Useful Tools for Quick Communication
Telephone systems, Web sites and e-mail are useful tools for quick communication with staff, parents and community members. They don’t replace face-to-face communication that you need to build and maintain trust in your school and programs, but these electronic tools, when used appropriately, can help you keep staff, parents and community members up-to-date on information they need to know.
Automated Answering Systems
If you have an automated answering system in your school, have you called it recently to see how well it works?
* Are the choices simple and easy to follow? If there a way for callers to easily reach a real person for help?
* Are staff members helpful in getting callers to the right place without transferring them from place to place or losing them?
* Are staff members encouraged to get an answer for a caller and then to call that person back promptly?
If your system is impersonal and difficult to use, or if staff members, when reached, are not helpful, then your automated system may well telegraph a negative image of your school.
These system’s are often a person’s first impression of your school. Make sure that image is positive. Make sure your system demonstrates efficiency and easy access to school personnel.
Voice Mail
For incoming calls, your voice mail message should tell callers where you are that day and when they can expect you to return the call. Returning calls within 24 hours should be a school expectation.
One administrator who uses voice mail well starts each day by changing her voice mail message to tell callers, “This is Mary Smith. I’m in my office today. I check my voice mail twice a day, so please leave your name, phone number and a brief message, and I will get back to you as soon as I can.” If she’s away from her office, she changes her message from wherever she is and lets callers know she’s gone, when she’ll get back to them and what number to call for immediate assistance.
When returning calls, if you reach voice mail instead of the person you are calling, make sure you leave a succinct response to questions and give a time certain that the person can call again and reach you or another appropriate staff member without encountering voice mail yet again.
Hotlines
A hotline is a phone service that someone can call to leave a message or to receive a brief message. A hotline is an effective tool when you have a time-sensitive message, important messages from the school, or details about scheduled events that people need to know about or may want to attend. Hotlines are also helpful in keeping staff and community members up-to-date in crisis situations.
Making effective use of hotlines requires a commitment to keep information updated on a regular—ideally, daily—basis. And, hotline phone numbers need to be published regularly in building and school publications, on the school’s Web site, and in parent and student handbooks. Be creative in making the number available. Consider providing families with refrigerator magnets.
Web Sites
One of the sayings we often heard as children is, “If you can’t do something well, don’t do it at all.” That’s good advice for your school’s Web site. The expectation of electronic communication is that it will be instant and current. Maintaining a Web site for most schools is a full-time job for someone. The best school Web sites have a simple, uncluttered design and offer visitors a user-friendly home page that takes them easily to:
* Directories of administration and faculty members, along with easy access to sending them e-mail
* Information about the school’s programs and services
* Regular news updates
* Maps and directions
* Calendars of events
* School lunch menus
All of these features take constant monitoring and regular updating. If visitors to your school’s Web site find the same information every time they check your site, they will quickly quit visiting it.
If your hotline and Web site provide a general voice mailbox or e-mail address, be sure there is a procedure in place for checking messages daily and responding with the information requested or by letting the person know how the request for information is being handled. In times of crises, these voice mailboxes and e-mail addresses may be jammed. Find ways to respond with more frequently hotline or Web site updates or consider assigning additional staff to handle responses.
E-Mail
E-mail is a great tool when messages are short, accurate and timely, and when speed is of the essence. However, e-mail can do more harm than good when it’s overused, poorly written or when attachments are added. Lengthy e-mail messages and long attachments discourage recipients from reading them and may undermine your communications efforts.
E-mail messages can also be easily misunderstood, especially when messages deal with sensitive issues. Recipients may incorrectly perceive your messages as containing angry tones, abrupt manners and even inappropriate humor. Better to deal with sensitive, confidential issues face to face.
When using e-mail to communicate with staff and faculty members, remember that not everyone—especially cooks, custodians and bus drivers—has easy access to e-mail. Be sure that supervisors distribute printed copies of e-mail messages to those staff members.
Schools that are using e-mail effectively for communication with parents collect e-mail addresses with registration information and then ask parents how they prefer to receive notices, newsletters and other school communications. Don’t assume that all families with e-mail addresses prefer to receive communication from the school via the Internet.
Remember, e-mail, like voice mail, needs a quick response.
Phone systems, Web sites and e-mail—the tools of our electronic age—make communication easier and faster, but they can’t replace the face-to-face communication required to build and maintain the relationships of trust and support our schools require. These tools support and reflect a school’s interpersonal communication efforts and are only as effective as the people and policies that govern their use.
Sidebar
Instant Phone Notification
School Leaders Reach for Reliability, Safety and Peace of Mind
By Paul Langhorst
The necessity of immediate and frequent contact with parents is increasingly a main focus for school administrators. It’s clear that student success improves with strong school communication, particularly efforts that include and inform parents. How to achieve instant contact is the question of the year.
For communicating longer-range events or news, school staffs typically use Web sites, newsletters, e-mail notices and the traditional “back pack” note. However, instant information and communication is now expected as the norm. For short-term and urgent messaging, phone-delivered communication is the preferred method for school leaders because it cuts through e-mail, postal and back-pack clutter. New and affordable phone broadcast notification services now enable school staffs to communicate with parents consistently and at multiple phone numbers for each, within minutes of launching just one phone call.
Phone and Web-based communications strengthen overall school performance in a variety of ways:
* Reduction of staff stress
* Reduced administration costs
* Better class attendance
* More informed and engaged parents
* Improved student performance
Earlier this summer, National School Public Relations Association Executive Director Rich Bagin announced that well-planned and effective, ongoing communications from schools makes a significant impact on student achievement, and parent and community involvement.
In fact, NSPRA research indicates, “In schools where teachers reported high levels of outreach to parents, test scores grew at a rate 40 percent higher than in schools where teachers reported low levels of outreach.”
Principals indicate, however, that they struggle with how to engage audiences due to lack of time, lack of resources and lack of mutual understandings. Instant phone notification benefits principals most in that they can easily target same-day or night-before announcements, reach specific audiences, control the content of messages and deliver them in their own voices.
When considering a phone notification or broadcast service, schools should seek providers that listen to their communication challenges. The solution should accommodate easy data import, easy message creation and scheduling, data security and privacy, real-time reporting, and most importantly, remote access to enable the critical need to launch broadcasts off-site. School staffs should be cautious of systems that require investments in additional software, on-site dialing equipment or more phone lines, which result in hidden costs and future maintenance issues. Companies that do not require such additional purchases, provide the fastest, most flexible and lowest cost option to phone broadcast solutions.
Instant phone notification is one of the most vital tools school leaders can have, and can be used for attendance, everyday announcements, policy reminders, emergencies, surveying and community outreach. Securing a reliable notification service also saves costs and time, while streamlining operational efficiency and improving overall student safety. Once implemented, school leaders wonder how they ever managed without it.
Paul Langhorst is the co-founder of SchoolReach ‘Instant Parent Contact,’ www.schoolreach.com, a company that specializes in providing customized notification services to school staffs throughout the United States.
