Issuu

P OW E R E D BY A P P T EGY

WINTER 2021

Creating a Seamless Experience

Owning Your Digital Spaces Building an Enrollment Funnel Winning the SEO Race Student Voice in School Marketing

“

We do not remember days...

we remember moments. - Cesare Pavese

“

M AG A Z I N E

P O D CA ST

BY A P P T EGY

Your schools have met the moment. Has your brand? Last month we said goodbye and good riddance to 2020, a year that pushed the world, our country, and public education to its limits. But just a few weeks into the new year, it’s clear we’re not out of the woods just yet. Violence rocked D.C. in January’s attack on the capitol. There was another presidential impeachment. Widespread political partisanship and unrest continue. And, of course, COVID-19 still rages on. So why, in the midst of all this chaos, are we publishing an issue on branding? At SchoolCEO, we believe that public education is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. At its best, it’s a great equalizer, affording students of every race, gender, and background the opportunity to thrive. In case you’ve forgotten, what you do everyday is important. It’s vital. Your success as educators determines the success of our country. Full disclosure: we’re not educators. Only a few of us even have backgrounds in education. We’re marketers, writers, illustrators, and videographers. But we’re working here, not anywhere else, because we believe in public education. On a daily basis, we interact with brilliant, forward-thinking educators leading premier schools.

OUR TEAM

Oftentimes, the challenges they face seem to be related not to the quality of their schools, but to their reputations. Most Americans aren’t aware of the great things happening in public schools. We can’t run a school district, but what we can do is offer you the expertise we have. That’s where branding comes in. It’s not the most important initiative your district will embark on. But as we’ll examine in this issue, your brand is your district’s reputation. A bad reputation, accurate or not, will keep students out of your schools, but a good one will attract them. Strong branding welcomes people in, allowing you, your teachers, and your schools to change their lives. Every encounter people have with your schools affects your brand, whether it’s in the classroom, on your website, on your LMS, or even on TikTok. In this edition, we’ll examine several avenues for strengthening your brand, from your digital user experience to your use of hashtags. It’s our hope that by sharing some info on what we do best, we can play a small role in the success of your schools, their positive impact on students, and the arrival of a better and brighter future.

Executive Editor: Michael Cruice Art Director: Sebastian Andrei Managing Editor: Joy Spence Community Manager: Rheannon Burnside Writers/Researchers: Melissa Hite, Barrett Goodwin, Corey Whaley

Graphic Designer/Illustrator: Corbin Lawrence Video Producers: Ryan McDonald, Obatola Layiwola Apptegy CEO: Jeston George

IN THIS ISSUE Radical Collaboration: Dr. Deborah Gist From D.C. to Rhode Island to her native Tulsa Public Schools, this superintendent has spent her career empowering families to take charge of their school experience.

Owning Your Digital Spaces

How to Boost Enrollment We asked admissions experts in higher education for their best tips on building an effective enrollment funnel.

SchoolCEO News Desk: Educators in Office We’ll highlight just a few of the exciting school leaders and teachers ready to serve in federal and state government this year.

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

Published by:

User experience on your district’s digital platforms— your website, LMS, mobile app, and more—can make or break your brand. We’ll show you how to ensure a good experience every time.

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Student Voice in School Marketing

Tie It All Together When it comes to your brand, consistency is key. Find out why you should unify your online image—and how to do it well.

Marketing 101: Hashtags Is your social media #effective? We’ll show you how to make the most of this tool in three easy steps.

As your most valuable stakeholders, students can be natural marketers for your schools.

Winning the SEO Race Does your district show up in your community’s searches? We’ll teach you how to rev up your website for search engine success.

Vol. 3 No. 2 © 2021 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. 2201 Brookwood Dr Suite 115, Little Rock, AR 72202. 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.

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Good News in Public Schools Greensboro, NC

Beaverton, OR

Highland, AR

After seeing a national need for masks, Jana, a high school student at Northwest Guilford High, started a nonprofit called The Guilford Mask Project. The organization provides reusable masks to communities in need. Through the project, more than 9,000 masks have been distributed nationally and internationally. (Fox 8 News)

When he first started learning from home, Levi, a junior at Sunset High School, was feeling unmotivated. In an effort to reconnect with fellow students, Levi created a channel on the social platform Discord where students can ask him for help with homework. Levi has received support from teachers and staff and hopes someone will continue the channel after he graduates. (KGWA8 News)

Students at Highland Middle School partnered with a local ministry to bring holiday cheer to nursing home residents with customized care packages containing items such as snack cakes and books. Amanda Gates and Anna Crowe, teachers at Highland Middle, say students really took the lead in the project. “It’s refreshing to see that young kids have that big of a heart,” Gates said. (KAIT8 News)

Wichita, KS

Sanger, TX

Groton, MA

Clarksly, a student at Anthony Elementar y, was inspired to organize a bake sale fundraiser to make sure all of her classmates had presents to open on Christmas Day. After sharing her idea through a video on Facebook, Clarksly received an outpouring of support. Over one hundred people donated items, including boxes for baked goods and fresh eggs. (KWCH12 News)

In an effort to help struggling families during the pandemic, Linda Tutt High School opened a student-led store where kids can purchase groceries and household necessities. By helping out staff or performing well on assignments, students earn points they may then use to make purchases. “We thought it was important to support [our] families and make sure they had food on the table,” said Principal Anthony Love. “We are a small school district, but we always try to teach our kids the importance of giving back to the community.” (CNN)

Adeline, a student at Florence Roche Elementary, donated art supplies to Emerson Hospital in an effort to offer patients a much-needed distraction. With the money she made selling painted seashells, Adeline bought watercolor paints, colored pencils, and other art supplies for patients in Emerson’s Transitional Care Unit. “I thought with the money I could cheer [patients] up somehow while they recover,” Adeline said. “It made me really happy that people thought that it was a good idea.” (The Lowell Sun)

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Paoli, PA

Cleveland, OH

Ashland, NH

When high school student Hita had to stop volunteering at her local nursing home due the pandemic, she worried the senior citizens there would be lonely. With the help of her brother, Divit, she started the nonprofit Brighten a Day, which has now sent almost 100,000 cards and care packages to seniors, frontline workers, and hospitalized children all over the world. (CNN)

Ryan, a junior at Cleveland High School, has set up a GoFundMe to buy an all-terrain wheelchair for his teacher and mentor Joel Boehlke, who is paralyzed from the waist down. “I would like to give to the teacher that has given so much to me and other students at our school,” Ryan wrote on the page. So far, the fundraiser has received more than $10,000—over half its goal. (The Free Press)

Declan, an alumnus of Ashland Elementary School, built picnic tables for the school as his Eagle Scout service project. Luckily, he had help. A local hardware store provided most of the necessary supplies for free, and 15 volunteers spent more than 78 hours finishing the tables. (The Laconia Daily Sun)

Nashville, TN

Aiken, SC

St. Louis, MO

Building on the idea of a local med student, Cole Elementary School has set up community refrigerators, allowing anyone in the area access to free food. Parents from the school have also volunteered to stock, clean, and maintain the fridges. “Cole has always been built on a foundation of reaching out to the community,” said Principal Chad Hedgepath. “The bottom line is it helps families. That’s what we’re all about.” (Nashville Tennessean)

Before Christmas, Noah, a student in Aiken County Public Schools, collected hundreds of new and gently used coats to donate to his peers in need. Calling his effort Noah’s Way, the middle schooler arranged for a local dry cleaner to freshen up any used coats before donation. With Noah’s help, the district has set up permanent coat closets in two schools—one middle and one elementary—for any student who needs extra warmth this winter. (Aiken Standard)

Sri, a student at Parkway West High School, has created a website to ensure that everyone in his community can sign up for the COVID-19 vaccine. Catered specifically toward unhoused individuals, covidvaccinenotify.net allows visitors to quickly and easily register to be notified via text, email, or Instagram when they become eligible for the vaccine. The website also helps users find their nearest vaccine provider based on zip code. (Fox 2 Now)

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Radical Collaboration How Dr. Deborah Gist is empowering families to rebuild the high school experience Photos courtesy of Tulsa Public Schools

On a hot Florida day in the 1990s, several school buses rolled up to Northwest Elementary. On the pavement outside, a troop of second-graders stood alert—visors on, clipboards in hand—to welcome busloads of their peers from all over the city. Dr. Deborah Gist’s students had been training for this moment for weeks. One of the visored second-graders looked up at her in awe, squealing, “They’re really coming!” As the visitors unloaded, Gist’s class sprang into action, welcoming students to an immersive field trip of the Tampa Bay Wetlands. They’d been planning this event all year.

What happened next would start a trend for the Tulsa native; she took the opportunity and ran with it. “We restored the land over a couple of years and turned it into an environmental center,” she explains. Gist then led her second-graders to research the marshland and create the field trip experience, all by themselves—complete with trail markers and a full itinerary for their guests. The field trips were wildly successful.

During her eight years teaching in Florida and Texas, Gist was a champion for this type of experiential learning. In Texas, she led her elementary students to plan and execute a young authors It all started years earlier when Gist’s conference serving 1,000 patrons. principal led her behind Northwest Students were responsible for the Elementary to a huge expanse of land: a budget, the catering, the venue—and mess of marshlands filled with tires and old matthey stepped up to the plate. Gist recalls Dr. Deborah Gist tresses, all surrounded by a tall chain link fence. “Just walking in on one of her second-graders negotilook as far as you can see,” he told her. “All that land belongs ating with a vendor. “This little bitty thing was on the phone to the school.” saying, Well, our budget is only $350,” she tells us. “She was totally negotiating with a grown-up!” 6

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After her success in teaching—winning Teacher of the Year for her schools in both Fort Worth and Tampa—Gist went on to become Washington, D.C.’s very first state superintendent for education. In 2009, she landed a role as Rhode Island’s Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, scoring a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania along the way. In 2010, after just a year in Rhode Island, Gist was honored alongside Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. Today, Gist is reimagining the process of making change in education. Back in Oklahoma, she’s currently leading the district she grew up in: Tulsa Public Schools. From elementary teacher to education commissioner to superintendent, she keeps the same unwavering focus on student success—always looking for ways to give her community ownership over their schools.

Organic Leadership While Gist was in Rhode Island, the state’s education system managed to secure a Race to the Top Grant under the Obama administration. This $75 million grant took up a sizeable chunk of the state’s focus. “But we also had this little bitty private grant to do blended learning,” says Gist. It would be this grant, not Race to the Top, that put Rhode Island on the map. To distribute the grant money, the state held a competition between schools. Only one school won the funding, but even schools who lost the competition kept experimenting with blended learning. “It became this grassroots movement,” Gist says—so much so that the state started hosting a conference to connect educators. “Teachers, school leaders, and students were teaching each other. It was the most beautiful, organic, true movement, led by people in the state who were passionate about that work.” In about two years, Rhode Island went from having very little blended learning to leading the movement nationally and even internationally. But Gist learned more from the experience than new information about technology and personalization. “For me, the lesson was about who needs to be in the driver’s seat,” she says. “I’ve always been someone who believes in engagement. But there’s engagement, and then there’s more organic leadership—there’s a difference.”

Wow Moments Coming from Rhode Island to Oklahoma, Gist was in for a bit of a shock. “I knew Oklahoma underfunded education, and teacher salaries were low,” she says. In 2020, Oklahoma’s per-pupil funding was about half of Rhode Island’s. “But I didn’t fully appreciate the depths of that, how competitive salaries are in neighboring states. And I didn’t expect for there to be additional cuts.” The year before Gist took the role of superintendent, TPS started the school year with 75 vacancies. At best, classes were taught by substitutes; at worst, they were combined or cut altogether. “It was just unsustainable,“ says Gist.

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At TPS, she’s done whatever she can to fill in the gaps. One year, Gist even drove to the house of a teacher who planned to retire, holding a fistful of balloons. “I told her, You can’t walk. We need you,” she says. “It’s that kind of effort.” Throughout her time in Oklahoma, Gist has been a fierce supporter of teachers. When they walked out of classrooms to protest school funding in 2018, Gist marched with them. “They need to be paid like the professionals they are, and we are never going to stop advocating for them,” she tells us. This kind of radical support is part of a larger cultural shift she’s leading in the district’s central office. “We are here to serve,” Gist explains. “That is the only reason this whole office exists.” To keep tabs on the district’s organizational health, Gist’s team conducts surveys focusing on her staff’s experiences: Are you supported? Do you have what you need? “We are not here to be roadblocks,” Gist says. “We want our educators to know that they’re supported.”

Over time, the data reports growth in district leadership. In 2017, central office administrators at TPS scored a 64%. But in the most recent year, teachers scored them 80%, and principals scored them 90%. For other superintendents wanting to make a similar shift, Gist recommends asking for frequent feedback from staff. At first, the TPS team conducted regular surveys, but then staff reported survey fatigue. Now, the team holds pulse checks: quick check-ins with employees that don’t add to their workload. However, Gist notes, a critical part of any sort of measurement is the leader’s response. “Use that information; respond to it; talk about it so people know that it matters,” she says. But to Gist, really changing the culture of the team means going beyond service. “It’s not enough that we understand that we’re here to serve—take it a step further,” she says.

“That’s the wow. It’s going so far above and beyond that it surprises people.”

The TPS team has started practicing what they call wow moments. Say, for example, that you get a call from a teacher who’s having an issue with payroll. While they’re explaining the problem, they mention that it’s their birthday. You’re listening and helping solve the problem; that’s to be expected. But the next morning, you stop by their school on your way to work with a birthday card. “That’s the wow,” says Gist. “It’s going so far above and beyond that it surprises people.”

From Stakeholders to Changemakers From the outside, one might expect Oklahoma’s budgetary restraints to restrict TPS’s ability to innovate, but Gist has seen the opposite. “They say that necessity is the mother of invention,” she says. “When you’re scrambling to run a system that’s underfunded, it can be hard to think about adding one more thing—but there’s actually more of an opportunity to innovate in those moments than in places where you have more adequate resources.”

Early on in Tulsa, Gist made a point to welcome all of her stakeholders as expert changemakers. “Too often, engagement becomes, Here’s an idea we came up with. Give us some feedback, and maybe we’ll tweak it—as opposed to authentic participation and ownership of the process,” she says. Around three years ago, for example, TPS began to realize that its seventh-grade center wasn’t working for students. With only about a hundred kids in the building, the program was financially unsustainable. Students weren’t in the building long enough to build significant relationships, and cost restrictions meant that they didn’t have access to the same resources as their peers across town. Luckily, there were several solutions. Gist initially proposed that seventh-graders move to the 8th-12th grade secondary school to give kids stability and access to more programs. The community’s reaction, however, was fiery: “This is a terrible idea. You’ve already made up your mind. It’s not safe,” Gist recounts. But there’s a larger reason families were mistrustful. “North Tulsa is a part of our city that has historically been WINTER 2021

oppressed—not represented in decision-making,” she explains. “There’s a lot of mistrust, because we have not served their children well for a very long time.” Instead of forcing a solution forward, the TPS team turned to the experts: the North Tulsa community. The district formed a task force of community leaders, and TPS promised, in advance, to implement whatever solution the task force proposed. Gist calls the process “radical collaboration.”

“But you know what happens when you believe in impossible things? You can actually do impossible things—and we did.”

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The task force worked hard to produce a set of expectations—and they spanned beyond the seventh-grade center. Though many Tulsa middle schools are merged with the district’s high schools, the community requested that the district form a comprehensive 6th-8th grade middle school. They also requested high-quality extracurricular experiences and a resource center for families. The recommendation came in February, and the task force challenged administrators to implement dramatic changes by August. And, somehow, they did. Today, the school offers a swimming pool, chess, debate, boxing, dance, and a parent resource center. Going into their third year, the same task force is still active and engaged, holding administrators to the highest standards. “It was beautiful and amazing, but it was also very daunting, and truly, I didn’t think it was possible,” Gist admits. “But you know what happens when you believe in impossible things? You can actually do impossible things—and we did.”

Making Innovation the Tradition While it has been a strenuous project, the new middle school isn’t the only kind of innovation taking place at TPS—far from it. “We also have a small team of super amazing people who carry out a number of different efforts in the district,” Gist tells us. “We call it our design lab.” One of the design lab’s most ambitious initiatives is Tulsa Beyond, a program that aims to redesign the high school experience. “I really believe that high schools have not worked for most kids for a long time,” Gist tells us. “There are far too many students, thousands and thousands right here in Oklahoma, who drop out every year. The ones who do finish school aren’t leaving with all the skills they need to be successful. The structure is not working.”

In Tulsa, Gist has had the opportunity to do something about it. “What we wanted to do was reimagine the high school experience. And we didn’t want it to come from administrators—we wanted high schools to be designed by the people who knew those schools the best.” The team started with what’s known as discovery work: empathy interviews, focus groups, and surveys to gather data about high school. Though they cast a wide net—interviewing parents, community leaders, higher education professionals, and local business owners—they kept their focus on students. Discovery work took about a year. “It’s a lot of manpower,” Gist explains. Each interview takes about two hours: 30 minutes of prep, an hour-long interview, and 30 minutes of data synthesization—plus travel time. To make sure interviewees felt comfortable, the district had them choose the location. In all, the team conducted about 150 interviews, and received additional input from around 5,000 stakeholders through surveys, focus groups, and student shadowing. After the discovery work, the TPS team went into design—but not alone. “We took that information to the experts,” says Gist. Design teams were filled with students, parents, teachers, and school leaders at each of the high schools. For a year, teams pored through the data and constructed different school models. While each model needed to include a few basic factors—like academic proficiency and college and career readiness—design teams had the power to build the schools they envisioned. Teams worked for six months on design and implementation plans. Finally, in the fall of 2019, they launched three brand new high school models. Each is anchored to a different focus, from project-based learning to life coaching. At Hale Beyond, for example, students work in a room similar to a coffee shop, prioritizing self-directed learning. Some students meet one-on-one with a teacher; others work individually or in small groups. After students plan their days, they tackle different sections of the curriculum, organizing meetings with classmates and teachers.

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Another high school, Tulsa Learning Academy, centered their model on both project-based learning and life coaching. Every teacher in the program has been trained formally as a life coach, and they mentor kids both one-on-one and in small groups. Across the city, Webster Beyond emphasizes personalized learning. Students are placed in houses, Harry Potter-style, and participate in outof-school volunteer work twice a month. “Already, in that first year of implementation, they were seeing really great results,” says Gist with a smile.

Constructive Turbulence Gist’s innovation in Tulsa, while remarkable, isn’t a new topic of conversation for her. “I started teaching in 1988 in a city with a lot of need, and we were asking the same question: How is our school district going to serve kids who aren’t being served well by the system?” she says. “I refuse to leave this planet without having changed that conversation to: Look what we’ve done. What else can we do?” With any kind of innovation, things are bound to go wrong, but as Gist sees it, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the chance. Years ago, Gist boarded a tiny plane on the way to a meeting. “All of a sudden, there was this crazy turbulence—the worst kind, where the plane drops,” she tells us. Soon the bumps were too big to ignore. “At one point, the pilot came over the speaker to check in. He said, This turbulence is coming from a massive tailwind, so it’s actually constructive turbulence. We’re going to get there faster in the end.” That short plane ride gave Gist a lesson she would take with her throughout her career. “When you do things that are new or when you’re striving for more, you’re going to have bumps along the way,” she says. “But at least it’s constructive turbulence. Those bumps are moving you forward.”

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How to Boost Enrollment

Optimizing your enrollment funnel with tips from higher education Across the country, school leaders are grappling with a particularly chilling aspect of COVID-19. Whether students moved to other states, private schools, virtual charter schools, or even back to the safety of their own homes, enrollment is down in districts nationwide. According to an October 2020 Bellwether Education Partners study, around 3 million students hadn’t interacted with their home districts since March. That’s more than twice the total number of K-12 students in the state of Arizona. Once restrictions due to COVID-19 are lifted, many students will likely return to their neighborhood schools. However, there will almost certainly be a small percentage who put down roots in their new environments. Because of changes in education due to the pandemic, families across the country have become more aware of their students’ educational options— and more comfortable transferring between them. For schools that rely on per-pupil funding to survive, the permanent loss of just one or two students will put pressure on the district’s budget. Now more than ever, there’s a financial imperative to make sure that families know about the great things happening in public schools. While competition for students is relatively new in K-12 public education, neighboring arenas like higher education have been developing competitive enrollment strategies for years. Expert marketers in higher ed spend tens of millions of dollars to help match students with their best fit schools. To do so, they use different versions of an enrollment funnel, with prospective students at the top and enrolled students at the bottom. K-12 districts may not have millions at their disposal for marketing, but following the idea of an enrollment funnel can provide us with key strategies for matching students to schools—ones that K-12 school leaders can capitalize on.

What is an Enrollment Funnel?

Prospective Families

Imagine you’re changing the oil on your car. As you pour new oil in, the liquid glugs through a funnel, narrowing as it passes through the center and into your motor. The concept of an enrollment funnel is similar. You want to narrow down a large group of prospective families into more seriously interested applicants—and finally into a small group of enrolled families. As they pass through the funnel, interested families should grow more and more excited about your schools. Just be careful that they don’t stop moving due to confusion or frustration. After all, if you don’t set up your funnel correctly, you’ll lose your oil in the process.

Your funnel starts with a large group of families: anyone with eligible K-12 students in the area. This group might include homeschool families, families who have been enrolled in private schools or other nearby districts, and families who are moving into the area. Your first goal should be to attract families from these groups, identifying the ones who have shown interest in your schools. These are your leads.

Your enrollment funnel should ultimately show families how they fit into your district. To make the recruiting process stick, you want to build a relationship with each of your prospective families, making sure that you know them and they know you. At each stage, you’ll have different goals for your marketing.

There are many ways prospective families might show their interest—engaging with an ad, following you on social media, or even contacting a district or school directly—so you’ll need to keep track of those interactions accordingly. Tip #1: Market to your audience’s wants and needs. In this stage of the funnel, you want to narrow down what families want and need as well as what your district uniquely offers. We’d imagine most families want a free, high-quality education—but they likely have more specific needs as well: innovative STEAM courses, great sports programs, or supportive reading initiatives. As best you can, identify what families specifically want, and brainstorm how to highlight what your district offers.

Prospective Families

Interested Families

Families Planning to Enroll

New Students

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“When it comes to students who aren’t already in our pipeline, it’s really about examining what is important to those students,” says Dawnica Jackson, Executive Director of Marketing & Public Affairs at Lee College in Texas. “We know who our potential students are. We know where our potential students are. But usually the question that we don’t have the answer to—the most important question in marketing— is why. Why are they making the decisions they’re making? What are we doing right, and what are we doing wrong?” At Lee College, those questions have led to changes in marketing strategy. “When we did the basic research, we found out that the COVID crisis has made it impossible for a lot of people to go to school from a financial standpoint,” Jackson tells us. But Lee, a community college, is much more

affordable than four-year institutions—a point Jackson and her team highlighted in their marketing. The team also addressed concerns about employment in light of COVID-19. “We’ve got a series of commercials in which we are trying to show our compassionate side,” she says. “We’re telling people, We know it’s tough out there. But if you come to us, you’re going to be ready to work on day one because of the quality of the training.” Just like Lee College, you’ll need to reassess families’ wants and needs each enrollment cycle. While a message of support due to COVID works well now, it (hopefully) won’t be applicable next year.

“Even in the middle of all the chaos, Lee College is still here for you,” says Lee College President Dr. Lynda Villanueva.

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Tip #2: Provide multiple entrances to your funnel. Remember that at this phase in the funnel, you’re not trying to get families to enroll just yet; you’re simply trying to pique their interest and to encourage them to engage with you. If all goes well, at the end of this phase, you should have a list of leads: families who might be good candidates for enrollment. However, not everyone will respond to the same types of marketing. That’s why you’ll need to diversify your approach, disseminating those marketing messages across all your available channels, from social media ads to print postcards to in-person events. No matter your medium, you should be driving your audience toward some kind of action, whether it’s filling out a form, requesting a campus visit, or simply clicking a Facebook ad. In the private sector, this push toward engagement is called a call to action.

At Hendrix College, a small liberal arts school in Arkansas, the admissions team is jumping on a nationwide trend. “As you start looking at more college websites, you’re going to see more and more that the main page is designed as a recruitment page,” says Ryan Cassell, Vice President of Enrollment and Dean of Admission at Hendrix. The Hendrix homepage is no different. It offers blurbs about the college’s educational philosophy, lists the majors they offer, highlights the beauty of Hendrix’s campus, and shows photos and videos of students and faculty actively engaging with one another. The site is clean and uncluttered. Tabs implore prospective students to “Request Information,” “Visit Us,” and “Apply”—all calls to action. “On our application, we ask students how they heard about Hendrix, and, many times, they will point to the website,” says Cassell. “That’s why web presence is so important.”

Hendrix’s website shows short, exciting video clips of students in lab, in dance class, even swimming with sea turtles.

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Interested Families Once you’ve identified your leads, the next step is to get to know them—and to help them get to know you. You’re tying names to faces, building on the interest they’ve already shown in your district, and ultimately carving out a nook in your schools for each family. Tip #3: Prioritize relationships. In higher education, admissions counselors can make or break a university’s enrollment. That’s because personal connections matter. “One theme we talk about a lot is the idea of Hendrix being a home, and us being a family—and that’s built on relationships,” says Cassell. To drive that idea home, the Hendrix recruitment team has sent out more than 3,300 handwritten notes to prospective students: birthday cards, invitations to visit campus, responses to college essays, and more. They even find out students’ favorite candies on the sly and then send some to their homes. “That’s something that’s really important to me, because that’s the true experience,” he tells us. “This is a place where you are known, where you are cared for—and those relationships outside the classroom and that mentorship is just as valuable as the in-class learning.”

Click the “Life At Hendrix” tab on Hendrix’s website, and you’ll be taken to a page of short video tours led by Hendrix’s student ambassadors.

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Tip #4: Help families envision life at your schools. Once you’ve developed genuine relationships with your leads, it’s crucial to allow students and parents to see your district for themselves. At this point in the process, Cassell says, “They can start to see themselves here more. If you ask a lot of students how they chose the colleges they did, I think you’ll find most will report that the fit was just there. They felt like they belonged at that school when they arrived on campus.” In the wake of COVID-19, physical visits may not be an option for your schools for a while—but you can still bring families onto campus virtually. In modifying their traditional campus visits to accommodate for social distancing, Hendrix has introduced virtual one-on-ones, inviting prospective students to chat over Zoom with faculty members who teach their favorite subjects. On their website, they share videos of students giving tours of campus. These and other virtual recruitment tools have turned out to be pretty successful. “We have had dozens, probably hundreds, of virtual one-on-ones with students,” says Cassell. As of this writing, the college is 30% ahead of last year’s application benchmark. The importance of the campus visit isn’t the physical space itself. It’s about filling in the blanks in your prospective student’s imagination, giving them a firsthand feel for your school’s personality and culture.

Families Planning to Enroll

New Students

One of the last stages in your funnel is enrollment. While many families will take months to fall through the funnel, asking questions and requesting tours, others won’t be as interactive. They’ll enroll seemingly out of the blue. But whether you’ve been courting families for months or are just noticing a downloaded enrollment form, families are still going through the funnel. You need to ensure that the enrollment process is a reflection of your district because it might be families’ first impression of your schools.

After students enroll, you might assume that they’ve fallen through your funnel. But that’s not quite the case. Once families have joined your schools, you have to keep them there— and you know better than we do that retention takes just as much work.

Tip #5: Remove obstacles. If you want families to seal the deal and enroll, you need to make the process as easy on them as possible. This means flattening any speed bumps in the path to enrollment—and making sure all those needs you promised to fulfill in your marketing are actually met. At Hendrix, admissions staff started to question an integral piece of their admissions process: SAT and ACT scores. While test scores seem like a non-negotiable piece of college applications, they really make admissions’ jobs easier, not students’. “We are test score optional now,” says Cassell. “We know those scores tell a lot, but not everything, and now many students can’t even take the test because of COVID.” Hendrix also took some of the inconvenience out of score reporting. If students do choose to report their test scores, they can self-report with a PDF rather than pay for an official score report from the ACT or College Board. “That way, we’ve saved that student the hassle and a handful of dollars in the process,” he tells us. Of course, public schools aren’t dealing with enrollment roadblocks like ACT scores, but there are other challenges: clunky enrollment forms hidden on your website, forms that aren’t mobile-friendly, maybe even an unanswered question that stops the process in its tracks. As you examine your district’s enrollment process, ask yourself: Could my least techsavvy relative find, fill out, and submit this application in less than ten minutes?

Tip #6: Don’t drop the ball after students enroll. Ultimately, the enrollment funnel is somewhat of a stand-in for relationship-building. As families move through each rung in your funnel, you’ll probably get to know them—their likes and their needs. But just like you have to maintain friendships with check-ins, birthday cards, and lunch dates, you also need to make sure that families continue to feel known, cared for, and supported in your schools. Retention is similar to recruitment; it goes back to trust. “When you show genuine interest and pay attention to the questions students are asking and respond in thoughtful ways; when you are grading their papers and taking time to not just show them what they did wrong but how they can correct it—you develop trust,” says Jackson. That trust is what will keep them in your district. One student at Lee College, Jackson shares, couldn’t have completed school during the pandemic without the college’s help. After learning that he was in crisis, Lee paid for some of his essential needs, allowing him to continue his education. Now, he has graduated and is on his way to becoming a teacher. “When you do those kinds of things, when you show the students that you care, they know it’s not about them just being a number,” Jackson says. “It’s about helping them achieve their dreams.” It’s these students and families who become advocates for your district, who encourage prospective families to take a leap of faith and raise their hands to learn more.

We recommend taking a long look at your application. What can you remove or save for another meeting? Remember, the goal is a simple, seamless experience. You don’t want families to fall out of your funnel at the most important stage.

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Owning Your Digital Spaces How your districtâ€™s user experience determines the strength of your brand

When you think about your district’s brand, a few distinct factors likely come to mind. You may think of your district logo, your mascot, your hashtag, your school colors. You may even reflect on your social media presence and the impression you’re making online. But while all these factors contribute to your brand, they’re not actually the brand itself. Your brand is your district’s reputation: the way people think and feel about your schools. Think, for a moment, about your own reputation as a school leader. You may be known for your boldness, your transparency, your innovative spirit, your compassion toward students, or any number of other characteristics. How did your community come to think of you in this way? It’s pretty simple: people interacted with you, or with the idea of you. They spoke with you at a football game, followed you on Twitter, or read an article about you in the local paper. Based on those interactions, people formed opinions of you. The community’s overall opinion? That’s your reputation. It’s the same for your schools. Each time members of your community come into contact with your district, the experience they have contributes to their feelings about your schools. At the end of the day, your district brand is an amalgamation of all the experiences people have had with your schools and how those experiences made them feel. This means that your brand is a living, changing thing, constantly in flux.

Many school leaders are most concerned with the primary experiences their district provides: the relationships between teachers and families. But in the digital age—and especially in the COVID era—most of your audience’s experiences with your schools take place outside the classroom. We’re not just talking about social media here. We mean messaging platforms, virtual learning spaces, school apps, and learning management systems. Those digital experiences also contribute to your community’s feelings about your schools, and therefore your brand—for better or worse. Right now, you may be leaving decisions about your school’s website, apps, and other digital platforms to someone else. But those choices are actually crucial to building and safeguarding your brand. If the tools you use are unintuitive or difficult to use, they’re reflecting poorly on your district—even if they’re not branded with your logo. If you want to take control of your brand, you need to control as many of your audience’s experiences with your schools as possible. That means giving your parents, students, and community members a great experience every single time they interact with your schools, no matter where that experience is taking place.

Your brand is your district’s reputation: the way people think and feel about your schools. WINTER 2021

The Apple Experience If you want an example of a brand that goes far beyond a logo, look no further than Apple. When you think about iPads and MacBooks, you might picture the distinctive Apple logo, or even recall their slogan: “Think Different.” But those simple assets aren’t what make Apple such a strong, recognizable, popular brand. People love Apple because the company has perfectly calibrated every experience. Just as your primary experiences take place in the classroom, Apple’s happen when users swipe through their iPhones or open up their Macbooks. After all, that’s the product they’re selling. But their technology alone isn’t enough to make Apple a powerhouse brand. In the end, the computers and phones themselves aren’t that different than those of competitors—but the experience surrounding those products is unmatched. The Apple Store—a pristine glass storefront outshining other retailers in your local shopping mall—is just as much a part of the brand as the iPhone. So is the easy self-checkout that allows you to scan a product with your phone, pay with Apple Pay, and leave without speaking to a single soul. Need to fix a problem with your product? Just set up an appointment at the Genius Bar—no waiting in line required. It’s not iPhones and iPads that have made Apple the brand it is today. It’s that they’ve carefully engineered every experience to make things as easy and attractive as possible for their customers.

Good user experience strengthens your brand. As a school leader, you’re already somewhat of an expert at what we call “user experience,” often abbreviated “UX.” When it comes to the classroom, you’re constantly focused on the “end-user”—in this case, the kids you’re educating. As you make decisions, you put yourself in students’ shoes, asking yourself what will work best for them. But while you’re worried about what happens on campus, you might be ignoring your community’s digital experiences with your district. So how do you ensure that those digital experiences are positive? In a recent Google study, the top three positive words used to describe digital brand experiences were “easy,” “helpful,” and “convenient.” Your parents, students, faculty, and community members want to minimize the amount of effort it takes to complete their tasks. Instead of thinking about where to go to find information, they want design to guide them there. In short, they want a good user experience. When parents open your school app to look up a lunch menu, how easily can they find that info? If a student has a question, can they message their teacher without too much trouble? Those are both questions of user experience, and their answers are significant reflections on your district’s brand. In the pages that follow, we’ll train you to look at your district’s digital experiences through your community’s eyes. By optimizing your user experiences across the board, you can impact how your community thinks and feels about your schools—and take control of your brand.

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What makes a good user experience? Even for experts, the concept of user experience can be difficult to understand. That’s why Peter Morville, one of today’s leading minds in information architecture and UX, created the user experience honeycomb, now a central tenet in the field of UX design. According to Morville, a good user experience is composed of seven interlocking factors: useful, usable, findable, accessible, credible, desirable, and valuable. The idea of value lies at the very center of the honeycomb, and for good reason: the other six factors work together to create value. You can evaluate your district’s apps, websites, programs, and platforms using a rubric based on Morville’s honeycomb:

Useful Desirable

Usable Valuable

Credible

Findable

• Useful: Does it have a reason to exist? Does it fill a need? • Usable: Does it work well? Can students and parents use it easily and intuitively?

Accessible

• Findable: Can students and parents find it easily? Once there, can they quickly find what they’re looking for? • Accessible: Is it ADA compliant? Can people with disabilities use it just as easily as anyone else? • Credible: Is the content here up-to-date? Is it free of misspellings and grammatical errors? • Desirable: Does it look good? If even one of these factors is missing in your app, website, program, or experience, it’s not going to provide value to your audience. You may as well not waste your time—or theirs. Let’s look at a simple example: your district’s digital newsletter. Maybe it’s beautifully designed, full of useful information, and completely credible and compliant. The sign-up is easy to find, and the subject lines indicate exactly what your audience should expect. There’s just one hitch: it’s extremely long, and most of your readers never make it to the end.

Your audience wants digestible updates they can consume quickly—so the length of your newsletter is negatively impacting its usability. Without that usability piece in place, your newsletter has lost all its value. It doesn’t matter how good it looks or how many worthwhile updates it contains. If your parents and community members aren’t actually reading the crucial information you’re sending out, why send it at all? In fact, this negative user experience could be hurting your brand. Annoyed by what they perceive as useless emails, your parents will still miss the important updates you included in that newsletter— and they’ll still have questions. In short, a good user experience is one that provides value, and every other cell in the honeycomb is just another step toward that goal. WINTER 2021

Usefulness In 2016, entrepreneur Doug Evans introduced the world to Juicero. The high-tech juicer, which cost a staggering $700, required that users buy packets of diced fruits and vegetables from its parent company, which the machine would then scan via QR code. If the packets weren’t fresh, the juicer wouldn’t work. If they were deemed worthy of juicing, the packets would be squeezed by internal machinery with 8,000 pounds of force. There was just one problem: Juicero wasn’t any more efficient than good old-fashioned elbow grease. A Bloomberg video published in 2017 showed a side-by-side comparison: the Juicero versus a person using both hands to squeeze one of the juice packets. As it turned out, the machine wasn’t any faster than the person. Juicero shut down completely just a few months after the Bloomberg video, brought down by their product’s total lack of usefulness. When it comes to rolling out apps, platforms, or software for your district, you don’t want to end up like Juicero. Much like a Wifi-enabled juicer, a high-tech school app sounds very cool, but coolness alone isn’t enough. To be worth implementing, your app— or anything else—also needs to make life easier for your stakeholders. Your technology should center around your end-users: your students and families. Instead of finding a reason to implement a certain platform or tool, work backwards from your audience’s needs and wants. What problems or inconveniences are your stakeholders facing? (If you’re not sure, ask!) Once you know, work to find the best solutions. There’s nothing wrong with a high-tech school app—in fact, we think you should have one— but it shouldn’t exist just to check a box on some school technology checklist. It should serve a defined purpose and serve it well. 26

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Despite its high-tech appeal, the Juicero turned out to be no faster than a person squeezing juice packets by hand. It failed the test of usefulness.

Usability To foster a good user experience, your platforms must be easy and convenient to use. As you might imagine, usability goes hand in hand with usefulness; a platform that’s too difficult to use can’t accomplish its intended purpose. Usability comes down to two factors: speed and simplicity. Speed How quickly does your app, website, or platform load? While it might seem like a small detail, speed has a large impact on your audience’s user experience. After all, people are impatient. According to research from Google, when a mobile page takes just five seconds to load, the bounce rate (or rate at which your users leave your page) is 90%. Around 32% of users bounce if it takes just three seconds. If users do stick around to wait, they’ll start to feel stressed. According to a study from Ericsson, a leading Information and Communication Technology provider, when mobile users are pressed for time waiting for a website to load, their heart rates increase by 38%. Their stress levels are comparable to those of someone watching a horror movie alone in a dark room. According to District Brand Breakdown, a 2019 SchoolCEO analysis of over 1,250 districts’ digital brands, around 30% had load speeds over two seconds, and 15% over three seconds. That might not seem like a lot, but it means those districts could be losing almost a third of the users trying to

access their sites. This doesn’t just mean parents. A third of job applicants, prospective students, and even engaged community members are giving up before the page loads. To increase usability—and improve your audience’s user experience—make sure your pages load as quickly as possible.

To find out what influences your website’s speed—and how to make it run faster—visit SchoolCEO.com/speed

Simplicity In 2000, a study at Columbia University sought to answer a deceptively complex question: Do consumers really want more choices? Researchers set up two tables at a highend grocery store, each displaying gourmet jam. While one boasted a selection of 24 different jams, the other offered only six choices. The results were astonishing. Only 3% of customers at the more extensive display actually made a purchase, but 30% bought from the smaller one. As it turns out, people facing a multitude of options get what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls “choice paralysis”—they’re so overwhelmed that they avoid decisions altogether. With a simplified set of options, people are better able to make a decision and move forward. In fact, in his book The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz argues that while options aren’t fundamentally bad, an abundance of choices actually makes us stressed and unsatisfied.

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What does all this have to do with UX? Well, think about your website, your district app, your LMS, or any other digital space your audience has to navigate. As they try to find information, how many links, pages, or buttons are they presented with? How many apps and platforms do they have to search through to find their child’s math assignments? If they’re faced with too many choices, they’re likely to get overwhelmed and abandon their task in frustration. Needless to say, that’s a bad user experience. One step toward a good experience is simplifying your audience’s decision-making as much as possible, removing choice altogether if you can. This means reducing buttons and links on your websites and apps—and cutting down the number of platforms you use. According to research conducted by SchoolCEO in the summer of 2020, over a third of parents used three or more apps to keep track of their children’s education. In the words of one respondent, “Going to 7-10 different websites, programs, and platforms was overwhelming and time-consuming.” Want to make your parents’ lives easier? Reduce the number of tools they need to use. The more essential tasks they can accomplish on a single platform, the better. As the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic set in at Fallbrook Union Elementary School District, Superintendent Dr. Candace Singh became attuned to this very problem. “We were using multiple programs for the kids,” she tells SchoolCEO—one platform for reading, another for math, yet another for science. “That was very challenging because we did not have the ease of use that we really needed, particularly for young children and their parents. We needed to simplify and streamline that process.” Teams of Fallbrook teachers came together to review new, simpler platforms with more capabilities. “The new platforms provided them with all the tools they felt were important, but they didn’t have to go to six places to use them,” says Singh. “Now, it’s so much more efficient for our teachers, for our parents, and for our kids.”

Findability For your audience to have a positive experience with your websites, apps, and platforms, they must be able to easily find what they’re looking for. When your parents and community members open your district app, visit your website, or log onto your LMS, how is the content organized? Is it immediately clear where users can find answers to their questions? Much of findability goes back to the idea of simplicity: reducing the number of decisions your audience needs to make to find information. Having fewer links, tabs, and buttons increases the speed and ease with which your parents and students can get where they’re going.

Want to make your parents’ lives easier? Reduce the number of tools they need to use. The more essential tasks they can accomplish on a single platform, the better. As you think about findability, keep in mind a crucial segment of your audience: families and teachers who aren’t yet involved with your schools. They’re searching the internet, trying to find information about your district. Creating a good user experience includes making that process easy as well. That’s where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, steps in. While SEO helps draw people to your site, it also contributes to a positive user experience; it helps your audience find what they’re looking for. But SEO is a complicated topic, one

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that deserves an entire article all for itself. You can learn more about it in “Winning the SEO Race” on page 60.

Accessibility To build a great user experience for everyone, you have to ensure that those with hearing, visual, or mobility impairments can access your content just as easily as anyone else. It’s not just good UX; it’s required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. We know you’re more than familiar with the issue of accessibility, and you may believe you have the issue covered. But of the district sites we analyzed, a startling majority—91%— had critical errors that made their websites inaccessible. What’s more, a whopping 67% lacked accessibility forms where users could report issues. According to the CDC, one in four Americans live with disabilities. If your websites, apps, software, and other digital tools aren’t accessible, you’re alienating more than a quarter of your potential audience.

According to the Chicago Tribune, user experience expert Jakob Nielsen “knows more about what makes websites work than anyone else on the planet.” Way back in 1999, Nielsen determined a few factors that contribute to a website’s credibility—and more than 20 years later, they still ring true. Here, we’ll go over just a couple: transparency and current content. Transparency Consider your own digital experiences with brands. Have you ever abandoned a site when you couldn’t find information about payment or return policies? Your audience, especially those yet to be involved with your schools, are evaluating your digital presence the same way. If parents can’t easily find, for example, your accommodations for special needs students, they may assume you don’t have any—and continue their search elsewhere. As you work toward greater transparency, start by asking what information is most useful to your audience’s interests. After all, transparency isn’t about overloading your audience

For more information on the ADA, accessibility, and providing a great user experience for everyone, visit SchoolCEO.com/ADA

Credibility Imagine a prospective parent is viewing your district website for the first time, trying to make a decision about where to send their child. This is a crucial moment in the enrollment pipeline—and the outcome depends, at least in part, on whether or not their user experience on your site engenders trust. If you want to strengthen your brand, you need to build credibility with your audience.

Social media management company Buffer names transparency as one of their defining values. They live it out by publicly sharing information other companies might hide, from their salary scales to their code. For example, this tool on their site allows prospective employees to see how much they would make if hired.

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with information—that will actually overwhelm them, making the information they need harder to find and producing a negative user experience. Focus on the questions you typically get, the info you know people actually want. Parents will likely be interested in your school ratings, your unique programs, or your accommodations for special needs students. Prospective teachers will want to know more details about your area or what benefits your faculty enjoy.

On their extensive privacy page, Apple outlines all the ways their technology keeps users’ data safe, building credibility and trust.

Once you’ve considered all the information prospective families and teachers might need, build out enrollment and careers pages detailing that information. Link to those pages prominently from your homepage. The more relevant info your audience has at their fingertips, the easier their user experience will be—and, most importantly, the more they’ll trust your brand. Current content There’s a reason popular social media apps like Twitter and Instagram heavily favor recent posts in their timeline algorithms. We don’t want to know what happened two weeks ago; we want to know what’s happening right now. The same is true for your parents and students. When they open your mobile app, log onto your LMS, or check your website—whether for the first time or the 500th—they want to see up-to-date, relevant information. Imagine a parent searching your app for a lunch menu, only to find one that’s two months old. Odds are, they won’t bother to come back next time. Refreshing your content frequently doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. It can be as simple as announcing an upcoming parent-teacher conference or posting pictures from a recent fundraiser. Just remember that you can’t keep new people coming in unless you’re keeping your content up-to-date.

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Desirability One of the factors Nielsen cites in his list of credibility factors is design quality—in other words, how a site or platform looks and feels. Morville refers to this same concept in his user experience honeycomb, deeming it “desirability.” Believe it or not, the aesthetics of your district’s digital spaces contribute to the way your audience engages with—and even trusts— your brand. While we may think we make judgments based on logic and reason, we form first impressions incredibly fast. According to a study published in Behavior & Information Technology, it takes about 50 milliseconds—one-twentieth of a second— for us to form an opinion about a website. To build your brand and provide a good user experience, you need your digital spaces to look great, right from the get-go. So what’s the relationship between the aesthetics of a digital space and how much people trust it? A study from the Stanford Web Credibility Project determined that 46.1% of consumers judge credibility, at least in part, on “the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes.”

they browsed various medical sites, looking for advice and answers as they faced stressful medical decisions. Researchers found that when the women rejected a site, they usually did so because of weak design elements such as boring web design, small print, too much text, and a corporate look and feel. However, when the women described the sites they trusted, they didn’t actually say much about looks. Instead, they pointed to informative content, relevant illustrations, and unbiased information. A well-designed website isn’t always the flashiest or the prettiest; in fact, flashiness can sometimes distract or even put off your audience. Here’s the thing about design: when something looks bad, we notice. But when something looks aesthetically appealing, we don’t think about the design much at all. Good design frees up space in your audience’s minds to focus on the info they’re looking for—and that provides a good user experience.

In another study, researchers from Northumbria University and the University of Sussex followed 15 women while

milliseconds

the average time a user takes to form an opinion of your website

46.1%

of users judge credibility based on the visual appearance of your website.

In the aftermath of COVID-19, the role of technology in education is only going to grow. That means the role of user experience in your brand’s strength is more crucial than ever. Consistently bad user experiences aren’t just a miserable slog for your parents and students; these days, they may be deal breakers. Rather than suffer through the hassle of your technology, they might choose to move to a school with a savvier digital presence. Good user experience, on the other hand, drives your parents and students back to your digital spaces again and again. When they need something, they’ll know where to find it; when they use a piece of software, they’ll know it will work. And on a deeper level, they’ll trust that whatever technological advances come to bear in education—whether it’s online learning or a new challenge altogether—your district will be ready to create a smooth experience again.

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Rooms is a classroom management and messaging tool that integrates directly with your district website and app.

CLASSES

ANNOUNCEMENTS

ASSIGNMENTS

MESSAGES

L E A R N M O R E AT

www.apptegy.com/rooms

Everything that happens at school within your district app -

Home Events News Dining Documents Scores Staff Forms Class Stream Assignments Announcements Classes Chat

Eukaryotic

SchoolCEO News Desk: Educators in Office Education was a big issue in campaigns around the country during the 2020 election cycle. From statewide ballot initiatives to local school tax elections, there was a lot to think about before heading into the voting booth. Many educators also ran for office, and a new administration in the White House means a new Secretary of Education. Here, weâ€™ll highlight just a few of the exciting school leaders and teachers who will be taking office across the U.S. this year.

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Federal

Dr. Miguel Cardona: U.S. Department of Education

Jamaal Bowman: U.S. House of Representatives

President Biden has nominated Dr. Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s Commissioner of Education, to be his Secretary of Education. Dr. Cardona has led Connecticut’s State Department of Education since 2019. Before then, he served as a teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent in the district he attended: Connecticut’s Meriden Public Schools (MPS).

Former middle school principal Jamaal Bowman was elected to serve New York’s 16th congressional district. Representative Bowman worked as an elementary teacher and a high school guidance counselor before forming the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx. He led the school for 10 years before stepping down to run for office. Bowman will be the second former principal in Congress, alongside Florida Representative Frederica Wilson.

When Cardona served as Connecticut’s Education Commissioner, he balanced the need to keep communities safe from COVID-19 with the urgency to get students back into the classroom. His department issued guidance for districts to operate safely, but left reopening timelines up to local decision-makers. President Biden has called for safely reopening schools during his first 100 days, making Cardona a great fit. Born to Puerto Rican parents, Dr. Cardona graduated from Wilcox Technical High School in Meriden. He holds a master’s degree in bilingual/bicultural education and a doctorate in education, both from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Cardona’s wife, Marissa, works as a Family-School Liaison at MPS, where his two children are enrolled as well.

Representative Bowman has been named to the House Committee on Education and Labor, where he hopes to put his experience as an educator to good use. “I come from a similar background to many of my students: I was raised by a single mom. I’ve lived in public housing, rent stabilized apartments. I used to get in trouble in school,” Bowman told New York Magazine. “My job is to fight for policies that will help children like me, children who struggle across the country.” Bowman has organized against standardized testing, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the privatization of public education. For over 20 years, he has been an advocate for public education, and he hopes to continue this work in the House.

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State

Brenda Dietrich: Kansas Kansas’ 2007 Superintendent of the Year Brenda Dietrich was elected to Kansas Senate District 20. Dietrich retired in 2015 after a 40-year career as a teacher and administrator. After spending 14 years as Superintendent of AuburnWashburn School District in Topeka, she was elected to the Kansas House.

Jonathan Acosta: Rhode Island Former math teacher and school administrator Jonathan Acosta was elected to Rhode Island Senate District 16. Acosta has taught eighth-graders in Central Falls, as well as in Florida’s Miami-Dade County Schools. He’s also worked on implementing cultural competency while at Blackstone Valley Prep Middle School.

Nathan Biah: Rhode Island Former math teacher Nathan Biah was elected to Rhode Island House District 3. Biah fled civil war in his native Liberia and began working as a substitute teacher while in college. He went on to teach at both the middle and high school level in Providence and is now principal of Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School.

Kristina Shelton: Wisconsin Former health and physical sciences teacher Kristina Shelton was elected to Wisconsin State Assembly District 90. A certified health education specialist, Shelton has been a member of the Green Bay Area School Board since 2018 and currently serves as its Vice President.

Amy Nichole Grady: West Virginia Elementary school teacher Amy Nichole Grady was elected to West Virginia Senate District 4. Grady, a math teacher at Leon Elementary, was inspired to become more politically involved by her fellow teachers during protests over teacher pay and school funding.

Eric Morrison: Delaware Former teacher Eric Morrison was elected to Delaware House District 27. Morrison taught and worked as a tutor for six years before moving into business and human resources management. He is making history as the first openly gay man to serve in the Delaware General Assembly.

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State

Amanda Elizabeth Toll: New Hampshire Former middle school teacher Amanda Elizabeth Toll was elected to New Hampshire House District 16. Toll taught at Lubavitcher Yeshiva Academy in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and has been honored by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation with its Excellence in Jewish Education Award.

Siah Correa Hemphill: New Mexico Educator Siah Correa Hemphill was elected to New Mexico Senate District 28 after a 25-year career as a teacher, school psychologist, and special education director. Hemphill works in the Cobre Consolidated School District and Aldo Leopold Charter School District. She was inspired to get into special education by her son, who has multiple disabilities.

Larry Lambert: Delaware Former art teacher and substitute teacher Larry Lambert was elected to Delaware House District 7. Lambert now works in community banking but has remained active in the Boys & Girls Clubs of Delaware, where he once participated as a young student and as a volunteer teacher.

Steven Howe: Kansas Fifth-grade teacher and cross-country running coach Steven Howe was elected to Kansas House District 71. Howe is a humanities teacher at the Cornerstone Classical School in Salina. In addition, he and his wife operate a dance studio.

Omari Hardy: Florida Former middle school civics teacher and fourth-generation educator Omari Hardy was elected to Florida House District 88. Hardy helps manage a partnership between the Palm Beach County School District and the West Palm Beach County Housing Authority, working to support the needs of students living in public housing.

Leo Jaramillo: New Mexico Former teacher Leo Jaramillo was elected to New Mexico Senate District 5. Jaramillo taught middle school in BelĂŠn Consolidated Schools before working for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Heâ€™s served on the Rio Arriba County Commission since 2018.

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Tie It All Together The importance and power of creating a seamless, unified online identity

During the COVID-19 pandemic, learning takes place at home, at the YMCA, in district classrooms—anywhere with a WiFi connection. Your district’s reach is as widespread as ever, giving you a variety of platforms to share your story. A key tenet of sharing that story, and in turn building a strong brand, is consistency. In District Brand Breakdown, a 2019 SchoolCEO analysis of over 1,250 districts’ digital brands, we found that consistency is a weak point in district branding. While most districts have bits and pieces of the branding process down pat, a unified brand—consistent across the district’s website, social media pages, and mobile app—was difficult to find.

To see the full analysis, go to www.schoolceo.com/brandbreakdown

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In the private sector, companies spend millions on branding toolkits that build consistency. Starbucks created a website that shares not only their brand guidelines, but the theory behind them. Twitter provides downloadable files, icons, and even snippets of code for embedding their logo. And if you share any business’s logo in the wrong context, you could face legal trouble. There’s a reason why companies invest so much in branding: consistency builds trust. Every time a parent or teacher “sets foot” in your digital spaces, they get an impression of your schools. If your social media header cuts out half of your logo, it’s probably not a deal breaker, but it also isn’t a great brand impression. Unifying your brand feels a bit like sitting down to a 1,000 piece puzzle. As you start to work, you might feel a little overwhelmed by the amount of pieces, by the many small problems you need to solve. But as you group together like colors and shapes, building systems for your work, your pile of pieces will dwindle smaller and smaller. Eventually, you’ll match your last piece, making a complete and unified image.

#1: District Narrative Your district narrative encapsulates your schools: your values, your mission, your vision. Think of it like an elevator pitch. Your district narrative is the story of how your schools uniquely serve your community.

We’ll go through each piece of the puzzle, focusing on three common areas for building consistency: story, look, and presence. Many of these fixes are simple, and they don’t take much time. If you tackle these projects little by little, one day you’ll sit down to a unified brand image, a welcoming digital infrastructure for your schools.

Consistency in Story

When you think of branding, you might think of the visual: logos, fonts, and templates. After all, visual cues help us recognize a brand in milliseconds, and it’s important to have those tools at the ready. However, the most powerful tool in your branding toolbox actually goes beyond looks. To build an emotional connection to your brand, you need a story. There’s a reason why big brands like Apple and Nike use story in their marketing campaigns: the simplicity and repetition help you remember them. Every time Nike shares an athlete winning a gold metal in Nike gear, #JustDoIt ties that post back to the brand’s larger narrative: Nike equips athletes to win big. But story shouldn’t be an afterthought. Instead, think of your district’s story as a blueprint for your branding. If innovation is at the core of your district’s identity, that message should fill your website banners and social media headers. Your story should be written into the core of your digital brand.

Every story has a hero. You might assume that your district—fearlessly serving students—is that protagonist. But to move your marketing from good to great, position your stakeholders as the heroes in your story. In Nike’s branding, for example, Nike isn’t the protagonist. Their athletes, winning championships and gold medals, are the heroes in every story. Nike merely gives them the tools they need to succeed. In your district narrative, position your district instead as a wise and helpful guide: Dumbledore to Harry Potter, Yoda to Luke Skywalker, an athletic wear company for champions. To build out your story, work through these two questions. • What do your stakeholders need? As a school leader, you know your community’s most pressing needs. Teachers are clamoring for emotional support, parents are pushing for a strong community environment, and business leaders are requesting a highly trained workforce. Every community needs all of these things—but you’re probably already thinking of a few areas where your district excels. • What do you provide them? Every district offers students a high-quality education, but each district does so in a unique way. What factors make your community different from neighboring schools? These are the things you love to brag about in board meetings and might share with prospective families. The intersection of these two questions is your district narrative: the story of how your district is actively helping your community blossom.

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#2: District Tagline Your tagline is a short, catchy version of your district narrative that helps unify your story. Keep it to as few words as possible—the shorter the better. Then, make sure everyone who works for your district is using that language: in their handouts, in their emails, in their everyday conversations. If your district community isn’t inclined to use your language, you’ve probably chosen the wrong tagline—one that doesn’t resonate with your community’s perception of your schools. A great tagline is a blend of visioning and reality. You want your audience to recognize your schools while envisioning a bright future. Once you’ve distilled your district’s purpose into a tagline, add that tagline to your header images, website banners, and social media bios. Only 7% of the districts we analyzed had consistent social media bios that gave some indication of the district’s identity. This is a very simple place to boost your district’s professionalism. Take Richland School District Two, for example. This large, high-performing district in South Carolina has branded itself with the tagline Premier Starts Here. But they didn’t just create the tagline and leave it. Premier Starts Here is a unifying force, tying the district’s content together to tell a larger story. On the district’s homepage, Premier Starts Here fills the header. A photo collage of Richland Two students cements that narrative: they show students in the classroom, at graduation, grinning after a win at a science fair. Right under that header, Richland Two shares individual stories that support this messaging. Sometimes they share updates, oftentimes celebrations. But each story connects to form a larger picture: Richland Two offers an experience that cultivates premier students.

To learn more about storytelling, visit schoolceo.com/storytelling

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On social media, they extend the narrative. To build consistency, the district infuses their tagline into each social media post with a hashtag. Every time students exhibit growth, Richland Two ties the story into their brand with #PremierStartsHere.

Richland Two ties student success stories into their brand using #PremierStartsHere.

Consistency in Look

Creating consistency in look is less like cooking—throwing in whatever you have on hand—and more like baking. You need to follow the recipe. Each time you use your district’s logo, you should use the right file type with the exact color scheme, not skipping even one step. While there’s a time for artistry, creating a consistent look is all about repetition. If your branding starts to feel redundant, that means you’re doing it right. Luckily, most of the mistakes common in district branding are simple fixes that make a big impact on your look.

#3: District Logo Your district logo is your bread and butter, the core of your visual identity. As such, it’s an important piece of your puzzle— one worth spending time and money on.

Districts also have an opportunity to link individual school brands with the district brand, making a powerful, unified brand family. Think of it this way: If a parent’s car displays bumper stickers for your district’s elementary, middle, and high schools, all three stickers should look like they go together. Sure, the logos may be different, but using consistent colors, fonts, and styles helps unify your brand, packing a powerful punch. There are also a few small, technical errors that, once solved, have big payoffs. For example, most districts aren’t sharing a consistent logo across communication platforms. The district’s official Facebook page might have a logo of a gray bulldog baring its teeth, while the website logo is illustrated in a different style, with the dog’s jaw closed. This type of inconsistency is actually quite common. Of the districts we analyzed, only about 30% used a consistent logo across their website and social media channels.

Historically, logos were created to differentiate products. In the mid ‘4 0s, Tide came out with their signature, heavy-duty laundry detergent. But looking at a wall full of products, consumers couldn’t easily tell the detergents apart. So Proctor & Gamble hired architect and famous industrial designer Donald Deskey to design what would become the Tide bullseye. Compared to the muted colors of other detergents, Tide’s bright orange and blue make the classic logo pop— establishing brand recognition. Your district logo shouldn’t just be a check-the-box solution. It is an opportunity to both define and differentiate your schools, just like the Tide bullseye. However, you’re probably not the only district in the country, or even state, with your mascot. That’s not a problem, but if your logo is an exact copy of someone else’s—whether it’s another district or a professional sports team—you’ve got an issue. Your logo should be a tool that separates your brand from the competition, and you don’t want families to muddle your schools with other organizations.

Even if you’re using the same image, it’s important to use the right version of it. Using the wrong file type on your website or printed shirts will mean that your logo comes off as blurry or illegible. Plus, you’ll need versions available to fit both light and dark surfaces, big and small. Building consistency, after all, doesn’t mean that you can’t have any variation—but each version of your logo should intentionally tie together.

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CENTERVILLE SCHOOL DISTRICT TIGER STRONG

File Types

Color Codes

Logo Variations

Primary Color CMYK: 100, 98, 8, 9 RGB: 0, 0, 140 HEX: #00008c

Secondary Color

Simplified

CMYK: 0, 67, 96, 0 RGB: 256, 119, 1 HEX: #117701

Raster files (jpg, png, tiff)

Wordmark

Fonts Display Font

ESTRICTA BLACK ITALIC

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRESTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Body Font

Raleway Regular Vector files (ai, eps, svg)

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRESTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Core Logo Files In order to tackle all of the branding projects coming your way, you’ll need several file types of your logo. There are two basic kinds of file types: vectors and rasters. You’ll need versions of both types as your core logo files. Have you ever tried to enlarge an image, only to find that it gets pixelated as it expands? That problem occurs when you use a raster file instead of a vector file. Vectors—files whose extensions end in ai, eps, or svg—are built differently than rasters. Rather than tiny, colored boxes, vectors use mathematical formulas to display their images. This allows them to stretch to any size without losing image quality. You need a vector version of your logo for printing larger items like banners or signs. Using a vector file will keep your logo looking clean and crisp from close up or far away. 44

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Single Color

CENTERVILLE SCHOOL DISTRICT Horizontal

CENTERVILLE SCHOOL DISTRICT

You more than likely already have raster versions of your logo—ones with extensions like jpg, png, and tiff. Rasters have their own uses. JPEGs, for example, work great when you need to keep your file sizes small. Think footers for your emails or pictures for the web. PNGs and TIFFs have the added benefit of allowing a transparent background, but that can sometimes result in larger files if you’re using lots of colors. Of course, larger file sizes will affect your website and app’s load time. If you’re not sure how to create these different versions of your logo, don’t worry. Hire a local graphic designer or even check in with a tech-savvy student in your district.

Logo Variations You’ll also want to keep other versions of your logo on hand, depending on your project. If you’re printing your white logo on white paper, for example, you’ll need to have a version that contrasts with its background. Here are a few common variations you’ll want to have on hand. • Simplified version: Many schools have complex logos that won’t work when scaled down in size. But on occasion, you might need an extra small version of your logo—for example, to use as an icon on your website or app. For this purpose, you’ll need a simplified logo, something that’s still identifiable without any extra details. • Single color version: Several occasions call for a single color. You’ll need a black version of your logo for printing in black and white, and a white version for displaying over dark backgrounds, whether it’s the shaded corner of a photo or your school’s shade of navy blue. • Wordmark version: A wordmark is a consistently designed logo that doesn’t include an image—just your district’s name. If your district chooses not to use a mascot or image, your wordmark can serve as your primary logo. Logo Use Guidelines Once you’ve made all your logo versions available, you’ll want to offer a few basic guidelines detailing how and when to use them. After all, your logo is the most important symbol of your brand, so you’ll want to make sure it stands out in all of its forms. • Minimum sizes: To ensure legibility, establish a minimum size for each of your logos, especially those with words involved. • Clear space: You don’t want to crowd your logo with other copy or design elements; it needs room to breathe. Set a specific amount of clear space to surround your logo on all sides. Usually, you determine the right amount of clear space by selecting a central element of your design to be your x indicator—basically, your measuring stick. For our example Centerville logo, we might choose the tiger icon as our x indicator. The height and width of that icon will serve as our benchmark for clear space.

A common misstep we see on social media is a poorly cropped image. Because of the way Facebook and other media sites automatically crop header and profile images, your gladiator logo might get decapitated. We suggest researching Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s preferred image sizes for header and profile images about once every six months; they change frequently. Also, you’ll want to check how each of your profile images perform on mobile as well—sometimes social media platforms crop mobile images differently than those built for desktop. This is also where the x indicator comes into play; the extra space around your logo gives you a buffer for mistakes.

#4: Primary and Secondary Colors You probably already have school colors—but you might not have prescribed shades of those colors. There’s a big difference between navy blue and baby blue. If you don’t have a plan, you could end up with wildly different color palettes across your district, damaging your brand’s consistency. For each of your school colors, you’ll need to identify three different color codes: your CMYK number for print and your RGB and HEX numbers for digital media. Then, pick a few accent colors that work well with your major school colors— you might use them for borders, links, or other purposes. Determine specific color codes for those as well. Several online tools, such as colorbook.io or htmlcolorcodes. com/color-picker, can help you determine the correct codes for the shade you want.

#5: Fonts Apple primarily uses San Francisco, a font they designed themselves, across their advertisements and product line. If you close your eyes, we bet you can picture what it looks like: simple, clean, rounded lines. The style enhances their branding while keeping their content unified. Choosing specific fonts is a simple way to tie your district’s content together, and you’ll actually only need a couple in your toolbox. First, you’ll want a display font to use for titles and headings—think the headline of a newspaper article. You’ll also need a font for body copy: the everyday text that makes up the content of your mobile app, website, or print materials. (For example, what you’re reading right now is body copy.) WINTER 2021

#6: Templates We can’t tell you which fonts to use, but there are a multitude of options to choose from. You can even purchase your own fonts, and some districts do. If your budget is tight, we highly recommend using Google Fonts. They’re free, and they’re always available for download when you need them. For body copy, a few of our favorites are Montserrat and Raleway, both of which are available for free through Google Fonts. These don’t just look good; they’re also versatile, offering several different weights (light, bold, italic, etc.). Your display font will naturally be larger and demand more of your viewers’ attention at first glance. This is a good opportunity to add a bit of flavor to your brand—while ensuring that it is still clear and easy-to-read. In our example, we’re using Estricta Black Italic. No matter what, avoid hard-to-read fonts like Papyrus or goofy-looking ones like Comic Sans. These don’t just look bad; they often cause accessibility issues.

An easy way to boost your consistency and save time in the long run is to create templates. By templates, we mean standard designs for posts and emails that help you put together consistent, branded messages in minutes. Then, when you scroll through your district’s website, newsletters, and Instagram profile, you’ll find consistency. For example, you’ll want official district letterhead and newsletter templates (whether for print or email). When the time comes to send out a newsletter or board update, just pop in information and photos. On social media, you’ll want a few templates that brand everyday updates. Nowadays, there are a variety of websites that make branding and design easy: Canva, Desygner, and PostCreator, just to name a few. As you’re looking at all of your templates laid out—using the exact same fonts, colors, and logo—they should tie together seamlessly. Your schools’ media will start to feel singular to your district, creating a stronger brand.

Building out social media templates can make standard updates more dynamic.

Have you practiced mindfulness today? #TigerStrong

It’s the last day of the semester! Let’s finish #TigerStrong CENTERVILLE SCHOOL DISTRICT

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Consistency in Presence

Unfortunately, many districts don’t have a reliable presence online, making it difficult for them to build a relationship with their prospective audiences. According to The Disconnect, a 2017 SchoolCEO study, only 68% of districts had a Facebook presence, and only 53% were on Twitter. Almost a quarter—22%—had no social media presence whatsoever.

#7: Toolkits for the Classroom Most families will connect with the district primarily through their students’ teachers. Parents will email back and forth, connect with a teacher in their classroom or over Zoom— maybe even walk past their student logged into a Zoom classroom. Each interaction families have with the district helps build your brand, so think of ways to tie those interactions back to the district.

Of those districts who had a presence across all social media platforms, many weren’t sharing consistent stories. We found that only a small fraction of schools, about 8%, hit standard private sector marketing targets for posting online. Many districts might post multiple times a week for months, then have a dormant feed over summer break. Posting consistently helps your audience engage. Think of it like building a friendship. Sure, we all have old friends we check in on every few years—but those are not the people we depend on in a bind. Schools, on the other hand, must be reliable. Creating that trusting relationship takes work, time, and regularity. But while consistency on external channels, like Facebook and Instagram, is important, there are other channels schools are missing out on. Parents access district tools— your LMS, parent communication software, school app, even alerts system—on a daily or weekly basis. And it turns out, most districts don’t take the opportunity to brand these digital spaces. Every time users have an experience with district software, they leave with an impression of your schools. It’s important to craft great digital experiences for your community. (You can learn more on page 22.) But you’ll also want to connect your brand to that great user experience. When you send parents into another app’s interface or to an external LMS, you’re missing a branding opportunity. In our analysis of district brands in 2019, we found that around 68% didn’t have an app branded by the district. That means that when parents look for information from a district app, they’re booted to an external software that isn’t branded by the district. Unification not only helps your branding, it builds up your reputation as an innovative district.

TIGER STRONG Small touches, like the branded Zoom background above or the teacher email signature below, help connect your brand.

Malika Johnson Superintendent

E: malika.johson@centervilleschool.org W: www.centervilleschool.org P: +1.901.867.5309

CENTERVILLE SCHOOL DISTRICT

Getting Started Unifying your brand is a daunting task that requires a multitude of small, technical challenges—just like a puzzle. It can be tempting to push the process onto someone else’s plate or to ignore it altogether. However, building a strong digital brand is part of creating a professional, unified identity for your district. While there are technical pieces, digital branding is ultimately leadership, establishing a strong vision for your district. You, as a district leader, are already perfectly equipped to lead the charge.

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We know superintendents learn best from each other. Every day at SchoolCEO, we talk with the nation’s leading superintendents about the amazing and innovative work that happens in their schools. That’s why we launched the SchoolCEO Conversations Podcast—to provide a platform for school leaders to share their best ideas with each other and the world.

The Speed of Trust SchoolCEO Conversations - Season 1, Ep

We hope you’ll come away with not only new perspectives on the problems you face, but also a few expert contacts you can reach out to when the going gets tough.

To learn how these school leaders are tackling everything from marketing their schools to building racial equity in their communities, check out SchoolCEO Conversations wherever you get your podcasts.

podcast.schoolceo.com

Marketing 101:

#Hashtags When you were young, it was simply referred to as the number or pound sign. But today the # symbol has become a cultural juggernaut, propelling brands and causes to new heights in the social media stratosphere. The hashtag has quickly taken its place for internet users of all ages as a simple and effective tool for bringing communities together online. And, believe it or not, choosing the right hashtags and strategizing their use can help you build your school brand, connect your stakeholders, and communicate important information to your community. It may seem like an internet fad, but the hashtag isn’t going away anytime soon. According to social media researcher Dan Zarella, tweets containing hashtags are 55% more likely to be retweeted. And Twitter’s own research has found that engagement for brands that use hashtags is at least 50% higher than those that don’t. District Brand Breakdown, our 2019 SchoolCEO analysis of over 1,250 school districts’ digital brands, revealed that 40% don’t use hashtags at all. Of the 60% that do, only 16% use a branded hashtag consistently across all of their district media channels. If numbers like this reflect a national trend, then countless districts aren’t taking advantage of this simple tool. But a hashtag isn’t as easy as just putting a # sign in front of a random word or phrase. You’ll want to engage your audience with hashtags that speak to your vision and keep students front and center.

Getting Started Originally created for use on Twitter, a hashtag is a word or phrase, without spaces, that’s preceded immediately by the # symbol. Hashtags not only categorize and index topics, but also connect movements and communities online. Fans of a television show, sports team, or political candidate can now find one another online through common hashtags—and fans of your schools can do the same. Here’s some quick tips to get you started: Step 1 - Create one hashtag to be the new online motto for your entire district. Choose something that speaks to your district’s unity, vision, strength, promise, etc. For example: #NYSDTogether or #VikingStrong Step 2 - Use your district hashtag on relevant social media posts across all platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). Step 3 - Encourage building leaders, teachers, and community members to use your district hashtag whenever they post.

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Unify If you give your community a message they can rally behind, they’ll do it. As you know, calling on your stakeholders as a team means using the right vocabulary—common words or phrases that unite everyone around your district brand. When Superintendent Matt Schmidt of Michigan’s Bangor Township Schools wanted to unify his district, he looked to hashtags. “When our marketing committee met for the first time, we said, Hey, we know teachers are leaving for the summer—what’s one thing we can come up with and really commit to in order to keep our staff and students connected? And it was something as simple as a hashtag—so we came up with #bobcatnation to rally our community around.” Schmidt and his team don’t just use their mascot-inspired hashtag on social media; they even give out #bobcatnation T-shirts to students and staff. “That has taken off like gangbusters,” he tells us. “Sometimes it’s the small things you don’t want to miss—taking that small thing and committing to it and doing it really well. When it comes to marketing, there are a million things you could do—figure out which ones are going to get you a return on your investment, not just dollar wise, but time-wise.” Sometimes marketing really can be as simple as a hashtag and a commitment to using it.

bobcatnation 50

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Amplify One of the greatest benefits to using hashtags in your social media posts is their ability to easily connect the stories you share to an overall theme. Many districts choose hashtags based around unity, strength, vision, or the future—bold, understandable themes that will earn buy-in from as many stakeholders as possible. By connecting these stories with a common hashtag, you’re making sure your audience sees everything you share as part of your larger school story. Dr. Nisha Patel, second-year superintendent of Fox C-6 School District in Missouri, inherited her district’s #FoxC6Strong hashtag from her predecessor, but she’s finding new ways to harness its power. “One goal has been to really streamline things and make a laser-like focus on what is truly our belief as a district,” she says. “Everybody in our district has a unique story. My communications director and I have been very strategic in sharing these stories. Every month, I would like us to highlight a support staff individual,” Patel shares. “My main, overarching goal is to increase collective efficacy in our district—meaning that if we believe our kids will be successful, they will be. We want to be able to amplify student voices as well as amplify our staff and community voices. And we’re doing that by sharing stories with our #FoxC6Strong hashtag.”

FoxC6Strong WINTER 2021

Diversify Hashtags may seem simple, but you can strategize their use to share a diverse array of content. Creating a story series that’s connected by one common hashtag, for example, can point your audience in the right direction. Just don’t overdo it. Twitter suggests using no more than two hashtags per post. Virginia’s Chesapeake Public Schools shares their most inspiring moments by creating unique hashtags for their serial posts. They use #InspireCPS to tie most district posts together, whether they’re highlighting a teacher or showing off a new program. But for specific series, CPS uses hashtags like #CPSHolidayHappenings to set their posts apart and bring their community together.

InspireCPS CPSHolidayHappenings 52

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In New York’s Batavia City School District, Superintendent Anibal Soler Jr. turned to hashtags to inspire hope in his community during the pandemic. In the fall, his schools launched #CantMasktheBataviaPride—a social media campaign which serves to unify the district and its supporters. Batavia asks community members and businesses to share their support on social media by posting photos or videos of themselves with the hashtag. This doesn’t just inspire unity, it also amplifies different stories from across the district. “We’re just trying to do anything we can to generate some kind of positivity,” Soler says. “There’s a lot of negative out there, so we’re doing the best we can to keep spreading hope.”

Recap #Unify your district by creating one overarching hashtag for your posts—something that ties your communications together and tells your audience who you are. #Amplify school and community stories by using hashtags consistently and across all platforms. #Diversify your posts by creating unique hashtags for serialized content or special campaigns.

CantMasktheBataviaPride WINTER 2021

Student Voice in School Marketing There’s a good reason we see a common image in most ads and commercials: happy people enjoying a product, whether it’s a can of soda, a jet ski, or even an allergy medication. Private sector companies know that to get our attention, they need to show their products creating joy, excitement, and value. When we see other customers enjoying a product or service, we start to buy in. As a school district, the product you’re selling is education, so highlighting your most impacted customers—your students—is a highly effective way to show your success. If your community can see your schools through the eyes of your most valuable stakeholders, they’ll believe in your mission that much more. That means your students are natural marketers for your schools. By listening to your students first, letting them tell your story, and then giving them some control over district content, you can create a truly student-centered marketing strategy. Highlighting student voices in your marketing will help your community, as well as prospective students and teachers, see your district more clearly. When they research your schools, they’ll see them as a place where their families can thrive. By amplifying your students’ voices and telling their stories, you can grow your school community in both number and spirit.

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Be authentic. In our conversations with school leaders and communications directors, we find that many are hesitant to use students in their marketing efforts—and we understand that. We certainly don’t suggest exploiting students to increase enrollment. Having students memorize a script for a district commercial or radio ad feels slimy for a reason—it’s inauthentic. Instead, we recommend a more organic approach: rather than scripted ads, find opportunities to showcase the learning already taking place on your campuses. Look for the inspiring stories happening in your schools and ask yourself: How can we tell this story through the eyes of our students?

Have student input inform your marketing. There are several ways to incorporate student voice into your marketing, but the most successful strategies start with student input. Your students know what their peers need and where to find them, so let them lead the way. In Oregon’s Lake Oswego School District, Superintendent Dr. Lora de la Cruz has invited student input into several venues. The district instates two new student school board representatives each year and also invites students to sit on their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. “We are seeking to have more and more student voice featured really prominently in our endeavors,” de la Cruz tells us. “I love having these student representatives on our committees because they ask their peers about things, and then they turn to us.” Last spring’s sudden shift to virtual learning didn’t deter Lake Oswego’s dedication to hearing their students. In fact, taking student input into account has opened the district’s eyes to an issue they thought they had covered during the pandemic. “We thought we were doing a great job of letting students know how and when to reach our counselors through Google Classroom, our website, and in newsletters,”

de la Cruz tells us. But in what she calls a “profound” conversation with a student, the superintendent learned differently. “This student said to me: I’m really worried about my peers and their parents who don’t know where they can get support.” Upon hearing this, de la Cruz was dumbfounded. “It just blew my mind that we had been doing what we thought was so much outreach to our students, and they weren’t hearing it—we weren’t getting to them.” In response to this student’s input, Lake Oswego shifted their marketing and communications strategies. To reach more students, they added middle and high schoolers to all their newsletter mailing lists—and started sharing counselor resources on the district’s Instagram account. “We decided to meet them where they are,” de la Cruz says. “And we saw a huge uptick in new contacts, a few thousand over the span of just a few weeks.” By listening to the input of one concerned student, this district has refocused its marketing efforts and strengthened its support for every student. Taking steps to include student input into your marketing strategy can earn you new, devoted

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cheerleaders for your district, and it may also change lives in the process. “We can talk to a lot of stakeholders, and all voices are important, but what really matters is how our students are either being positively impacted or not,” says de la Cruz. “And if they’re not, then we need to change what we’re doing. Our kids can’t wait one minute longer to have the support that they need.”

Let students be your district’s voice. Letting your students tell the story of your schools is a winwin for any district. You want your community and the world to see the opportunities your campuses offer—and if that’s coming straight from your students, your audience will be even more inspired by your vision and mission. When Superintendent Matthew Miller of Lakota Local Schools in Ohio does his semiannual “State of the Schools” community address, he lets the kids do most of the talking. “It’s not the Matt Miller show; it’s the Lakota show, and our kids talk more about our schools than I do,” he says. In a typical year, Lakota invites community members like local politicians and business leaders to hear from students firsthand. “If I say something, people think, That’s just his job to say that,” Miller tells us. “But if I get a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy up on stage talking about what they’re creating and how this ties into what they want to do for the rest of their lives— then that goes much further than just me saying it.”

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Even when school has to go virtual, Lakota Local Schools lets kids do the talking.

Allen ISD produces and shares “Eagle Minute” videos, letting students tell their own stories.

In Texas, the communications team at Allen ISD uses video to put their students front and center. Their district YouTube channel features a series titled “The Eagle Minute,” inspired by the district’s mascot and tagline: Where Eagles Soar. “The video series is a great way for us to highlight our students and their accomplishments,” says David Hicks, the district’s Chief Information Officer. “But it’s also a great way to have the students tell our story for us. It personalizes the district to the community. That’s what we’re here for: to give students a chance to shine. And you’ll notice in a lot of our videos, it’s not just kids holding up trophies or a football team winning the big game—it’s more about what they’re doing everyday in the classroom and who they are.”

Put students in the driver’s seat. As we said earlier, your students are your best storytellers, and there can be great value—both for them and for your schools—in letting them take the lead. Your students know what they need, want, and care about more than anyone else, so it just makes sense to have them tell prospective students what your schools are all about. One engaging way to do that is by letting your district’s kids produce relevant, student-centered content for you on the platforms their peers are using. A student-produced post on Instagram or TikTok could reach a lot more kids than a tweet or Facebook post from the district. Plus, it gives your students hands-on experience with media production, social media management, and 21st-century storytelling.

In McAllen ISD, another Texas district, Superintendent Dr. J.A. Gonzalez knows that to reach stakeholders, especially prospective students and their parents, his district needs to meet them where they are. “Our whole vision is trying to stay hip and fresh and ahead of what the kids are doing,” Gonzalez says. “The last thing we want is to think we’re being innovative and creative when we aren’t even reaching our targeted audience.” By working with “student ambassadors,” Gonzalez and his communications team have been able to appeal to a wider and younger audience through social media. Where some districts may struggle to connect with students online, McAllen ISD is letting the kids lead the way—and it’s working. “We turned our student ambassadors loose on TikTok, and they put out some really great stuff that got us some good reviews,” Gonzalez says. He and his team work with school principals to choose these students, who now come from schools at every level. Student Council presidents, who are elected by their peers, are also invited to be ambassadors.

Student ambassadors for McAllen ISD share dances on TikTok as a way to reach their peers.

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McAllen ISD recruits prospective families by putting students front and center on platforms kids are using.

“In the education business, we are entrepreneurs of the human spirit,” Gonzalez explains. “To have an impact on the future, you have to really look at it from the perspective that the future is now. The way to do that is by having conversations with students and empowering them to make decisions— not only through lip service, but through action. Any time students are able to see change take place based on their conversations with you, you start to get more momentum.” Making student voice a prominent part of your strategic planning, your community outreach, and your social media isn’t just a smart move—it’s a necessary one. All of those things combine to give you a marketing plan centered around your most important customers: your students. If you want your community to see who you really are, you have to connect with them, whether through a student-produced TikTok dance video or through a student’s personal story shared on YouTube. No matter how you reach your stakeholders, keeping students on the forefront of both decision-making and implementation creates the most impact for them and for your schools.

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Winning the SEO Race How to rev up your website for search engine success

These days, we live a large portion of our lives online. And when it comes to your schools, prospective families and employees are seeking out information on the web, expecting to find what they need when they need it. When prospective families search for your district, are the top results links to GreatSchools or Niche? If teacher candidates search “best employers for beginning teachers,” do you show up high on the list? Research marketing blog Backlinko has found that 99% of Google users click on a link on the first page of search results—with 75% of clicks going to the first three results. To make sure your website and content are at the top of their search results, you should be using every tool at your disposal. That’s where search engine optimization, or SEO, comes into play. Creating relevant content for your audience, ensuring that your website plays nice with search engines, and addressing common topics people are searching for are all core components of SEO. For years, private sector marketers have been using SEO to get their websites to the top of search results. And while it may sound complicated, there are plenty of easy ways to make sure your school’s web content is getting the recognition it deserves.

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How does SEO work? When you search for something on Google, a lot happens between the time you hit “enter” and the time your results are displayed. Search engines take what you’re looking for and try to present you with the most relevant results, tailored to your language and location.

aspects about your schools or programming people are curious about. Everything from parent forums to questions you receive on your district Facebook page can provide valuable insights.

How do they do this? Every couple of days, crawlers—bots that index web content for search engines—scan everything on the internet. Crawlers categorize web content so that when you type in a search term, the search engine can find it.

The next step is to create content that provides answers to those common questions or digs into aspects of your schools that parents are curious about. If you want to highlight your STEM program, center some content around the benefits you offer to students, all the while sprinkling in keywords like “STEM for elementary students.”

Keywords are the words or phrases users type into their search bars. For example, when you search for “best chili recipes for vegans,” Google checks to see where those keywords—”best,” “chili,” “recipe,” and “vegan”—show up on the internet. It then uses that information to determine what web content is most relevant to your search. The result you get is a ranked list of the most helpful websites—in this case, the best chili recipes for vegans.

When it comes to incorporating keywords, you don’t want to overdo it. In fact, search engines now tend to punish websites that “keyword spam” their pages by ranking them lower. However, by writing with your target audience in mind, you’re automatically providing rich information search engines can use to find your web content and propel it to the top.

With knowledge of how keywords work in hand, you can optimize your webpages to appeal to both search engines and your stakeholders by using relevant keywords in your content. This will help you not only show up first in related searches but get valuable traffic to your website.

An important thing to keep in mind is that you’re not likely to reap the benefits of SEO overnight. After all, nobody gets pole position in their first race. Don’t worry if you implement some SEO strategies and don’t notice an immediate impact—it’s all about playing the long game. Consistency is key if you want search engines to boost your rankings to the top.

Building your strategy The first step toward search engine success is determining which audiences you’re trying to reach. Let’s say you own a small business that sells scarves, and you know customers are really interested in sustainable products. That knowledge of what your audience wants or is curious about is the engine that will drive your SEO strategy. Once you know who you want to attract to your website, think about what you’ll need on your site to appeal to that audience. In our scarf example, you could use relevant keywords to highlight your locally sourced wool and recyclable packaging. These efforts will put you in front of people searching for things like “environmentally-friendly gifts” or “sustainable fashion.” You’re obviously not in the business of selling scarves, but the same approach applies. Try to discern what questions people have around the topic you’ve chosen, or what

Nobody gets pole position in their first race. Don’t worry if you implement some SEO strategies and don’t notice an immediate impact—it’s all about playing the long game. WINTER 2021

SEO Basics Getting meta One easy way to boost your engagement is to always include meta titles and meta descriptions on your website. No, we’re not asking you to get philosophical; we’re talking about information that’s entered into the code of your site and shows up in search results. A meta description is like a first impression. If it seems enticing, people will want to read more. Optimizing your metadata will improve your click-through rate: the percentage of people who click on your link in the search results page. After all, ranking on the first page of search engines doesn’t guarantee more website traffic, especially if users aren’t curious enough to click through to your website.

The meta title here is “SchoolCEO - The School Marketing Magazine,” and the meta description is the page summary displayed below it. This extra information tells visitors what they can expect to find if they click your link.

Meta Title

Meta Description You’ll want to include metadata for each page of your website. Keep your titles and descriptions both unique and interesting. “An Interview with Superintendent John Doe” is not a particularly compelling meta description. However, “Superintendent John Doe announces new afterschool programs in Adaville School District” is both descriptive and specific. Most website editors or content management systems make it easy for you to adjust your metadata. If you need help, consult with your IT team.

Cleaning up broken links When deciding your website’s ranking, search engines also consider the trustworthiness of your domain. One big issue is broken links: links that once led to functioning web pages but now give users an error message when they try to access them. These will most often be older pages you’ve taken off your website. There’s certainly nothing wrong with deleting old content. However, if links to those pages remain 62

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on your site, they’ll leave users at a dead end and garner disapproval and possibly a lower ranking from search engines. Several free online tools can help you find broken links on your site. We recommend Screaming Frog, which offers a variety of SEO check-ups. You can deal with broken links in one of two ways. The most straightforward is to create a custom error page, which will redirect traffic to other parts of your website whenever users encounter a problem. Giving users somewhere else to go increases the odds that they will stay on your website. This is also an opportunity to provide a good user experience by using your branding. Lego does a great job of this, turning what could be a frustrating user experience into a useful one. On the other hand, using a generic message, like Google Chrome’s default 404 page, could potentially turn users away.

Another approach is to simply redirect traffic to a different link through what’s called a 301 redirect. These are great for when you want to intentionally redirect users from an old page to a new one. For example, you might redirect a link for information about a previous bond campaign to a brand new section of your website on capital projects. If you need help redirecting links, have no fear! Your IT staff should be able to answer your questions.

SSL can be a little complicated to explain, but it boils down to a simple question: Is a browser (think Safari or Chrome) able to verify that your website is legitimate? A user’s browser determines this by checking with the server that hosts your website to confirm your website’s information. Once that has been done, communication between the user’s computer and the web server are encrypted. This security is most often indicated by a little padlock in the address bar.

Securing your website

Search engines want users to have a safe experience while navigating the web, so websites without SSL certificates are penalized in search rankings. Fortunately, this security is easy to obtain and could even come standard with your website hosting. Consult your web hosting provider to find out if your website is secure.

Another indicator of domain trustworthiness is your website’s security, determined by whether or not your website has an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. The presence of this extra security is what the prefix “https” indicates at the start of a web address, as opposed to “http.”

LEGO’s error page fits into their brand and provides users with options, while a generic error page could potentially turn users away.

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Optimizing for mobile If you find yourself visiting websites on your smartphone or tablet more than on a desktop computer, you’re not alone. According to 2020 data from Comscore, a media measurement and analytics company, 79% of all time spent online in the U.S. is spent on mobile devices. Mobile browsing has now become the norm in online traffic. That’s why mobile-friendly websites perform better in SEO than websites that are hard to use on smaller screens. Mobile-friendly websites are responsive: able to scale down to fit smaller screens like a smartphone or a tablet. If you’ve ever encountered an unresponsive website on mobile, you know how frustrating it is to pinch and zoom to read anything or navigate through the site.

An easy way to test your website is to resize your desktop browser so that it is narrower than normal. As you shrink the size of the browser window, your website should resize along with it, remaining easy to access. You can make some tweaks to your website’s code, or refresh your website entirely, to make it more responsive. To test your website’s mobile responsiveness, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Staying ADA compliant with alt text Alternative text, commonly called alt text, is a descriptive caption that is added to any image on your website. These captions help users who rely on screen readers to understand the image displayed. Because alt text is being used in place of an image, you need to make sure that it is descriptive. For example, label a picture of a dog “smiling golden retriever” as opposed to “image123.jpg.” If you’re already using alt text for ADA compliance, there’s an added benefit: it helps with SEO! Descriptive alt text actually helps search engines determine what kind of content you have on your website.

Takeaways It’s safe to say that search engines have become the default way we seek out information. Unfortunately, it’s easy for your messaging to get lost in the noise. With a sound SEO foundation, you can not only maximize the amount of search traffic that lands on your website, but also make sure you are reaching your target audiences.

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• • • • •

Check your meta titles and meta descriptions for your webpages. Look for any broken links on your site and redirect traffic away. Ensure that your website is secure. Make sure your website provides a great experience on mobile devices. Provide alternative text for each image on your site.

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