“Work smarter, not harder,” says Tracy Lau, a web specialist at Alief ISD in Houston, Texas. That’s pretty much the mantra for school PR pros using Smore to streamline their school and district communications. We caught up with some of these EdTech experts at #NSPRA2018 to hear their thoughts and best practices.

Full text:
“At the district level, I do a board memo every month, a summary of the board meeting for our employees. We have twelve different campuses, probably, I would say, about ten out of the twelve use Smore on a regular basis. We have a communications function in each building that helps maintain that. And they kind of pull all the data and all the information from the different parts of the building and put it into one concise newsletter. That way, parents know what’s going on, they don’t have to write down information. I just see our principals use this every day, every week in their communications, and it really serves as a branch to reach their parents and students. We have about twelve schools in the district — and every one of them uses Smore. At every school, our principals do Smores. Our principals can look at it and see what worked, what didn’t, and if people are clicking on their links.

Our teachers use it primarily to communicate with their parents, especially the lower grades. Maybe a second grade teacher only communicates with her parents. And then we have administrators who use it in different ways. We have principals who decide that they want to communicate directly with parents. We have those who use it as an internal newsletter, just for their staff. And then we have those who use it at the district level, just to communicate with other administrators on campus.

We create a template, we show them the look and feel that we want — ideal font, what the ideal background would look like, and so on. And we give the schools the template, so we have a good place to start. However, we had so many principals who were already Smore users, and they said, "I already know what I need to do, and we're going to do our own thing, but we're still going to follow your guidance." So the things that we recommended is to make sure that there's still an events calendar, somewhere in there should be contact information for more information, and just the idea that it should be short, sweet, to the point, and that it speaks to what parents really want. Those are the three big things that we ask, and because we gave them both sides of the coin, our principals have more buy-in. And they've loved it ever since.

We do have that branding, but we don't force directors to commit to it. And that's exactly why they are more charmed by the tool.”

“At the district level, I do a board memo every month, a summary of the board meeting for our employees. We have twelve different campuses, probably, I would say, about ten out of the twelve use Smore on a regular basis. We have a communications function in each building that helps maintain that. And they kind of pull all the data and all the information from the different parts of the building and put it into one concise newsletter. That way, parents know what’s going on, they don’t have to write down information. I just see our principals use this every day, every week in their communications, and it really serves as a branch to reach their parents and students. We have about twelve schools in the district — and every one of them uses Smore. At every school, our principals do Smores. Our principals can look at it and see what worked, what didn’t, and if people are clicking on their links.

Our teachers use it primarily to communicate with their parents, especially the lower grades. Maybe a second grade teacher only communicates with her parents. And then we have administrators who use it in different ways. We have principals who decide that they want to communicate directly with parents. We have those who use it as an internal newsletter, just for their staff. And then we have those who use it at the district level, just to communicate with other administrators on campus.

We create a template, we show them the look and feel that we want — ideal font, what the ideal background would look like, and so on. And we give the schools the template, so we have a good place to start. However, we had so many principals who were already Smore users, and they said, 'I know what I need to do, and we're going to do our own thing, but we're still going to follow your guidance.' So the things that we recommended is to make sure that there's still an events calendar, somewhere in there should be contact information for more information, and just the idea that it should be short, sweet, to the point, and that it speaks to what parents really want./"

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