The people in your neighborhood - Fine Point Communications

The start of a new school year offers a good time to brush up your community relations. After all, the neighbors will probably become acquainted in no time with your new parents, if they haven’t already!

A community-relations strategy involves several layers, and many of these touch on communications. So, even if responsibility for keeping the neighbors happy belongs to another office, it helps for the communications director to keep a list of items to review each year.

Each school’s strategy for dealing with its neighborhood will differ, thanks to municipal and zoning laws, idiosyncrasies in operating hours and services provided to the community, and more. Yet every school would benefit from these few steps:

Know your neighbors

Compile a list of names and mailing addresses for your nearest neighbors, those within a couple of blocks.

The simplest way to do this is to order a mailing list from Data Axle USA (formerly known as InfoUSA), at the cost of a couple hundred dollars. You can also order email addresses from Data Axle, although I’ve found them less reliable than the company’s street-address information.

You also could do this manually, scraping city or county records online. The most friendly route is to send out a letter or postcard of introduction and asking neighbors to share their contact information, perhaps through an online form.

This information will help you engage more readily with a neighbor when, say, a parent late for an event chooses to park in his driveway. (Not hypothetical.)

Don’t forget the real players

In every neighborhood, some viewpoints matter more than others. Elected leaders are always at the top of this group, followed closely by municipal officials who have the power over whether your school stays open or must close. Create a VIP contact list of these people, and encourage your head to keep them in the loop.

Then there are the people in the community whose opinions carry outsize weight. Getting these names requires more work, but you may find great rewards in cultivating these people, too, as friends.

Stay in touch

Resist the habit of talking to the neighbors only when there is bad news to share. Provide your good news, too, as you do with your parents.

Aim for the school to be seen as a real contributor to the community. If your neighborhood has an email listserv, use it to promote the school in soft, community-friendly ways, such as to highlight upcoming student performances.

Consider mailing out an annual neighborhood report to provide updates on major initiatives that may affect traffic, noise, safety or other quality-of-life factors. This is also an opportunity to brag on your students and how their community service makes a difference. You also could include need-to-know information, such as the academic calendar, your traffic-calming strategies and opportunities for neighbors to meet with school leaders.

Bring people to campus

Talk to your colleagues whether forming a school-community advisory group, with regular meetings open to any neighbor who wants to come, makes sense for your school.

I encourage this type of gathering, which can serve as a release valve for any tensions in the community and allow a broader understanding. It’s amazing to see how the charisma of a head of school can soothe grumpy neighbors. Others, though, may see this as creating a risky forum, one beyond the ability of the school to manage.

Talk to your internal community

Some of the biggest neighborhood tensions can stem from the actions of parents, faculty and staff.

Communications should reinforce at regular intervals — in the weekly newsletter — how important it is to keep the neighbors on your school’s good side and how thoughtless actions around parking or speeding, for example, can harm the school’s reputation. Grievances can add up over time and present a major difficulty when, say, the school is looking to expand its zoning limitations.

Create neighborhood touch points

Add a page to your website that details all the school does to cultivate warm relations. This is easy PR that will show up in search-engine results, again making the point softly that your school is a contributor to your community.

Promoting a generic email address (i.e., neighbors@yourschool.edu) makes it easier for people to bring you questions and get trustworthy answers.

Each of these action items can be scheduled well in advance, with many of them needing an update only once a year (the neighborhood addresses, for instance).

This is also work you can brag about to your bosses: Add this to your annual performance appraisal under the heading of “issues management.” In this case, the dog that doesn’t bark (or bite!) is something your supervisor should definitely notice.

One to go on

Every year in late summer, social media gives me all the feels as I look through the photos and messages of proud parents whose children are becoming college freshmen. This month, a tweet from Dave Taibl of the Enrollment Management Association served as this year’s kickoff.

Maybe it’s just me, but I see an easy touch point for independent schools in this moment of launch. After all, your school not only knows the new freshman but also helped her get to this point.

A short, personal note from the head of school or the alumni relations director that honors the excitement and anticipation of this transition would be an excellent way to deepen connection.

Don’t-miss clicks

As schools begin to ramp up for admission season, I learned much from George Packer’s thoughtful analysis of the factors that go into parents’ decisions for a school.
Also timely is this post from my friend Angela Brown on cleaning up your website, email lists, analytics reports, and more for the coming year. (Don’t miss the one-sheet checklist that you can download!)
Miami (Ohio)’s Jaime Hunt makes good points on what really matters in educational communications.