Make a new first impression - Fine Point Communications

Welcome back! The start of the school year is always one of my favorite parts of the calendar. It’s such an exciting time, full of possibilities and promise, and the energy of people returning to campus — both adults and students — is contagious.

I also love the annual opportunity for renewal, whether this is your first year on campus or your 20th. The start of classes is a chance for our work to make a new first impression on parents, co-workers and administrators.

Maybe that starting over will take place on social media. The beginning of classes is a great time to reintroduce your school to audiences. For example, think about a quick campaign of fun back-to-school photos and videos, mixed with curated, need-to-know information about your school and the year ahead. Here is a chance to establish your accounts for people as the authority on life within the school.

If, instead, you’re refreshing communications such as the weekly newsletter, this is the moment to get things off on the right foot. Revisit your internal procedures for how you’ll receive and review copy. Establish timelines for when the newsletter will be “locked” for publication and what time it’ll go out, remembering that communications consistency is good for everyone. And execute a big-picture review of the newsletter: Make sure that you include information parents need to have, along with the stuff administrators want to pass along.

And if your team creates a school blog, flip quickly through the archives to remind yourself of story ideas that are still valid but were obscured by later and louder developments. With so much going on inside a school, it’s easy for some programs and worthy stories to lie in obscurity for far too long.

For families, this start-of-school honeymoon period runs longer than we in communications might expect: We certainly have until back-to-school nights with parents, and maybe as much as a month, to complete our “resets” and give people new reasons to anticipate hearing from the school.

Enjoy this special time of year, and embrace the opportunity!

Striking the right tone

If you haven’t signed up for Ashley Budd’s newsletter on school marketing, you’re missing out! I particularly liked her latest edition, which included these quick takeaways about what she calls conversational marketing:

Quality and frequency of email matter. Yes, send quality content, but also have a sustainable plan to keep the communication flowing.
Using authenticity, empathy, and logic in your messages will build authentic trust with your audience, and that will allow you to take chances.

Don’t-miss clicks

There’s been a firestorm in Nashville this month after Harpeth Hall School updated parents on internal discussions about gender diversity and announced a new admissions approach for the 157-year-old girls’ school: “Any student who identifies as a girl may apply to our school.” Harpeth students have been pressuring for adoption of a more inclusive gender policy. Still, within days, hundreds of parents had signed a letter saying that the “gender diversity philosophy” statement had damaged the school’s reputation for single-sex education. Officials now say they’ll “pause” the new philosophy so that they can meet with parents and alumnae on the issue. I empathize with the administrators who must try to restore trust among divided and now embittered constituencies.
The consultancy Simpson Scarborough released a new report on salaries in higher education marketing and communications. (It’s free for download by filling out a form.) The headline statistics: Nearly 70% of higher ed marketers are actively looking for a new role, and a majority are looking outside academia for that next job. It suggests that the Great Resignation is far from over in our industry. An interesting follow-up examines “burnout factors” in marcom and how they differ for men and women. I haven’t seen these differences yet become part of the broader conversation about employee retention.