Show Notes: 

Listen to our interview with Greg Turchetta on Season 2 of the podcast: Winning at School Communications. 

Read the original research cited in this episode: A Seat at the Table, Who Speaks for Your Brand and Layers of Leadership. 

Learn more about us and subscribe to our newsletter at schoolceo.com. If you have a story you’d like to share with the SchoolCEO team, email me at eileen@schoolceo.com or schedule a call with me! 

Follow SchoolCEO on LinkedIn or X/Twitter @school_ceo. 

SchoolCEO is powered by Apptegy, the maker of the leading K-12 communications and brand management platform.

Episode Transcript

Eileen Beard: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the SchoolCEO podcast. I’m your host, Eileen Beard. On Season 2 of the podcast, we talked to Greg Turchetta, then the senior chief communications officer for the Richland Two School District in South Carolina. Over 10 years in the school comms field, Greg loved to use SWOT analyses to determine the health of his department’s school marketing plans. Here, I’m sharing Greg’s SWOT analysis of the entire school communications field. By the way, we originally shared this analysis with readers of our SchoolCEO Spark newsletter, so sign up at SchoolCEO.com to receive more great content like this. Moving on. 

If you don’t know, a SWOT analysis is a technique used to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to an institution, a department or even a specific project. And it is a powerful tool for helping you identify opportunities for improvement. 

So today, I’m going to share with you a SWOT analysis Greg created for all K-12 school communications programs right now. Let's dive in and see if it applies to you. 

YOUR STRENGTHS

Every school district has a limitless supply of amazing stories to tell that support and prove their value to their community. From student success to sports achievements, program accolades to teacher profiles. The amazing efforts of support staff and even, or especially, those small moments of student engagement and enthusiasm and excitement in classrooms. There is a fantastic positive story everywhere you look on a school campus. 

YOUR WEAKNESSES

These aren’t really weaknesses. They’re more like vulnerabilities or obstacles to overcome. And there's one really big one. You probably don't have 100 people working for your communications department. In fact, SchoolCEO’s survey of 600 communications directors nationwide found that nearly 50% of school communicators work on a team of one. We’ll link that study in the show notes. 

And even if you had 100 people, you probably still couldn’t witness every amazing moment happening at every school every day. After all, how many times have you had a community member come up to you and say, "I had no idea you were doing such a cool thing here?" That's a shame—but it’s also an opportunity. How can you capture more content? How can you share it more strategically? Later this season, we’ll talk about ways to work around having a small team or a small budget so you can still get all those positive stories out to stakeholders. 

YOUR OPPORTUNITIES

The largest opportunity you have as school leaders is to empower your district professionals. SchoolCEO Research has found that teachers and staff members alike are ready and willing to act as brand ambassadors for their schools—they just need a little training and direction. The same goes for your building leaders, who are among the most trusted members of any community. We’ll link to both of those studies in the show notes. But when the responsibility for telling your schools’ stories is left up to just one person or even one department, things can fall through the cracks. In future episodes, we’ll share how your district can cultivate content creators all over the place, capturing stories you wouldn’t even know existed! 

YOUR THREATS

We all know we have work to do to change the national narrative around public schools. The vocal minority, who are often critical of public schools no matter what actions they take, is winning in too many towns. Misinformation and even disinformation thrive in the face of insufficient communications. The best way to counter untrue narratives is to push through the fear and let those closest to the classroom tell their own success stories. 

So, what do you do next? You have to use every voice possible to tell your district's story. Otherwise, funding, student enrollment, and teacher recruitment decisions will be influenced more by your critics than your own voice. 

To get things started, we highly recommend writing up a SWOT analysis of your own communications plan using this as your guide. To determine your strengths, ask yourself: what examples of student success do you want to champion? Do you have an innovative CTE program for video game design? Have you recently renovated buildings? Those are your capital S strengths, but you also provide education, socialization, emotional support and a home away from home for all your students. Your strengths are all of those stories. 

To determine your weaknesses, instead ask yourself what are your biggest communications hurdles? Do you have a small team that is stretched too thin? Are parents not hearing from you enough? 

Opportunities for improvement are endless, but think specifically of opportunities that exist to address your quote unquote “weaknesses.” 

Finally, think about threats to marketing your schools. The national narrative around public education is one, but does your reputation need a facelift locally, too? 

District leadership and comms can collaborate on a SWOT analysis to make it as comprehensive as possible. Because every school and every district has additional unique challenges and opportunities. Check out our next episode to see how one district celebrated one of their strengths—and how you can, too. 

Remember, school communications teams have one strength in common—you all have incredible stories to tell. On the next episode, we’ll share one of those stories from a school district in Georgia and how they chose to tell it. 

Thanks for joining us. Talk soon.