The start of a new year offers a good time for schools to brush up their 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 informed and happy belongs to another office, it’s good 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 idiosyncrasies in municipal and zoning laws, operating hours, 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 minimal cost. You can also order email addresses from Data Axle, although these are typically less reliable than the company’s street-address information.

You also could gather this manually, by scraping city or county records online. The most friendly route is to mail out a letter or postcard of introduction that asks neighbors to share their contact information, perhaps through an online form.

However you get this information, having it will better prepare you to engage helpfuly with a neighbor when, say, a parent late for an event chooses to park in his driveway. (Not a hypothetical situation.)

Identify 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 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. Collecting these names requires more work, but you may find great rewards in cultivating these people, too, as friends.

Stay in touch

Too many schools make a habit of talking to the neighbors only when there is bad news to share. Why not 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 highlighting 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. Such a mailing is also an opportunity to brag on your students and how their community service makes a difference.

And you could regularly send out 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

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

This type of gathering 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. Toxic online “conversations” take on a better tone and become more fruitful when people come face-to-face. And you lessen the possibility of neighbors regarding the school as unwelcoming.

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, say — 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.

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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 that the communications director can brag about to the 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.

This post is adapted from the August 2021 issue of Refill, published by Fine Point Communications.