Channel your inner Big Bird - Fine Point Communications

How do you decide on the topics for your school’s external communications?

Do they come from strategic goals or from directives from on high? Maybe you’re using institutional pain points as your prompt. Or maybe you promote what instinct tells you that your audience should know.

At Fine Point Communications, we advocate starting a communication by identifying the audience and then assessing and responding to its needs. Yet my guess is that, in many schools, messages are driven more by internal needs and desires than by what their audience cares about or wants to know.

In fact, I’d go further and suggest that most schools don’t understand what their audience wants — because they are unaccustomed to asking them about that.

This is what the corporate world calls market research, and it’s table stakes for any effective PR campaign. Even the most satisfied customer will have something they’d like to see improve, and the only way to get this information is to ask for it.

Yet independent schools are often reluctant to ask what parents, students or alumni want and don’t want, what they like and don’t like.

Big Bird walks down a street in a parade. I don’t understand this reticence. As Big Bird put it, “Asking questions is a good way to find things out.”

Maybe administrators feel unready to hear the feedback, or maybe they worry that asking questions puts a burden on already-busy people.

To that end, I like this recent tweet from psychologist Adam Grant. He reminds, “People are happier to help than we expect,” and adds that “Seeking help is an expression of trust.”

So — to single out one audience — why not solicit parent feedback about school communications? You’ll earn some goodwill simply by asking, and you may learn what is working for them, and what goes unnoticed or unclicked.

You could get these insights informally, by inviting parents to gather over coffee to answer a few questions, or more formally, by creating an advisory group that meets regularly or a SurveyMonkey questionnaire.

Whatever route you take, come into the process with what our colleague Mike Barzacchini has called a “research mindset,” predicated on what and why questions. You don’t need many: A half-dozen questions can explore parent preferences and elicit what they see as useful changes.

Dana Nelson-Isaacs, who writes regularly about surveys in education, has a good list of tips for anyone new to taking the temperature of an audience. I particularly like her advice of beginning with the end in mind as you formulate questions.

You’ll need a plan for handling the responses. (This is another reason to keep the list of questions short.) And you’ll earn more goodwill by sharing what you learned. Participants will be looking for any changes they recommended, so you may as well be transparent about the outcomes.

Ultimately, I’d love to see independent schools create a broader culture of asking questions of its constituents. People are eager to share their opinions, and giving them a forum where they can do so is a simple way to instill a sense of partnership — something often lacking in parent-school relationships.

What’s new at Fine Point Communications

September has been hopping: We onboarded two new clients, wrapped up several projects and, for the first time, brought on extra hands to assist with an assignment.

Kent Place School in New Jersey published four short features from Fine Point in its fall magazine. I love the editing by Rachel Naggar and the design by 2communique!

And we teamed with the Agnes Irwin School in Pennsylvania on a pair of admissions materials — a new College Counseling brochure and an update to its Arts and Technology viewbook. I’m grateful to Jubin Kwon for this collaboration!

Still more work is moving through clients’ approval pipelines. Stay tuned for links.

The fall is looking to be busy, too. If you’re thinking of a project where Fine Point Communications could help, let’s talk soon and get you on the calendar.

Don’t-miss clicks

After two major swerves in my career (journalism to education, employee to sole proprietor), I found a lot of wisdom in this Derek Thompson essay, “Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life.” A few of his professional-counseling tips that I heartily endorse:
- “People are happiest when their life is aligned with their identity”;
- “You should constantly look to … push yourself into discomfort zones”; and
- “Take the job you want to do for hundreds of hours a year.”
Last month’s Refill touched on the difficulty at Harpeth Hall School after it announced a new admissions approach. Last week, the Nashville girls’ school released an updated statement that says, “Any girl or young woman may apply to our school in accordance with past practices.” Formerly, that sentence had read, “Any student who identifies as a girl may apply to our school.” The school also retitled its document “Gender Philosophy at Harpeth Hall,” rather than “Gender Diversity Philosophy at Harpeth Hall” (my emphasis).