Online Marketing - Part 3 of 3

Which social media platforms are you or someone on behalf of your school using?

The question is becoming more important as the communities we serve get more connected – socially. Equally important is an evaluation of how well your social media strategy and your marketing strategy align, and the extent to which they are used consistent with your school’s current and future policies.

For me personally, just figuring out how to use social media has been a challenge – one that in large measure still eludes me. But I understand it well enough to observe some less than desirable outcomes of what started as good intentions. The purpose of this article is to view social media in its entirety and discuss an overall social media strategy. It seems that there are three common challenges that exist with respect to social media.

Priorities, Processes, and Control

I addressed these issues in an article written over a year ago. And while the popularity and adaptation of the different social media platforms have changed. I believe these principals still apply to all of the variants of social media.

Priorities

It is still my opinion that your first priority, when evaluating online venues, is your school’s website. A properly constructed and managed website becomes a virtual community unto itself and the consolidation point for all of your social media channels. As hard as it is to imagine, there are still plenty of folks – especially parents – who simply don’t get the Facebook phenomena and probably never will. For them a tweet is something they long to hear after a long, cold winter, 1+ is decent Golf score for a tough hole on par 5, and Pinterest is just bad spelling.

So it seems that placing significant content on your main school website ought to be your highest priority. It might be a better strategy to liken your main website to the hub of a bicycle wheel, with all of the spokes leading to/from the hub to your various social venues. From a marketing standpoint, your online strategy, including all of your social channels ought to be designed with the purpose of driving traffic to your school website and gathering leads for prospective students.  Here are some other reasons why your main website ought to be your highest priority:

1. Social platforms, while here to stay are a bit unpredictable and your community will probably move in and out of various social channels on a regular basis. Placing a greater emphasis on social channels at the expense of meaningful content on your website could end up diluting your message over time and eliminating much of your intended audience.
2. Content is king! While social channels are buzzing and brimming with activity, it is still a social channel. Real content, including legally required notices and documents should not to be delivered in a social setting. While announcements, opinions, and chatter can drive awareness of policy and administrative processes, the clear and authorized information should still be on your main website after proper review and publishing guidelines are followed.  
3. The social media landscape is changing very rapidly, and the apparent winners today may not be the winners long-term. Your ability to move in and out of the social channels of choice will be enhanced by a clear website strategy. That strategy should not rely on the success or failure of a particular social media.

Process

Social media as a business (or school) is different than social media for personal use. Understand the difference and avoid mixing the two. If you are into social media, you have undoubtedly experienced cases of extreme over posting. And you certainly don’t want to be like that as an institution. It is not uncommon for companies to employ social media experts, whose sole focus is on developing and delivering social content. While it is unlikely that will have the luxury of such expenditure, there should be a clear strategy in your school about this process
.
The last thing your principal wants is another assignment, but someone at that level ought to be the champion of the school and the school’s social media advocate. But principals and other staff members are not perpetual, so be sure that your social media account is.

It is also important to be consistent in your policymaking with respect to social media. Do you attempt to build a Facebook community, but ban the use of Facebook within your school? Are you trying to build a twitter following, but restrict use of mobile devices in your organization?

One idea is to develop your own internal social media platform. This is done automatically for you if you are using the Office 365 for Education platform. See my article about Live@EDU services.

Control

One common challenge is well-intentioned individuals, associated with your school, who create social media accounts using their own personal information and your legal name. This is a very precarious situation that should be handled sooner, rather than later. Having control over your messaging is essential, even when those individuals are key stakeholders in your organization. Much like the nightmares we have seen with domain names, ownership of Facebook pages with your official name by unauthorized individuals can be embarrassing at the least and potentially a legal nightmare in the worst case scenario.

Want to see how big of a problem this is? Just do a Facebook search using the name of your school. If you see more than one entry, you have a problem. More importantly, your users have a problem because they don’t know who to follow.

Social Media can be of great benefit to your school. Set clear priorities, designate specific individuals to manage it, and maintain control of this important piece of intellectual property. And remember, that from a marketing perspective, social media exists to obtain prospective students. So make sure there is a consistent and easy way to gather and track leads for followup.

Managing Website Content - good, better, best

Managing public website content in the dynamic environment of a charter school is enormously time consuming. If you think otherwise, then your school’s website is most likely out of date and in need of an overhaul. A quick poll of your site’s users will likely confirm this, and probably tell you more than you care to know. Even the best and most popular websites face constant scrutiny from one set of stakeholders or another—who each inevitably have website suggestions but often little understanding of the costs attached to those suggestions.

Because charter schools have so many requests for content updates, accompanied by all the usual interruptions and stretched staff assignments, this task can quickly get overwhelming.

The purpose of this article is to explore three methods that we have used to manage website content, each with varying degrees of success. Pros and cons exist with each method, but no solution at all will ultimately cost you much more in wasted administrative resources. In fact, your public facing website can actually reduce the amount of administrative effort required to run your school, but only if done thoughtfully and consistently.

Before we address the methods, let’s quickly review the basic categories, and samples of content, that you ought to be familiar with, as explained below:

• Contact and directory information that bypass admin resources to every extent practical. This category includes phone, fax, email (forms-based), maps, organizational charts, and department information.
• Notifications that are legally required in order to comply with board and other necessary public notices. These can include board minutes, policy manuals, student handbooks, and health notifications.
• News and activity information to inform the community about all school related activities, including academics, events, calendars, community engagement, fundraisers, school plays, projects, and field trips.
• Social media and buzz to generate excitement, awareness, and sense of community. This involves using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other media associated with the school’s hub of activity.

This list is intentionally given in order from the least to the most frequently updated category, and roughly parallels with semi-annual, monthly, weekly, or daily updates. And correspondingly, this list is given from most to the least restrictive category, with respect to content review and approval. Keep this in mind as we outline the methods of managing content, because different kinds of content require different publishing processes, and have different shelf lives.

One last thing before we discuss methods—all content should take the shortest path possible from the time of its creation to its publication. For example, if a calendar of events has three separate approval processes to go through, and faces any delays that sometimes happen in life, then you may as well forget about it. By the time the event is posted and published, it could long since be over. Another example is homework assignments or study guides submitted by teachers for the website. Systems need to be in place for allowing and training staff to easily save a document in a format they understand (Word, Excel, PDF, etc.) and then quickly publish the document to the website, without a lengthy approval process or any difficult technical steps.

Easier said than done? Perhaps. But with even modest training, any of these three methods below will provide this functionality. I’ve labeled them as Good, Better, and Best.

Good Use whatever they are comfortable with.

With so many web publishing options available, it is quite possible that members of your staff already have a blog, a personal home page, a Facebook page, or a website devoted to their work. These are often personalized very well, and reflect the passion and interest of the individual authors. Allowing this kind of content management comes at a very low initial cost, a reasonably high participation rate, and can be quite effective. We’ve seen some that are excellent, both artistically and functionally.

However, it’s important to understand the risks associated with this model. The primary risk is content control, lack of oversight, and possible legal issues. These kinds of resources are universally owned by the individuals creating them. Inappropriate use could be embarrassing to the school, provide misinformation, and potentially create liabilities that you feel are unacceptable. And without the cooperation of any of your particular staff members, an offensive website cannot easily be taken down, especially if you have adopted a precedent of allowing this kind of online creativity over a long period of time.

Artistically speaking, your website may end up looking like a virtual flea market. But the good thing is that there will be accurate content readily available.

Better Use a centralized content management system.

Most schools use this model to manage website content, and for good reason. Using a content management system is an efficient way to build a website that contains most of the features you need, with some type of password protected area that allows a management interface to add, remove, or modify content. Because most content management systems are built with a template framework, information on new pages gets formatted in a similar fashion as other pages, giving the site a more uniform feel. While this can make creating content easier, it can also create limitations in the design elements and artistic expressions you may wish to use.

With a modest amount of training, users can add, remove, and edit content in areas of the website where they have responsibility to do so. And some content management systems have thousands of appliciations or utilities that you can easily set up to do a wide range of tasks, like updating your Facebook page, sending out newsletters, or creating extensive directories.

Many charter schools have used such a method, normally powered by Joomla, an open source content management system. But while many of our schools use this model, we’ve experienced only modest success in those cases where there is not a single website content manger on site.

Simple means different things to different individuals, and some CMS interfaces can be difficult to use or require in-depth training for staff and faculty. As you have likely experienced, often any kind of barrier or perceived difficulty may pretty much stop users from updating content on the school website, simply because they are not motivated to do so. Functionally, you will have a uniform looking website, but the amount of fresh content will depend upon how motivated and reasonably trained users are. Note: This takes more than one individual to work successfully, unless that individual devotes significant time to content management.

BestMicrosoft Sharepoint: a public website that is connected to your internal documents.

Sharepoint is a very popular Microsoft technology that manages website content through a simple Internet Explorer interface. It’s based upon the permissions you as a user are granted on the site. It bridges the gap between whichever document is sitting on your desktop waiting to be shared and the ability to upload that document to your public facing website. In the simplest of terms, any staff member with permission to do so can create a document, save it to a specific folder on their desktop, and then synchronize it to the school’s public website.

Sharepoint provides a uniform and artistically appealing framework that easily synchronizes documents from desktops with the public facing website. By allowing the creators of your most frequently changed content to publish their materials directly to the website, you will ensure that your content is always up to date.

Admittedly, there are some underlying assumptions in this model, namely the required server and software infrastructure. But this infrastructure is not terribly expensive, especially when bundled with your annual school agreement license for Microsoft technologies. It is interesting to note that the Live@edu services I recently wrote about (which provides free email, document storage, and web pages for students) utilizes Sharepoint as a usable framework. Schools adopting the Live@edu services could more easily transition to the Sharepoint services for managing website content because of the initial familiarity with the technology and interface.

Summary

Managing content on your school website is a very large undertaking, and a process best accomplished by a method that delegates content creation to the responsible authors and where strict oversight is not required. Schools that can reduce the number of steps from content creation to online publication will have greater success in creating a dynamic public website.

And remember that content on the Internet is King! Even an imperfect looking website that has great resources—meaning fresh, accurate, relevant, and accessible content—will give you high marks when users to go answer the question, “How’s our school’s website?”

Finally, it is possible to use all three of the above models simultaneously to manage your website. You don't just have to use one model. Keeping all content resources within the framework of your site will give it a more uniform look.

Good, better, best,
Never let it rest;
Until your good is better,
And your better is your best.

Please let us know if you would like additional information about managing your website content more efficiently by using Sharepoint at your school.

Putting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to work in your school

A core assumption in the Charter School movement is competition. Most competitive measures are geared toward educational outcomes. But before you can compete in the area of outcomes you must compete in the arena of sound business management. Running the business side of a Charter School is enormously challenging. In addition to the key metric of recruiting students, you must manage all kinds of relationships with parents, teachers, administrative staff, board members, volunteers, the community, vendors, and regulatory agencies.
Managing a school is a relationship management intensive undertaking! And how well you manage these crucial relationships will have a far reaching impact on your organization. But how many of you are using any kind of a Customer Relationship Management program? More specifically, how many of you are using a CRM system that is deeply integrated into your existing information systems?
Increasing numbers and types of businesses are adopting Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.  CRM systems cover a lot of territory: sales, marketing, case management, and documentation; so making general observation here is not really going to help. But try to imagine how different your school would look if you had a system in place that could help quantify measures of performance, more clearly define and manage processes, automate administrative tasks, centralize information, and increase the capacity of your staff to work in a more unified manner.
A CRM system is not a simple solution to implement, but managing the business of a Charter School is not a simple undertaking. And while complex systems require thoughtful planning, testing, and deployment; the complexity exists whether or not you have such programs. Traditional school districts have a huge advantage. Although they deal with the same array of relationships they also have significant resource advantages and economics of scale, often employing an entire team to accomplish what a solitary administrator is expected to do.
The best way to overcome this inherent disadvantage is a Customer Relationship Management System designed specifically for Charter Schools.
From a funding perspective, students and their families are your paying customers. But in reality you have a long list of “customers”, or groups without which you could not function.  And as simple as it may sound, keeping them happy is most likely to occur when using a Customer Relationship Management system designed just for that purpose.
Nobody likes a hard sell, and perhaps that is what comes to mind when you hear about CRM software. In fact effective CRM programs do more than just build brand awareness, deliver consistent marketing messages, and track interaction with potential customers until you “sell” them. CRM systems help you manage all of the aspects of the important relationships that define your organization and make it as easy as possible to do business with you.
Customer Relationship Management software has been successfully implemented in all kinds of businesses, and for the same reasons it makes sense for your school. Consider things you could do with a CRM system designed for a Charter School:
Contact Management

• Centralize the essential contact information for students and their families and tie it to their Student Information Records
• Consolidate all other contact lists for the school into a single source and enjoy a much more accurate source of information
• Identify relationships among the various contacts to better understand communication requirements and preferences
• Communicate effortlessly with any combination of individuals within groups and track those communications for accountability
• Streamline the records update process by distributing the task to the end points of interaction
• Provide financial and case management records for context (as allowed by security roles) within your contact information

Marketing

• Create, execute, and measure campaigns for recruiting, fundraising, and volunteering
• Communicate with potential students at the frequency and intensity of their interest level
• Track all interactions with potential students, donors, and volunteers and measure defined goals of those relationships
• Build better relationships through consistent messaging, improved responsiveness, and uniform processes
• Manage Social Media campaigns

Case Management

• Establish workflow and manage documentation for new student from application to entrance
• Manage facilities and contractors with workflows and centralized documentation 
• Manage support issues (help desk) for all kinds of issues - technical, personnel, facilities, finance
• Track grants and funding opportunities with better reminders of deadlines and tasks management
• Comply with Board Meeting minutes publications using permission based workflow and oversight
• Manage questions, complaints, or discipline with current students (outside of SIS)
• Streamline communication with key team members by centralizing information stores
• Develop a centralized policy and procedure knowledgebase
• Manage field trips, group events, and meetings

Fee Management

• Manage student fees and simplify the reconciliation process for finance
• Centralize accounting for all sales or service fee collection for all groups in or out of the  student store
• Improve the process for collecting library fees, yearbooks , DVD sales, and sporting equipment
• Integrate the accounting and development functions for fundraising and donation management
• Document and improve collection for property damage fines
• Improve inventory management for all product based items

As you can see, this is a pretty comprehensive list of features touching many departments and individuals both in and out of the school. As such the architecture of this system is vital. In order for this system to succeed it must have a common and familiar interface, utilize existing rather than new policies and procedures, and it must be a cloud based solution with unrestricted availability from anywhere on any device.
Our recommended solution is Microsoft Dynamics CRM online configured specifically for use in the Charter School Community and managed with familiar tools you use every day – Microsoft Outlook, Word, and the other Microsoft Office programs. But whatever solution you choose it must be capable of delivering administrative efficiencies to support the non-academic aspects of your school.
One last point - while we did not directly address the educational side of your organization, it too will be greatly enhanced by a CRM system.

Social Media and your school website – priority, process, and control

Social Media is exploding all around us and the possibilities it presents are quite astonishing. It's engaging, personal, agile, and a very effective one-to-many messaging platform. Many of you have jumped in with great enthusiasm, only to get lost in the rapidly changing landscape. 


Some love it, some hate it, but no matter your position, it is a real phenomenon and probably demanding more of your attention than you currently care to give it; additionally you likely struggle to maintain a sense of rationality about the whole matter. Let's consider a few principles that will make your entrance into Social Media a little less chaotic and hopefully a lot more effective.

Priority

Your first consideration is to prioritize the web channels you use, both social and traditional. Always place the highest priority on your main school website as the repository of core content. Properly provisioned, your main website will be the center of your online strategy and all of your social channels ought to be designed with the purpose of driving traffic to your school website when content outside of the social platform is needed. Here are some other reasons why your main website ought to be your highest priority:

1. Social platforms, while here to stay are a bit unpredictable and your community will probably move in and out of various social channels on a regular basis. Placing a greater emphasis on social channels at the expense of meaningful content on your website could end up diluting your message over time and eliminating much of your intended audience.
2. Content is king! While social channels are buzzing and brimming with activity, it is still a social channel. Real content, including legally required deliverables should not to be delivered via social channels. While announcements, opinions, and chatter can drive awareness of policy and administrative processes, the clear and authorized information should still be on your main website after proper review and publishing guidelines are followed.
3. The social media landscape is changing very rapidly, and the apparent winners today may not be the winners long-term. Your ability to move in and out of the social channels of choice will be enhanced by a clear website strategy. That strategy should not rely on the success or failure of a particular social media.  

Process


Social media as a business (or school) is different than social media for personal use. Understand the difference and avoid mixing the two. If you are into social media, you have undoubtedly experienced cases of extreme over posting. And you certainly don't want to be like that as an institution. It is not uncommon for companies to employ social media experts, whose sole focus is on developing and delivering social content. While it is unlikely that will have the luxury of such expenditure, there should be a clear strategy in your school about this process.


The last thing your principal wants is another assignment, but someone at that level ought to be the champion of the school and the school's social media advocate.




Control




One common challenge is well-intentioned individuals, associated with your school, who create social media accounts using their own personal information and your legal name. This is a very precarious situation that should be handled sooner, rather than later. Having control over your messaging is essential, even when those individuals are key stakeholders in your organization. Much like the nightmares we have seen with domain names, ownership of Facebook pages with your official name by unauthorized individuals can be embarrassing at the least and potentially a legal nightmare in the worst case scenario.


Want to see how big of a problem this is? Just do a Facebook search using the name of your school. If you see more than one entry, you have a problem. More importantly, your users have a problem because they don't know who to follow.


Social Media can be of great benefit to your school. Set clear priorities, designate specific individuals to manage it, and maintain control of this important piece of intellectual property.