Three Ways to Increase Engagement Levels in the School Community

‘They market to everyone else, but they never market to us,’ the parent of a pupil in an independent school said to me in frustration. I was researching the school’s marketing strategy.

Communications had come up as a critical concern for the parents. But according to the management, the school was communicating to parents all the time, through multiple channels. Yet school families were frustrated. Information was often inconsistent, generic and confusing. The website said one thing about a sports fixture or academic event, the SMS platform another and WhatsApp groups yet another. Parents were venting their frustrations about this on WhatsApp groups and other platforms, impacting the reputation of the school and leading to retention issues.

Does this sound familiar?

The effort that was being made in marketing the school externally was not being matched internally. There was no attempt to increase engagement levels in the school community. This illustrates an oft-forgotten aspect of the promotional element of the marketing mix. Promotion should be both an external and an internal activity. And these communications require different approaches because they are different audiences with different messages, even though the campaign has a common purpose.

In my experience of consulting in school marketing, I’ve often found that schools want more collaboration with the parent body. But it’s not something that will happen spontaneously if it’s not been the way things have been done in the past, especially if trust levels are low. It’s fixable, but it needs attention. So, for this article, I’ve taken a strategic marketing approach to the situation and shared three tips to achieve greater engagement with existing families.

Involvement versus engagement

As context, let’s first understand what is meant by quality family-school collaboration. A closer look at the publications generated by the Brookings Institution reveal an excellent document called ‘Collaborating to transform and improve education systems – A playbook for family- school engagement’. This explains the difference between involvement and engagement:

A school striving for family involvement often leads with its mouth – identifying projects, needs and goals and then telling parents how they can contribute. In contrast, a school striving for parent engagement leads with its ears – listening to what parents think, dream and worry about. The goal of family engagement is not to serve clients but to gain partners.

In marketing, the term engagement has become a popular metric of social media activity. For the purpose of this article, the social media definition of engagement (likes, commentsand shares on digital platforms) is a component of the wider definition provided by Brookings above.

Now that we understand what is meant by engagement, how can schools intentionally build a collaborative environment with existing families?

Know your customer to increase engagement levels in the school community

Tip #1 – Know your customer

Most of us believe we know our customers, those parents and pupils we work with daily. I remember a school principal once saying to me: ‘I know what they’re going to tell you in the interviews, but I’m interested to see if it’s any different to what I hear every day.’

There are always surprises in good market research. I find one-to-one interviews better than surveys for the more strategic work, but a good survey is better than none. A recent blog by Emma Castleberry has a link to a useful ready-made Google form for a parent communications survey. Good data is essential to meaningful engagement. It was the acclaimed engineer W Edwards Deming who said: ‘Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.’

Once you have these insights collected and analysed independently, spend time understanding the portfolio of customer personas, their expectations, need and wants. What keeps them awake at night? What delights them? What do they watch, listen to, use or play? This will move you from the position of leading with your mouth, to leading with your ears, as per the Brooklands quote above.

Before you take the next step, consider your own existing internal structures and processes for communicating with this internal customer. Do these make it easier or more difficult to engage? Who is in charge of parent communication? Perhaps it’s time to review this, especially the role of marketing.

Tip #2 – Make it two-way not one-way

Next, ask yourself, how much of the communications you have with families is two-way versus one-way?

The growth of social media moved the world from one- way interaction online towards two-way communication. The next internet era is likely to leapfrog us even further along this trajectory. Customers want to be more in control of their purchases, with co-creation, self-service, automation, messaging, and branded apps becoming the norm.

So, with regard to schooling, parents get frustrated when they are unable to access accurate information at all hours, ask questions of a reliable source with an immediate response, pay with banking processes that suit them, and complete orders swiftly. Formal and informal engagement channels help to grease the wheels of the operational processes in a school. Too many informal channels of communication can lead to confusion. These often emerge when formal channels are inadequate.

If increased engagement is strategic, then every touch point along the customer journey in the school should be reviewed in terms of two-way communication and integrity of the source. Sometimes one-way is best to avoid misinformation (especially in a crisis), but ready and reliable access to two-way is vital.

For example, when a child is moving from one grade to another, what conversation do we have with the family? Is there an opportunity for two-way channels and personalised communication that would add value more than one- way SMS or newsletter mailshots? This could influence retention.

And when parents are looking for information about what uniform their child should wear to the prize- giving assembly starting in an hour, what is the main source of accurate up-to-date data, and is it accessible, user- friendly, dependable and well-publicised internally?

Also, remember that story-telling increases engagement, especially on social media. And storytelling linked to purpose, is especially powerful.

Encourage two-way communication

Tip #3 – Get in-person with purpose

Online has become a comfort zone. Staying home, working from home, avoiding physical contact have all become habits. Our children notice these habits and mimic them. This is why it’s important to go back to your school’s purpose. Why does the school exist? What do we do every day, really? What is our impact?

In his book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek draws three circles.4 The outer circle is ‘the What’. The middle circle is ‘the How’. The inner circle is ‘the Why’. This concept is called the Golden Circle.

It’s a natural human trait to talk about the What: What happened yesterday, what will happen today, what must happen tomorrow. But it’s harder to talk about the How, and even harder to say Why. But the Why is what inspires and unites. It’s the Why that is the story, our reason for being together.

Getting people together is easier when there is a common cause, a rallying cry. This is the role of leadership, but it is also really important for change to be successful. Having worked on understanding your customer and establishing two-way channels, the third step is to actively bring people together based on your Why, the story that makes your school unique.

Balance the online with hybrid and in-person, and develop technologies and processes that help your school to thrive within its market positioning. Actively move towards a mix of these that is your school’s ‘sweet spot’. Often, there is so much noise that those distinguishing characteristics are hidden – a wasted opportunity to reinforce your message to your existing families, growing ambassadors from alumni and past parents.

This is the cycle of trust which builds brands and keeps families coming back. For example, what is your school’s one key event that families and friends will travel across country to attend in person? Get in-person with purpose.

What’s next?

It’s difficult to believe that after all the changes schools have experienced through the pandemic, we still need more change. But we’ve learnt new habits from the prolonged lockdown, and we now need to learn new ways to prepare for a new future. Being intentional about quality family- school collaboration requires a leadership commitment to be intentional about engagement.

These three tips of getting to know your customer and what works for them, moving from one-way to two-way communication, and strategically increasing purposeful in-person interaction will build trust, which in turn will improve your overall internal communications and retention of families.

Take the first step. Make the decision to get to know your customer. Lead with your ears.