What are your plans for the summer? - Fine Point Communications

As we zoom through the last days of the school year, don’t forget to give yourself a big pat on the back. In the past 10 months, you survived the Year We Came Back to Campus, the Year of Covid 2.0 (and 3.0) and the Year of the Big Quit. This time more than most, simply making it through has been a feat, so congratulate yourself!

Now — what comes next? The end of a school year means, for a change, you have time. Time to breathe, to relax and get away, and also to plan.

Once you’ve marked out two weeks for vacation, the calendar suggests you should have 10 weeks left for … whatever you want. Do you want to finally attack one or two of the big projects that have taunted you for years? Will you take the opportunity to organize (or reorganize) your workspace so that it fits you better? Or will you task yourself with little jobs — the sort of minor projects that never become priorities during the year yet ultimately need doing?

Ten weeks. Make the most of them.

If this year has you too tired and frazzled to even begin planning, here are 10 ideas for projects that you can start and complete this summer (or delegate to colleagues).

Year in review: Create a PDF that summarizes the biggest highlights of the past year. Make it an easy read with plenty of eye candy, and keep it tight and bright: four pages max. Because you’re repurposing content, this shouldn’t take more than a few days, start to finish. When you’re done, share the PDF with parents, faculty, staff, and board members. Even incoming parents will appreciate it as a taste of the life of the school.
Community relations: Don’t forget to share your year in review with the neighbors! Summer is also a good time to refresh your neighborhood knowledge and start developing relationships with the main players. Check this blog post from the fall for ideas.
Onboarding: As new employees start arriving on campus, is there a seat for you on the welcome wagon? Do you have a school history to share? Can you pass along a campus map or a list of key people to know? Simply ask yourself, what existing communications assets would be useful for the new folks to have?
Style guide: Does your school have a style guide? If not, here are tips on how to start creating one. If you already have a guide, when was it last updated? Does it reflect the school’s current thinking on various issues?
Annual giving: Have you connected with co-workers in Development about their end-of-year appeals and/or thank-you messages? Many schools lock these in place back in the fall, but if yours prefers the creativity of the last minute, time to rise and shine.
Emergency communications: Every school needs a plan for how and when to connect with parents at a moment’s notice. Whether you’re dealing with the website going down unexpectedly or something far, far worse, how will you push out the messages you need others to hear and understand? Summer is traditionally great for this planning, and this summer is an especially relevant time. ’Nuff said.
Reorder supplies: (How’s this for a tone shift?!) Running out of letterhead, pens, notepads, paper clips, and the like in the middle of the year is no fun. Take an hour or two, assess your department’s needs for the coming year, and place an order.
Back-to-school packets: Who manages the process of communicating with parents about the materials that children will need in September? Whether that duty belongs to academic staff or the communications office, it’s good to clarify what is going and when to avoid an email bottleneck later in the summer.
Department brainstorming: Take your team off-campus for a few hours — whether at a restaurant, a park, or a co-working space — to kick around ideas for the year ahead. What big ideas can your crew start in the coming year? What arrangements can you make now to set you up for success?
Fall/winter magazine: The beast must be fed, so take a bit of time to think through what you want the next issue to contain and how you want to present those stories. Use this gift of time as an opportunity to try a completely different storytelling approach.

What projects do you prefer to pursue in the summertime? I’d love to hear about them, so drop me a line and share.

Don’t-miss clicks

Ashley Budd at Cornell University is a veteran newsletter publisher for school communications (you should consider subscribing), which makes her thoughts about improving your newsletters and other email worth a read.
Did you know that filling out the federal FAFSA form meant sharing your personal information with Facebook? Neither did I until reading this startling report from the Markup (a new publication that is breaking stories frequently): “After The Markup questioned the U.S. Department of Education about the tracking practice, the feature that enables sharing those details with Facebook was turned off. But personal data from an unknown number of students remains in Facebook’s hands, to be used for its own purposes.” Thanks, Uncle Sam.
Jenny Petty at the University of Montana has a great op-ed arguing against Facebook in school communications: “We’ve aligned ourselves with a partner that is in direct opposition to the values higher education claims to hold dear: truth, curiosity, democracy, critical thinking and debate. Yet we’ve become so dependent on Facebook’s ecosystem of advertising that many higher ed professionals feel pressure to stick with it at the expense of developing other, more sustainable online channels and platforms that universities own or that give them more control, such as their own websites or more-private social media tools.” Jenny echoes what I wrote in September: Facebook’s ethics are indefensible, and schools should steer clear from such a “partner.”