When it comes to facilitating your school district’s long term success, community stakeholder support is critical to reach and maintain those goals. Identifying key stakeholders, building meaningful relations and maintaining them heavily relies on trust and open communication. Creating a foundation based on trust requires transparency and ongoing communication practices for a successful relationship between school and community. In getting started, center your partnership strategy based on the following:
- Partnership activities must be directly aligned with student achievement goals.
- Efforts must be collaborative and genuine. There are meaningful roles for each party to play and these must be clearly articulated.
- Information sharing must be transparent. Achievement data must be clear, accurate, and meaningful.
- All parties must operate from common values and a common vision for student achievement.
- All efforts must be mission-oriented and data-driven.
- The staff must take the lead to provide stakeholders the data and other information they need to be productive partners around student achievement
Sharing data and news with the community is central to communication efforts, and finding creative yet effective approaches to doing so can help make a positive impact. Finding a strategy that involves multiple forms of communication is a smart way to reach all audiences with approaches that may resonate differently for each one. Getting creative with the ways we share information makes communication efforts more effective as everyone receives information differently. Here are a few approaches your school PR and communications team can incorporate into the community engagement strategy:
- If your district is in the midst of building new facilities for example, using a drone to capture footage of its process to share with the community keeps them highly informed of the project’s progress
- Incorporating regular messaging to community stakeholders throughout district social media plan
- Incorporating a page on district website for key stakeholders
- Using collateral like mailed pamphlets and newsletters to reach those who are not digitally savvy
It takes a village as they say, so keeping your community involved and informed is important to maintaining the school district’s long term success! For more ways on how Nichols Strategies has helped develop the partnership between schools and community, check out our case studies: https://nicholsstrategies.com/case-studies/