Making parent engagement simple with digital communication done right.
It’s time to stop playing catch-up with digital communications. We understand your core business is teaching your students, in partnership with parents. But schools, compared to the average small to medium business, generally have many more stakeholders with multiple channels both inbound and outbound. And they’re often managing with relatively less administrative communication support.
From our years of experience, here’s practical guidance on ways to ‘tame the communication beast’ and make digital communications work for you.
The Parent Engagement Paradigm
Teachers have just one school year to establish relationships with parents that improve outcomes for their students. And ‘caretaking’ expanding numbers of communication channels is not productive in terms of teaching and learning outcomes.
Support, administration and management staff also have multiple communications channels for parent engagement throughout the student lifecycle – from enrolment, through finance, classroom interaction, extracurricular activities, OSHS, bus management, event management and eventually, graduation and alumni engagement.
Evidence is clear that most parents respond to personal and empathetic communication, and of course, this does help to build fruitful relationships when it’s done right. It’s just quite a challenge when you have hundreds or thousands of parents and children to deal with! The 2020 Education Report reported that 81.7% of respondents found it “challenging to improve communication between teachers, students and parents.”
The challenge is multiplied when there’s no immediate parent engagement or response to school communication – follow up takes even more time and effort. Especially if there are multiple channels involved and they’re not closely integrated.
Juggling all the possible channels (not forgetting the new channels introduced through remote learning mechanisms) increases administrative complexity exponentially and can shift the focus from your teaching and learning goals.
It’s also easy for that consistent brand and professional ‘look and feel’ to slip, as staff can tend to do their own thing to some extent and staying on-brand is not likely to be top-of-mind!
View this simple infographic to see how our FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia can help your school communicate across the student lifecycle.
Map out your communications
Mapping out a helicopter view of all your digital communication channels, right across the student lifecycle, will aid in understanding what works well for your school. You should be able to highlight the successes, gaps, duplications or wasted effort. For very engaged parent and student communities, a broad scattergun approach (like an emailed newsletter or general class announcements on a class portal) might be effective. With less engaged communities and prospective families, a much more targeted approach may be needed.
Then, narrow down the objective and purpose for each channel. The more focused, the better. For example, does the communication channel:
- share one-way information?
- express wants or needs?
- ask simple or complex questions?
- develop interaction or relationships?
Do you have ways to measure what types of digital communication work with your parents? For example, do your teachers get a good response with formal interviews? Or are more casual communications like SMS, notes in school bags or time to talk after school more effective? Is there a high level of parent and student engagement through portals, class web pages and website forms?
Digital communication vs print or face-to-face
There’s an appropriate time and place for each one. What you are aiming to create is two-way, personalised and meaningful conversation touchpoints that hit the mark, every time. Speaking with our communication specialists can help you uncover which channels suit your communications best.
The advantage of digital vs other types of communication is the power of automation, intelligent forms, security and privacy assurance and personalisation. There’s also in-built capacity for analysis that allows you to measure the success of your communication. Used correctly, you can save time and costs that can be used for more important things.
And before you think ‘that’s all very well, but we don’t have the time or expertise to set up what we need’, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia has got you covered. We’re introducing our DigiComms Packages for Education that bring things back to simple, while squarely addressing the unique challenges of education communications.
You can learn more about our DigiComms packages by visiting our dedicated webpage.
Ready to customise your message to your audience, and build your brand?
Taking a purpose-led approach, each package follows a predetermined automated workflow that leads the audience through a series of relevant digital communications, simple to understand and easy to respond to – and returning feedback data about the outcome you set out to achieve. It’s the DigiComms service we provide that removes the need for those confusing email trails, unread notes and long explanations on the phone to guide a parent through a process, data validation, payment or event registration.
If the intent is there but time is an issue, our Digicomms service consultants can come alongside to audit your school’s communications workflows. We build tailored solutions - one or a combination of our digital packages - cleverly woven together to reach any preferred outcome. We don’t leave you there – our team are here to support, with expert help just a call away.
Tame the communication beast and power up your parent engagement. Find out how our new DigiComms offering can help, speak with your Account Manager or contact one of DigiComms experts today on 13 14 12.