with the basics, sharing why stories are so effective and how to craft the overarching narrative of your district. Then, we’ll teach you how to find and tell smaller stories that not only reflect your values, but captivate your audience along the way.

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Why story?

Build your district narrative.

We probably don’t have to tell you that storytelling is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Research by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner suggests that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts alone. Stories can clarify complex ideas. They have the power to elevate boring subject matter into something engaging and interesting.

What’s more, 92% of people say they prefer that the marketing they consume come in the form of a story.

Whether it’s the Budweiser Clydesdales pushing through snow or a can of Chef Boyardee rolling through the supermarket aisles, when marketing tells a story, it sticks with us.

We’ve often discussed how to build your district’s core message: a short statement that indicates a problem and provides your solution. But when it comes to school storytelling, it might be helpful to think of your core message as a story itself—a district narrative.

Stories also encourage us to turn off our sense of skepticism, says digital culture expert Frank Rose, author of The Art of Immersion and one of today’s leading minds in the field of storytelling. “Stories encourage the willing suspension of disbelief,” he tells SchoolCEO. “Even if only for the duration of the story, you tend to turn off your critical faculties and just listen to what the story is telling you.”

But most importantly, stories are a catalyst for connection.

“Stories are the way that we connect with each other,” says Hilary Trudell, founder of storytelling organization The Yarn.

“You want to connect with your audience, whether it’s a theater full of people, your parents, your kids, or your school board. You want to create empathy within that space.

Stories are an essential part of what creates a community.”

Of course, this is even more true in a school setting, where the stories you tell are really the stories of your community’s children. And once you’ve worked to build that connection, that trust, that community, the stories you’ve told over time can drive them to action. Dr. Steve Webb, superintendent of Washington’s Vancouver Public Schools, says he sees himself as the district’s “storyteller-in-chief,” and that “a yearround commitment to storytelling” helped his schools win a major bond measure.

“If we don’t tell the story about the great work that is happening in our schools on a day-to-day basis, then we’re missing an opportunity,” Webb tells SchoolCEO. “It’s about building public confidence in our schools and enlisting continued support from partners, stakeholders, patrons, and taxpayers.”

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Your heroes As you begin to construct your district narrative, you must first determine your hero: the main character of the story you’re telling. We’ll tell you a secret: your district is not the hero of this story. Instead, it’s your students, parents, and community members. Your brand narrative shouldn’t focus on what you want; it should focus on what they want.

Your district does have a role in this story, however; you’re the wise and helpful guide. Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, Dumbledore in Harry Potter, or Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, it’s your job to help your heroes accomplish their goals.

What they want Every great story, from Moby-Dick to Finding Nemo, is about a main character who wants something. Captain Ahab wants to slay his white whale; Marlin the clownfish wants to find his son; and your community’s parents want specific things from their schools.

We can’t tell you what the members of your unique community want—but you probably already know. It might be cutting-edge innovation, with state-of-the-art STEM programs; it might be an emphasis on social-emotional learning and the child’s wellbeing; it might be safety and security. Account for everything a parent could want for their child’s education.

These are your heroes’ goals.

How they’ll get it Your district’s narrative is the story of how you’ll help your heroes get what they want. As the guide, it’s your job to lead your parents and students to success.

Compare your heroes’ goals to the amenities your district uniquely offers. Where do their wants line up with your offerings? That intersection is the core story your messaging should be telling—and you’ll back it up with smaller stories along the way.

Back up your district narrative with smaller stories.

Your district narrative should be the backbone of your school communications. Everything you post—on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on YouTube—should function as a part of that story. Think of your individual posts as episodes of a TV show. Though each post will have its own unique story, each also contributes to the overall narrative of your school district.

Take, for example, the way Hawai’i Preparatory Academy (HPA) makes community relationships a key part of their narrative. “At HPA, we welcome you not just to our campus but into the HPA family (‘ohana),” the school’s website promises. “ ‘Ohana involves inclusivity, shared responsibility, and care for one another. So when you arrive at HPA, you join a community that will accept, support, and strengthen you.”

Smaller stories feed your overall story when they share the values of your audience—the same values you’re emphasizing in your district narrative. According to Trudell, connecting through values is a key part of any story.

It makes sense that, alongside the group photos typical of a commencement ceremony, HPA’s Instagram features exuberant, emotional moments from their graduations, highlighting the relationships they promise. Though the captions are pretty sparse, the images say it all: the school has created an environment where students genuinely love their teachers and one another.

“I think the biggest thing to think about when you’re creating your story is, how do you create an opportunity to relate on a values level?” she tells SchoolCEO. “There’s always breaking it down and thinking about the values that are inherent in the story. Are we talking about them in a way that’s going to let someone else connect with them?”

Smaller stories like this one succeed for several reasons. For one, it’s emphasizing an aspect of school that HPA knows their community values: relationships. Stories like this one say, “We understand what you want, and we can provide it”—and that level of understanding builds a connection with an audience.

HPA’s Instagram features exuberant, emotional moments from their graduations, highlighting the relationships they promise. Though the captions are pretty sparse, the images say it all: the school has created an environment where students genuinely love their teachers and one another.

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What makes a great story?

HPA’s Instagram post also works on its own, because, well, it’s a great story. One look at these photos and you understand what they’re saying: “We’ve really grown to love one another here.” That’s because HPA knows the essential factors that make a great story, no matter the medium: emotion, authenticity, and transformation.

No matter how interesting the facts of a story are, it’s the emotion that draws us in—because it’s the emotion that allows us to relate. But a story doesn’t have to be as dramatic as overcoming disease and disability to capture our emotions. It can be as simple as excitement over a cherished school tradition.

Emotion

Since retiring from a 34-year career at one of Colorado’s leading news stations, Jack Maher has put his journalistic skills to use for public education. Now, he’s the sole videographer for Jeffco Public Schools, a district of 86,000 students and 15,000 employees. As he crafts stories for the district’s Emmy-nominated YouTube channel, JPSTV, he’s looking for emotion, too. He tells us about a fairly simple shoot, capturing a first-day-of-school tradition at Van Arsdale Elementary: the launch of a model rocket painted to look like a #2 pencil.

Over the last decade, Paul Smith has become an expert in business storytelling. Interviewing hundreds of CEOs in dozens of countries, he’s learned the keys to building a story that sells—and one of them, he tells SchoolCEO, is emotion.

“A story is nothing more than a fact plus an emotion,” Smith says, referencing novelist E.M. Forster. He goes on to share one of Forster’s examples: “If I were to tell you that the king died, and then the queen died, that’s just a fact. But if I were to tell you that the king died, and then the queen died of grief—now that’s a story.”

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.

Last year Dylan Rheker, a student battling cancer and other disabilities at Michigan’s L’A nse Creuse Public Schools, won the Macomb County Volunteer of the Year Award. Those are the facts. But the way the district chose to report those facts made it a compelling story. Look at the opening of this article, “A Hero’s Happiness,” in the district’s magazine, Living L’Anse Creuse: Theresa Rheker and her husband tried to smile through the tears streaming down their faces. They watched their 14-year old son Dylan receive a standing ovation as he walked across the stage to accept an award nobody saw coming.

This was one of “those” moments. A moment Theresa says she would bottle up and play over and over if she could. This was a moment that personifies why Dylan is his parents’ hero.

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“They’ve been doing this for years, but you just would not believe how excited the kids and the staff were to see this little model rocket shoot up,” Maher tells SchoolCEO. “When you think of public school, it was all there. It was the excitement of the first day. It was pride. It was love, love for their school.”

But you don’t have to take Maher’s word for it. You can hear it in the little voices counting down to blast off, see it in the faces gazing up at the sky. By highlighting those emotions, Maher’s taken a fairly universal event—the first day of school—and made it something special: a story.

“That’s really the key to authenticity: to look at everything you’re saying from the audience’s point of view. ”

Authenticity Dr. Frank Rose, who teaches a seminar on storytelling for Columbia University School of the Arts, believes authenticity is one of the keys to great storytelling. “People need to put themselves in the position of the reader,” he tells SchoolCEO. “People who are in positions of authority tend to think about what they need to communicate rather than what the audience wants to hear. So as a result, you see people communicating in a way that they would never respond to themselves.”

Your community doesn’t need your flashy, overproduced highlight reel—no matter how much you’d like to show it to them. They need the honest stories of what’s happening in your schools. If you want to win with story, that’s what you need to give them.

“That’s really the key to authenticity,” he says: ”to look at everything you’re saying from the audience’s point of view.”

Despite his background in video, Maher has found that at Jeffco, sometimes less is more. While in past years he’s filmed superintendent messages with plenty of polish—fancy backgrounds, three-point lighting—now, he’s decided that’s “too slick.”

“This school year, we’re just telling our superintendent, You’re at schools every day. Take your iPhone and just do a selfie video with a teacher. It may not be the best quality, but let’s see you out there in the raw, interacting with your employees and your community,” Maher says. “And boy, has it been a hit. It’s very direct, and it’s very honest, very authentic.

It’s something any superintendent could do in any district.”

As you get started with storytelling, remember to make your content a window into your schools, not a glossy filter. “As educators, we have this really special privilege of seeing kids at their best,” says Maher. “You want to give your community a window into that world.”

super selfies

In this JPS-TV video, students at Van Arsdale Elementary gaze up at the model rocket they’ve just launched—a first-day-of-school tradition.

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Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District showcases the exciting changes made possible by a recent school bond measure. “BVSD completed $75 million of work on 14 different projects, improving learning environments and extending the useful life of buildings in a variety of ways,” the story reads.

Transformation Think of the stories that have most impacted you, and you’ll probably realize they all deal with growth and change. The Beast, thanks to true love, turns back into a human. The Little Mermaid trades her tail for legs. Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield move from childhood into adulthood. Ebenezer Scrooge becomes a better man. This is a principle emphasized by The Moth, a nonprofit group that shares the power of personal storytelling through workshops, live events, a podcast, and even a Peabody Award-winning Radio Hour.

“In all our stories, there’s an element of change—the way the storyteller has changed since the beginning,” says Hanna Campbell, Senior Manager for The Moth’s Education Program. “It can be a huge change or a small change, but that’s just as interesting to us as human beings. We want to know how the person in front of us has become who they are. We want to see that transformation.”

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, and changes your schools are making in the lives of your students.

Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District (above) showcases the exciting changes made possible by a recent school bond measure. “BVSD completed $75 million of work on 14 different projects, improving learning environments and extending the useful life of buildings in a variety of ways,”the story reads. In a feature from Chicago Public Schools (right), graduating senior Christian Bradford credits his high 46

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school’s IB Programme for his college preparation—he’s the first in his family to attend. Bradford, who was making low B’s and C’s at the beginning of the program, got into DePauw University with his 4.6 GPA. Changes like these are easiest to convey in a longform story on your site—but with a little extra planning, you can use social media to tell them over time.

For example, say your district is attempting to pass a bond measure to build a new STEM facility. Once you’ve finalized the plans for the building, post the concept art on your Instagram. When the bond passes, make an announcement on all your social media platforms. Share photos along the way of the groundbreaking, the construction, the final ribbon-cutting. When the time comes, share photos of students finally using the facility.

Taken individually, none of these posts makes a complete story—but together, over months or even years, they culminate to tell a story of transformative growth.

This approach to storytelling doesn’t just work on capital projects. Follow the progress of your Quiz Bowl team as they prepare for a big match, the band as they practice for the homecoming halftime show, or your football team as they train for the championship. When you finally share these successes, they’ll mean that much more to your audience—because they’ve followed your progress along the way. They saw where you started, and they’ve seen the transformation.

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 to DePauw University. He’ll be the first in his family to attend college.

How do you find great stories?

Work with a team.

At The Moth, the creation of stories is often a collaborative process. When she’s conducting workshops, Campbell finds that a group setting enhances her participants’ brainstorming. “Sometimes in our culture, when we’re going to work on a story, we go and we sit by ourselves and we write it, but sometimes it can be extremely generative to do it in community,” she tells SchoolCEO.

to do two things: eat and tell stories.” You could also make story-sharing a regular part of your all-staff meetings.

In a large district, working with a team is practically necessary if you want to find stories across all your schools. So build a group that can help you extend your reach—whether that means hiring a full-time communications team, consulting regularly with your building-level leaders, or creating a group of particularly story-savvy teachers and staff members.

Build a story wish list.

Once you have your team, find outlets for collaboration and story-sharing. Smith suggests “story circles.” Once a month, invite different people to a lunch where “you’re only allowed

Do some brainstorming around that question. Are the girls on your volleyball team exemplars of grit? Does the improvement of your high school choir show off your district’s

Whatever strategy you choose, know that while you may be your district’s “storyteller-in-chief,” you don’t have to find stories by yourself. Use your resources—especially the people around you.

As you’re looking for stories to tell, go back to your district narrative. What values stand at the center of your overarching story? Maybe you’re proud of your commitment to innovation, your focus on students’ emotional wellness, or your determination to push learning to its limits. What kind of stories would best promote those values?

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growth mindset? Once you know what types of stories will best advance your vision, don’t be afraid to make your wants known. “Make a list of the type of stories you wish you had, and ask for them,” Smith tells us. “Once people know you’re looking for particular stories, you’d be surprised how eager they are to tell you.”

Empower your staff to tell their own stories.

Kindergarten teacher Lauren Neumaier, an employee of Arizona’s Crane Schools, has found a creative way to make her students feel safe and in control. Each day, as kids enter the classroom, they get to pick how their teacher greets them.

By pointing at a chart on the wall, they can pick a dance, a hug, a high five, or a fist bump.

When Neumaier first recorded this daily ritual, she only meant to show her principal, Laura Hurt. But Hurt was so touched by what she saw that she shared the video on the school’s Facebook page—where it’s since received more than five million views, 63,000 likes, and 23,000 shares.

This is exactly the kind of story Crane Superintendent Laurie Doering and Executive Director of Human Resources and Communications Lupe Lewis had hoped to uncover with their recent emphasis on staff-wide storytelling.

“Our school environment just naturally has a lot of amazing things happening on a daily basis, and we find our staff sometimes takes them for granted,” Lewis tells SchoolCEO. “Before I worked for Crane, as a parent, I didn’t really know what was happening after I dropped off my daughters at school other than traditional forms of communication—flyers, emails, occasional social media posts.” Parents were only getting announcements and updates, not stories from the classroom. “So we wanted to start showing off what’s happening inside the walls of our schools during the day so that parents feel more connected,” Lewis says.

To accomplish that goal, Doering explains, “everybody has to market”—everybody has to be a storyteller.

For the last two years, Crane has empowered their building-level leaders with monthly trainings on marketing. And in return, Crane’s principals are “feeling comfortable and creative,” Doering says. “It’s a risk,” she adds. “Sometimes

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you’re wondering, Is this worthy of posting? But we’re just saying, Take the risk. What’s the worst that could happen, you get two likes versus 100?”

Doering and Lewis aren’t just leading the storytelling charge at Crane. They’re giving their staff the skills and permission to feel confident about the content they’re posting—and stories like Mrs. Neumaier’s are the payoff.

How do you tell those stories well?

Show, don’t tell.

Just google “storytelling tips,” and in almost every article you click, this classic missive will turn up: “show, don’t tell.” In the words of Anton Chekhov, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Or, in other words, “Don’t tell me your schools are innovative—show me kids programming robots in your STEAM lab.”

When you sit down to work on a story, think about the details that will bring your work to life. Writing about a decisive basketball win? Give us a dramatic recounting of the moments before the final buzzer. Tweeting about how much your teachers care? Show me a photo of a student hugging a staff member.

In the context of schools, showing is about more than just telling a compelling story—it’s your proof that you’re following through on your messaging. It proves your authenticity.

At Crane, Lewis and Doering know this well.

“We’re not using keywords, we’re not using buzzwords,” Lewis says. “We’re not just telling you we’re innovative and creative in the videos we release—we hope you capture that through what you’re watching, what you’re feeling. It has to be real. We have to prove that it’s actually true.”

Keep it simple.

Maher’s best advice for school storytellers? “Apply the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid,” he says with a laugh. It goes back to authenticity—you don’t have to overthink your content. “If it’s back-to-school and the kindergarteners have a sweet welcome song, use your iPhone and get that welcome song recorded,” he says. It can be that easy.

At The Moth, Campbell also finds that her workshop participants tend to make storytelling harder than it has to be.

“Typically I find that the first version is super long,” Campbell tells us. “Folks feel like they need to give you all this context of who they are and where they were for their story to make sense. So the first question I ask is, What is this story really about? Then we can focus on which details are essential.”

As you work on your story—whether it’s a Twitter thread, a Facebook post, or a blog article—go back to your district narrative. Which ideas are you using this story to reinforce?

Keep those at the forefront of your mind, only including details that serve that overarching theme.

You’re also shooting for simplicity in the way you present your content. “Write like people talk,” says Maher. “I think in education, sometimes the ‘eduspeak’ can really muddle the messaging. So step back after you’ve communicated. Is this authentic? Do I sound like a person talking to a person over a cup of coffee? If not, if it’s laced with eduspeak, you need to start doing some editing.”

Don’t be afraid to get started.

As you’re getting started with storytelling—and even once you’re a pro—it’s easy to get paralyzed by perfectionism.

You might want your article, your Instagram, your Facebook post, to be perfect right from the get-go… making even the thought of getting started intimidating.

“It’s all too easy to censor yourself,” Rose says. “You end up staring at a blank page for a long time. But it’s better just to put down what you want to say with a minimum of censorship.”

You’re not going to get your story exactly right on the first try—but that’s okay. Later you’ll rewrite, recut, remove extraneous details. You’ll show your drafts to colleagues you trust and get their opinions. But for now, you just have to string one word, one shot, one photo after another. You just have to get started.

Look for dynamic visuals.

Scroll through any school district’s social media—perhaps even your own—and what do you see? Posed photo after posed photo: students holding up awards, teachers standing with their classes, the football team gathered for a group shot. The problem with these photos is two-fold: they’re not very interesting, and even worse, they’re not unique. Every other district is posting similar photos, meaning that your posed content won’t stand out from the crowd.

As Jeffco’s videographer, Maher is bringing skills from his newsroom past into his classroom shoots. He says he tries to avoid what he calls “BOPSA”: code for “bunch of people sitting around.” “I really try to find those stories that have a really cool visual component,” Maher tells SchoolCEO. Next time you’re tempted to take a video or photo of some BOPSA, think again. Instead of posing an awards photo, try to catch a student’s authentic reaction to receiving her certificate. Instead of a yearbook-style shot of the football team, get a shot of teammates hugging after the final touchdown.

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Bond Expert Q&A: Dr. Kyle Ingle A leading researcher on referendums shares what works and what doesn’t in school bond campaigns.

Dr. Kyle Ingle never planned on becoming one of the country’s leading experts on school bond campaigns. When his first posting as a professor took him to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, however, he simply couldn’t avoid them. As a new Ohio voter, Ingle was shocked at the “sheer frequency” of education-related referendum materials he received. Admittedly, he didn’t know much about bonds—but his new state leaned more heavily on school tax elections than any other. So Ingle followed his curiousity.

Thirteen years and many bond campaigns later, Ingle’s findings on bond and levy campaigns have guided countless districts to build support and buy-in from their communities.

Currently an associate professor and assistant chairman for the Department of Educational Leadership, Evaluation, and Organizational Development at the University of Louisville, he has been published in several educational journals and encyclopedias, as well as in half a dozen books. We spoke with Ingle to learn what the research says about how districts can hit it out of the park on Election Day. 52

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Have you found any correlation between how much a district spends and their success in passing a bond?

Besides your findings on yard signs, was there anything else significant you found in terms of spending?

Our models suggested consistently that spending more money matters. For a unit increase in spending, there was an increase in the likelihood of passage, and it was significantly so.

We had a variable for campaign consultants—basically paying an external person from some organization to help run the campaign. That was insignificant.

However, the type of campaign expenditures were pretty much insignificant. There was one exception, and that was the expenditures on yard signs. Of course, correlation doesn’t mean causation. Spending more money on yard signs doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have people who are willing to take those yards signs and put them out there in support. So essentially, we determined that the expenditure on yard signs is likely just a proxy for community support. The greater the community support, the greater the demand for the signs.

Why is community involvement essential for the passage of a bond?

What was funny about it is that a colleague and I did a presentation at the annual meeting of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators. We explained that we’d found that paying for a campaign consultant was an insignificant variable. But after we did our presentation, I don’t know how many people came up and asked, “Would you want to be a campaign consultant for us?”

I guess we could have made some consulting money if we’d wanted to, but I wouldn’t have felt very good about taking their money, especially knowing what I knew. Another reason I didn’t want to accept was that you have to know the community, and it takes time to get the feel and pulse of a campaign and of the community.

This is huge. It’s one of those things that seems obvious, but there are still school districts who try central office campaigns as opposed to involving the community heavily. You must have community support, or build it. Stakeholders have to be willing to vote for increased taxation for education.

The central office campaigns, which relied more heavily on individuals who worked in the school district, without a whole lot of community support, tended to fail. But if you had engaged community members and let them make that clarion call for you, that was more successful. Here’s the point that we made: voters assume that school district personnel are going to be in favor of increasing taxes for schools—which discounts messaging from them. But if community members that are not employed by the school district are delivering the message, then other community members are more likely to listen.

VOTE!

One of the administrators we interviewed said, “School district personnel are essentially hired guns. We assume they’re going to be in favor of the bond, because that’s where they work. This money is going to benefit them most directly.” But when community members are advocating for the levy campaign, they tend to be seen as more legitimate voices in the community.

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Have you found any districts with exceptional message training practices in place?

“The central office campaigns, which relied more heavily on individuals who worked in the school district, without a whole lot of community support, tended to fail. But if you had engaged community members and let them make that clarion call for you, that was more successful.”

Why is it so important to train campaign participants on messaging?

Adequate message training was integral to the success of districts that passed their measures—you want there to be a consistent message as to why passing the levy is important.

Campaigns should provide message training to ensure a consistent message across the community. However, they also want to be smart about targeting the message to specific demographics. And that’s where the message training comes in handy. Again, community members are going to be more amenable to hearing from a parent or a volunteer that’s not employed by the school district. So you want that consistent message training to make sure people are prepped for the potential questions that might be posed.

It’s kind of like prepping a witness before a trial. You don’t want them to just go in and wing it. You want to give them some training in advance to say, “Here are some of the potential questions that might be raised when you’re out canvassing the neighborhoods.” And you want them to have an answer as often as possible.

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One district would use not only “sit-and-get” approaches to training with PowerPoint, but also modeling, like, “Pretend you’re going up to the door. How can you respond to this question? How are you going to respond when somebody is rude and slams the door in your face in front of your kids?”

So districts who spend more tend to pass their bonds. What about community members who get scared away by expensive campaign materials?

If you’re a community member and you get a glossy mailer, which you know costs an ungodly amount, you might be like, “Well, if they need more support, why are they spending money on this crap?”—especially if you’re tax-averse anyway.

I totally get it. And that comes down to just getting to know the community. If you’re going to contact community members, you want to figure out what they’re willing to support—and why. If you’ve had kids that were in the school district years before, you may be saying, “Look. I’ve done this. I’ve paid taxes for years, and I don’t have any kids in the school district anymore. My grandkids have already graduated. I’m on a fixed income. Why would I want to support this?”

So what the district would do is try to target the campaign message to them. They might say, “This is going to help support after-school programming to prevent crime. You don’t want high crime in your neighborhoods.”

What types of campaign strategies should schools avoid?

The most important recommendation I’d have for school committee members is to know your community—that context—when planning for campaigns and campaign expenditures. You have to know what your community is willing to support.

“If you don’t know the community, you’re less likely to win them over.

That’s all there is to it.”

You also have to know your community in order to customize campaign strategies. If you don’t know the community, you’re less likely to win them over. That’s all there is to it.

And that’s why I think the campaign consultant expenditure, at least in our research, was not significantly associated with a positive outcome. If you don’t involve the community members, taking that message out to the streets and the neighborhoods, you’re less likely to win at the ballot box.

I would also recommend avoiding messages that don’t prioritize benefits to children and the community. So a new operating levy, like the ones that we studied in Ohio, may just go to the district operating budget for expenditures such as salaries and benefits. But voters, they just see that as benefiting employees. The campaign chairs and the community members have to sell what the levy’s going to do for the kids in the community, rather than what it’s going to do for the employees.

That’s what you have to combat in your message—it’s not just to benefit teachers and administrators that work for the school district. It’s to benefit the kids in the community.

This is why we’re doing this; we’re doing it for the kids.

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Need a boost?

A primer on Facebook advertising for schools

For marketing professionals, Facebook has been a gift from the heavens. One of the most critical parts of any marketing effort is getting your message to a specific, defined audience. Before the internet, marketers often did this by advertising on television or in magazines. Want to sell men’s razors? Run an ad during the big game. Want elderly people to sign up for your insurance program? Throw in an ad during Days of Our Lives.

While this approach did narrow the audience some, you never really knew who was seeing your ads. Lots of single moms love football. College students watch daytime TV. Today, Facebook has changed all of this. Instead of choosing these broad groups, with Facebook’s platform, you can specifically select detailed groups of people based on the massive amount of information Facebook provides to advertisers. Marketers can run a campaign to parents aged 25 to 34 who live within ten miles of Phoenix and like The Big Bang Theory’s fan page. The best part? You only pay when people see the ad. Instead of paying up front to show your ad, you pay based on the number of “impressions” your ad receives.

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But Facebook has become such a dominant player in online advertising for another, more significant reason: it allows advertisers to inject their content directly into audiences’ News Feeds. When you log into Facebook, you’re probably just trying to pass the time. You click links to articles, look at new products, and check up on your friends. But as lazy as this scrolling might seem, it’s more participatory than watching a commercial on TV. Instead of passively watching, you’re actively engaging with the personalized content on your News Feed.

It’s easy to see why Facebook is valued at over $600 billion.

Marketers can reach their audiences faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than on any other platform.

If you’re a school leader spending more and more time on marketing, Facebook could be a powerful tool in your marketing tool box. On Facebook, you can promote stories of student success and insert them into the News Feeds of people who live in your area. Advocacy groups can share bond promotion ads.

In this article, we’ll introduce you to the basics of Facebook ads. We’ll give you a taste of how Facebook might be the perfect tool to amplify your district’s voice.

What types of campaigns work for schools?

Because Facebook is set up to work with all kinds of companies, the platform provides a variety of campaign options to choose from. For schools, we think you should focus on two main types: brand awareness and lead generation.

Why would schools buy Facebook ads?

If you’re like most school districts in the country, the majority of your social media audience is on Facebook. Pew Research shows that a whopping 69% of U.S. adults were active on the platform in 2019, three-quarters of them visiting the site daily. As we found in a SchoolCEO Analysis, around 68% of school districts were also on Facebook in 2017.

To see the full analysis, visit: SchoolCEO.com/the-disconnect There’s a growing expectation that schools reach parents on social. Here’s where Facebook’s current system gets a little tricky: Facebook and platforms like it adjust their algorithms to benefit those who pay. With organic social media, your messaging won’t reach new followers unless your current followers engage with your content often enough. If you don’t “pay to play,” you risk keeping your carefully crafted content invisible to the people you want to reach.

At a basic level, the goal of a brand awareness campaign is just that—awareness. You don’t need people to do anything except look at your ad. There are two basic factors to adjust: reach and frequency. Sometimes, you might want to loop in as many people as possible to see a great story about the district—you want a wide reach. Billboards, for example, have a reach of hundreds: each car who drives down the highway. Frequency means just what you might expect— how often does each driver see the billboard?

With a brand awareness campaign, you can toggle both reach and frequency to get your message out. Imagine being able to clarify misinformation on a bond referendum, place hiring ads in the feeds of qualified teaching candidates in your area, or even alert parents about the district’s open enrollment period.

In a lead generation campaign, Facebook will optimize your ad to encourage people to complete a specific action.

Private sector marketers use this setting to get a customer on their website either to make a purchase or to fill out a form. We think schools could best use a lead generation campaign to get interested leads to fill out a form on your district’s website. Someone sees that ad on Facebook, clicks the link, and then provides their contact information.

During a bond campaign, for example, you might have a form for people who want more information about the upcoming bond. Once people fill out the form, you can start a drip email campaign to influence them to vote Yes. For more information on drip campaigns, flip to page 26.

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What are the components of a Facebook campaign?

Inside Facebook Ads Manager, your main goal is to build a campaign. The process is three-tiered, and each tier is a bit more focused than the one before it. Think of these levels as folders on your computer, each nested into the last.

Campaign. Choose the goal of the campaign and set your budget.

What’s the simplest way to get started?

If you’re Facebook-savvy, you might have already paid to “boost” a few of your existing posts—essentially, to send them to more people. You can try it yourself if you haven’t already. Once you’ve shared a post on Facebook, choose an audience, the amount of money you’d like to put behind the ad, and how long you’d like the post boosted. After you’ve set up each category, Facebook will amplify the post’s reach.

Boosting a post is sort of like a pared-down version of Facebook Ads Manager. But while a boosted post is the most user-friendly option, it’s largely a temporary strategy. You won’t have the full power of Ads Manager behind you, leaving you with weaker targeting and fewer options to choose from.

Plus, managing ads for all of the district’s individual pages can be like herding cats—imagine having to keep up with the billing and permissions of a dozen pages. Luckily, a business account will allow you to consolidate these into one place. If you’re excited by the results of your boosted post, you’re ready to set up a Facebook business account.

Ad Sets. Narrow down your audience.

Ad. Design the ad by choosing which photos, text, and videos to present to your audience.

So you might have dozens of ad sets inside of a campaign, and dozens of ads inside of a set, fitting together like Russian nesting dolls.

But before you access Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll first need to link your Facebook page to a business account.

Don’t worry too much about this step, though—Facebook does a pretty good job of guiding you through the setup process. (They want you to pay them, after all.) Once you’ve finished, you’re ready to start publishing ads!

Campaign: Choose a Goal To start off, you’ll choose your goal for the campaign: your desired end result. There are lots to choose from—Facebook can send ads in a way that encourages your audience to like your post, watch your video, or simply see the ad in their feeds as often as possible.

But if you’re running either a brand awareness or lead generation campaign, you really only need to worry about two options: awareness and consideration. For a brand awareness campaign, you’ll choose either “brand awareness” or “reach” under the “awareness” objective.

Both options are optimized to get the ad in front of your audience, just using slightly different methods.

For a lead generation campaign, you’ll select “traffic” or “lead generation” under the “consideration” objective. These two options lead your audience members either to a form on your website or to a landing page. There, you control the content, so you could seal the deal with an option to submit more information or even to download enrollment forms.

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Set Your Budget When it comes to payment, you’ll set a budget for each campaign, not for each individual ad. At a very basic level, you can choose to set a daily budget or a budget for the lifetime of the campaign. Facebook will share your ad as often as possible to spend your budget in full.

If you are new to Facebook ads, this is where you should be careful. The cardinal rule is that Facebook will take as much as you are willing to pay, so make sure you feel comfortable with each budget you set. We generally recommend starting with a modest budget, as low as $10 a day, to get some practice before making a more serious investment.

Ad Sets: Narrow Down Your Audience After you’ve chosen your goal and set your budget, you’ll get to choose your audience. This is what makes the ad platform so strong (and a little creepy).

Here are a few basic parameters you can use to target your audience: • Location. You can target audiences in a country, state, city, or even a cluster of zip codes.*

• Age and Gender. These can be narrowed as specifically as you please.

• Detailed Targeting. This is where Ads Manager gets interesting. Narrowing your audience by demographics, interests, and behaviors, you can produce almost any combination of these three categories to target a highly specific audience. Target by income, education level, birthday, those who are “away from family” or “away from hometown,” “close friends with a man with a birthday in 0-7 days,” parents with children in certain age brackets, industries, job titles, or interests.

And that’s merely scratching the surface. If you have an email list, you have the option to upload that list and choose “lookalike audience.” Facebook will first match those emails with users who created an account using the same email.

Then, the platform will magically compile other users with similar demographics, interests, and behaviors to your original list.

You can also work with your website vendor or technology team to install a pixel—a short stream of code that effectively tracks site visitors—into your website. Then, Facebook will create an audience out of everyone who has visited your website or Facebook page in the last 30, 60, or 90 days. However, depending on your state, privacy laws might restrict your ability to install pixels.

If this all makes you feel a little queasy, you aren’t the only one. However, this tool is powerful, and businesses—and school systems—across the country are making use of it. *Facebook has targeting restrictions on several types of ads, including those for employment and politics. Also, Facebook requires that your target audience have a certain number of members. So while you might be able to narrow down your audience to a single person, Facebook wouldn’t send ads to just them—the audience size would be too small.

Ad: Design Your Ad Creative Now for the fun part. Once you’ve chosen the more technical targeting parameters, you have the opportunity to design an ad—whether it’s a video, a photo, or even simply text. Facebook calls all these elements your “ad creative.”

However, keep in mind that this step comes with lots of technical restrictions. You’ll want to use images of a proper size that fit Facebook’s requirements—there are dozens depending on the type of ad you’d like to send. Facebook will also throttle ads with text-based images, so keeping text minimal is important. You can find these technical details on Facebook Blueprint, Facebook’s free online advertising course.

You can promote posts that already exist, or use Facebook’s ad builder to create fresh new ads. You’ll also have the option to send users directly to your website through the ad.

We understand that this is a lot to take in. If your head is spinning, draw a bath, steep some tea, and check out this example of how an ad campaign might look for your district.

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EXAMPLE LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN GOAL: Increase open enrollment These ads have three unifying traits: 1. Clear pitch Regardless of the specific audience or age group that each ad targets, the district repeats the message that open enrollment is available and that there is a deadline.

2. Consistent messaging In each ad, CPS communicates the same core idea: the district encourages student growth at every grade level.

3. Call to action Every ad asks the audience to take a specific action: in this case, “Learn More.” This leads the district’s audience to investigate the offer and actually begin the enrollment process.

When they click “Learn More,” they should end up on a landing page or, in this case, the enrollment page of Central Public School’s website.

In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, and ever since, the two platforms have become more and more closely linked. Today, Instagram’s ads are run through Facebook Ads Manager, so most of the ads you make there can be run on both platforms. It is a best practice to reformat images for Instagram, but Facebook can also do the formatting for you.

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What’s holding you (or your opposition) back?

The Review Process Unfortunately, people who want to use Facebook ads in the education space have to contend with the platform’s restrictions on ads about “social issues, politics, or elections.”

District-level advertisements fall at a unique cross section of politics and education, both contentious subjects that Facebook is cautious about. Facebook will not serve ads that deal with these issues unless they’re very sure who is posting and paying for them.

And by Facebook’s standards, “social issues, politics, or elections” are broader topics than you might think. Even relatively apolitical posts have to get special approval if they use words that trigger Facebook’s automatic review. For example, at SchoolCEO, we’ve had to get special approval to run Facebook ads that use the words “superintendent,” “equity,” or even “school district” in the copy.

Say you want to publish an ad with the words “Election Day” in it. You first have to confront the trickiest part of placing ads on Facebook: ID Confirmation.

Stay the course.

From the outside, the different toggles on Facebook Ads Manager seem like buttons on a spaceship. Luckily, though, you’ve already taken the hardest step. You’re starting to understand the rules of the game.

As with any board game, the first few rounds on Facebook Ads Manager can be difficult. At first, you don’t quite understand the rules, let alone the best strategy. But on your second or third try, you’ll start getting the hang of it. Soon, you’ll be playing the game like a pro, reaching new audiences and amplifying the district’s work like never before.

ID Confirmation This involves someone volunteering a picture of a government-issued ID to Facebook. Once processed, Facebook will ask for an affidavit of identity to be signed by a notary public and returned. After two weeks (or more—Facebook isn’t exactly clear on how long this process takes), your identity will be confirmed.

A friendly warning: If you think you’ll ever want to publish a Facebook ad, go ahead and have somebody in your district get their identity confirmed and associated with your ad account. While not all of your ads will get Facebook’s almighty finger wag, confirming an identity will give you a lot more freedom, allowing you to focus your energy on making good ads and content.

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FACING

EXHAUSTION The bond process can be (no pun intended) taxing. School leaders we’ve spoken with were regularly attending meetings before and after work multiple days a week, sometimes late into the night. Whether you’re nearing the end of the process or just beginning, here’s some advice—and commiserations—from other experienced administrators.

Teaching the community about a bond just takes time. “I eat a lot of meals when we’re running a bond or levy, because we go to every rotary club, church, and neighborhood council. I always laugh when I get home because my husband says, Did you eat? And I say, Oh yes! He and my son, though, they don’t see me that year, because it truly is every morning, every evening. It’s that important. Because people have to understand it; it’s not automatic, and you want them to feel good about checking that box. That takes time.” - Superintendent Dr. Shelley Redinger, Spokane Public Schools, WA Learn to say “no” during the campaign. “It’s very hard to say no, but it’s probably the most helpful thing to be able to do. If I had four coffee talks in one week, I was not going to the track meet on Saturday. You just have to balance and self-regulate and say, I’m not doing it, because I need downtime. And it’s harder to do than it is to say.”

- Superintendent Joelle Magyar, Brecksville-Broadview Heights City School District, OH

Lean on your team. “Knowing that there’s light at the end of the tunnel is the thing that really gets you through—I knew that in November, it was going to be done. I was going to be able to take a breath. But it is one of those sinkor-swim times. You have to depend on your team; you have to be organized. That’s what’s going to alleviate things for you. But my team out here—absolutely amazing. When I would get to that point where I just couldn’t look at one more thing or lick one more envelope, they would step in.”

- Director of Communications and Human Resources Michelle Stephens, Lowell School District, OR 62

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Remember, bonds are an extra layer of work on everybody. When we asked Tiffany Dunne-Oldfield about self-care, she initially laughed. “I don’t think it’s possible!” she said. But as she started talking about the process, she grew more serious. “This Saturday we’re actually opening one of our schools that was in the bond, and it reminds me that we were exhausted. I mean, our team was exhausted, but our principals were exhausted too. It’s an extra layer of work on everybody, on top of everything else that we’re still responsible for. But right now, seeing new schools open makes it all worth it. You can see the ‘shiny.’” - Chief Communications Officer Tiffany Dunne-Oldfield, Spring ISD, TX Take care of yourself. “I exercise every morning at around 5 a.m. I work out with my spouse; it’s about the only time I get to see her,” Balderas tells us. “It’s like any work; you’ve got to take care of yourself. Exercise and drink a lot of water.”

- Superintendent Dr. Gustavo Balderas, Eugene School District, OR The campaign is short-term; the benefits last decades. “It was the hardest professional thing I’ve done.

Really, it was all consuming and extremely stressful,” Moore says. Her advice for other district leaders? “It’s not an easy road, but you’re going to really have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of students through improved facilities and technology that last for decades. It’s well worth it. Know that it’s a short-term challenge, and embrace the campaign as an opportunity to really get some feedback from the community.” - Superintendent Dr. Melissa Moore, El Segundo Unified School District, CA Wait till you see students’ reactions. On the first day of school after their bond passed, Assistant Superintendent Gröeber toured a few schools with other administrators.

On the tour, a second-grader broke out of line to run up to the group. “He was so excited,” Gröeber tells us. “He looked around and said, Did you see our bathrooms!? We have new bathrooms! That’s what he’s going to remember, right? He got new bathrooms. Whatever works, you know. But that’s a story that makes it worthwhile.” - Assistant Superintendent of Administrative Services Robert Gröeber, Visalia Unified School District, CA

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The Superintendent’s Guide to San Diego We sent former superintendent Donnie Whitten to San Diego ahead of the conference to show you everything to eat, see, and do to make NCE 2020 the best conference ever.

Watch the video now at apptegy.com/SanDiego