June 30 concludes the academic year for most schools, and with graduations and other goodbyes now behind us, this is the perfect moment to prepare for the coming year.

Any summer to-do list should start with closing out the old year: for example, reviewing the school’s entire website to catch any outdated information, such as departed administrators, faculty, and staff or last year’s governing board roster. If your office manages the school’s learning management system, you have a fuller list of wrap-up tasks, including advancing students to the next grade, archiving academic materials, and revoking credentials where appropriate.

But summer’s real opportunity is in setting up a successful year ahead.

• Gather your team to brainstorm the communications projects that would significantly improve your school.
• Collect and review analytics to discern what your audience is telling you through their clicks (or lack of clicks).
• Think through the needs of each of your primary constituents — current parents, prospective parents, employees, and alumni — and assess how you could better fulfill those needs, mindful that the answer may be not to do more but rather to do better.

This process is even more critical this summer, after last summer was consumed with responding both to COVID-19 and Black@ social media campaigns. As these took priority, schools lost their best opportunity for meaningful progress with their communications programs — ironically, just as those programs would become even more central and important.

Once you have your projects in mind, the fun part begins: establishing a priority list, lining up resources to accomplish them (including time and budget), and setting completion dates.

As you keep your eye on the big picture, save a little time to plan the near term, too — back-to-school messages, Opening Day, the annual report. In doing so, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how much capacity you have for the bigger projects.

In June, summer feels like it’ll go on forever, but these 10 weeks or so will fly by fast. Good luck!

Tips From ‘The Old Editor’

I never worked directly with John E. McIntyre. His employer was the Baltimore Sun while I was at the Washington Post, papers separated by a few dozen miles but, in personality, a continent’s worth of difference.

Still, whenever we would meet on occasion at industry events, John had a way of putting things that would stick with me.

For example, he once described copy editing as an Augustinian profession: We editors know in our bones that, despite the best of intentions, each of us falls short. How can you forget an aphorism like that?

John was wise about our shared profession, and we are fortunate that he collected several insights into a slim book, The Old Editor Says. When John announced his retirement this month from the Sun, I pulled down that 2013 book and thumbed through it one more time. Although he aimed at an audience of journalists, several points apply just as well to the school communicator. Here are only a few:

Your mother does not work here. Pick up after yourself.

If you rely on anyone else (a colleague or the magazine designer, for instance) to catch the spelling you only guessed at, you may be disappointed.

If you are your own editor, you’re working without a net.

McIntyre adds, “If what you’re writing is really important, pay someone to look closely at it.” (Hey — like me!)

Here’s a tip: Know your bad habits. My foible is subject-verb agreement; for others, spelling or inexact synonyms may be the bugaboo. Being self-aware can go a long way toward catching the errors you typed in.

The reader doesn’t care how hard you worked on that story.

Ouch! But true.

If there’s a word in the text that you don’t understand and you let the text go, you haven’t edited it.

Never assume that the writer got it right. It doesn’t matter if the writer chairs the board or is the college president. Trust me: You’ll both sleep better if you double-check any questions you feel in your gut.

Mistakes lurk in the big type.

Oh my yes. Experienced editors know that headlines, for some reason, carry a bit of kryptonite that make errors hard to spot.

There’s plenty more wisdom where these came from, and John’s book is a nice fit next to your preferred stylebook. Amazon is usually a reliable source for a copy, although it does go in and out of print fairly often.

Don’t-miss clicks

• The New Yorker had a stunning statistic recently: The pandemic quintupled the proportion of Black students in homeschool, up to 16%. In the admissions season ahead, how can your school convince these families to take a second look at what you provide?
• There is a lot of wisdom in this evergreen blog post aimed at the new-to-education marketer. I particularly liked what David Garden, who handles marketing at an Australian university, wrote about the worth of storytelling and “the culture of collaboration among schools.”
• Speaking of, one of the wisest people I know in school communications is Jan Abernathy at the Browning School. She is generous with her thoughts and time, and, as with John McIntyre, what she says always makes me think. For example, this short LinkedIn post about framing DEI continues to echo for me.
• Liz Gross of Campus Sonar highlights a trend I’m seeing, too: “I think higher ed is entering a period of increased reliance on business-to-business products and services. … In the near future, you may not have the in-house talent to effectively use software or other tools you’ve purchased.” Although this may sound self-serving, partnering with vendors is a good solution. It’s also timely to talk to your head about this; as demand rises, prices will go up, too.

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