Correction: A previous version of this episode referred to Molly McGowan Gorsuch as Rhodes Branding's Marketing Strategy Director. Molly is actually Rhodes' Director of Client Engagement.

Episode Summary

School leaders are well-equipped to consider how families' experiences with their schools shape their opinions about their districts. But for many families, the majority of their experiences start and remain online.

In this episode of SchoolCEO Podcast, we dig into how to optimize your online communities to make sure that they’re just as incredible as your schools are in real life. We also dig into some lessons from industry experts Rhodes Branding as well as advice on how not to make your online communities feel like negative spaces.

Episode Notes

Online communities matter—but how can you make your school district’s online spaces shine just as brightly as your physical ones? In this episode of SchoolCEO Podcast, we dig into how to optimize your online communities to make sure that they’re just as incredible as your schools are in real life. We also hear some lessons from industry experts Rhodes Branding as well as advice on how not to make your online communities feel like negative spaces.

Featured in this Episode: Molly McGowan Gorsuch and Ginny Kowalski of Rhodes Branding, Pat Flynn, and SchoolCEO Magazine Editor Melissa Hite.

Episode Transcript

Brittany Keil (Host): 6 years ago, I bought a house in a new neighborhood here in Little Rock. Like most new homeowners, I was excited to become a part of our new neighborhood community. And like a lot of folks, I figured that joining the neighborhood next Nextdoor would be a good way to go about it. I expected connection, invitations to neighborhood events, you know, all the good things. 

If you are a part of your own neighborhood Nextdoor, you probably know what's coming next.

If you haven't heard of Nextdoor, I can give you a little primer. Nextdoor was started in 2010 to foster neighborly communication. On the platform, you're identified by a hyperlocal neighborhood crew, and there are functions to do neighborly things, like report a missing pad or build a trick or treat map for Halloween. Over the years though, Nextdoor has come to be known as a space where complainers can thrive. 

Anyways, back to my Next Door experience. 

It was terrible. 

Since I hadn't heard of Nextdoor and didn't really know about its controversies or reputation at that time, I had no idea what was coming and quickly assumed that I must have bought a house in a neighborhood full of the most grumpy complainers imaginable. While there were some understandable complaints on the platform, such as people speeding through residential streets or dogs barking all night, there were so many more complaints that were nothing but petty. I remember one neighbor in particular complaining that they didn't like kids using sidewalk chalk on public sidewalks because it, quote unquote, ‘ruined their shoes’. It was full of that kind of thing. 

So I continued existing, disappointed in my neighborhood but loving my house. A few months after I moved in, I was invited to our neighborhood's annual Labor Day potluck. At this point, I had grimly accepted that I had unfortunately not bought a house in the kind of neighborhood to throw a good block party. And, honestly, I didn't wanna go, and I didn't intend to. But my next door neighbor convinced me to go, and I was amazed.

The potluck was incredible. 

Everyone I met was chipper and welcoming, and I found myself enraptured as they told me stories about the many, many potlucks before and what they were excited about for the new year. One person I met had even grown up in the neighborhood and had played in my house as a child. You could probably say that I was surprised because I hadn't yet learned that people can be way grouchier online than they can be in person and that a few loud naysayers can often appear to speak for the whole majority, even when they don't. 

Our digital experience for our neighborhood was problematic, and it paled in comparison to the actual wonderfulness that was the real experience. And chances are, the same thing could be happening in your own school community. 

Here at SchoolCEO, we spend a lot of time talking about school communities, both online and IRL, and what we know is this: creating a strong digital experience is as vital as it is challenging. For some people, the digital experience for your district might be all they ever know because like me in my new neighborhood, it turns them off from taking a chance on the real thing. Unfortunately, this is especially dangerous if these people happen to be prospective families or teachers. 

A few years ago, I had the experience of moving from Washington DC to Little Rock, Arkansas and since I didn't know anyone in the area to tell me otherwise, I spent a lot of time judging schools solely based on their online personas. 

Real quick: let's define what we're talking about when we say digital experience. We actually broke it down in one of our SchoolCEO articles, owning your digital spaces. Article author and SchoolCEO editor, Melissa Hite, sums it up here.

Melissa Hite (SchoolCEO Magazine Editor): “Many school leaders are most concerned with the primary experiences their district provides, the relationships between teachers and families. But in the digital age, most of your audience's experiences with your schools take place outside the classroom. We're not just talking about social media here. We mean messaging platforms, virtual learning spaces, school apps, and learning management systems. Those digital experiences also contribute to your community's feelings about your schools and, therefore, your brand, for better or worse. Right now, you may be leaving decisions about your school's website, apps, and other digital platforms to someone else, but those choices are actually crucial to building and safeguarding your brand. If the tools you use are unintuitive or difficult to use, they're reflecting poorly on your district, even if they're not branded with your logo. If you want to take control of your brand, you need to control as many of your audience's experiences with your schools as possible. That means giving your parents, students, and community members a great experience every time they interact with your schools, no matter where that experience is taking place.”

[Excerpt from SchoolCEO Magazine Article - Owning Your Digital Spaces]

Brittany Keil (Host): If you're a school leader who doesn't think that often about how families interact with your digital spaces, this can be pretty intimidating. It's like finding out that a prospective employer could judge you solely based on your Uber rating. Oh, actually, maybe they do. But don't worry. We have experts here to help.

For advice on this, we turn to Rhodes Branding. Rhodes Branding is a K12 marketing communications agency that partners with schools, districts, and organizations serving K12 education. One thing that makes Rhodes Branding team really special is that they have a lot of experience in marketing in a variety of fields, from higher education to private industry to K12 communications. 

Molly McGowan Gorsuch is Rhodes' marketing strategy director. And for her, their experience is what helps them solve for challenges that may feel new or scary to schools, but have been solved elsewhere in other industries. I'll take it to Molly.

Molly McGowan Gorsuch: “We are bringing our diverse backgrounds, but because we have, yes, kind of that insight from all those sectors, it's it's easier to kind of pinpoint and show, say, hey. This is what's working really well over here. Why don't we use this in k 12? Or, these are what your competitors are doing that maybe we haven't you haven't tapped into because, there's maybe a fear factor or or just, you know, there's uncertainty. So being able to bridge that gap and helping folks in, traditional public charters, independence, and everywhere saying, like, this is what's working and this is what's worked for higher Ed. This is what's worked for corporate. Let us show you how we can do this for your school.”

For Molly, an effective digital experience for our district stakeholders is a critical component of a district's ability to position itself in a k twelve market that's more competitive than other. Molly explains a bit more.

Molly McGowan Gorsuch: “One of the misconceptions or things that that we're seeing, at the school saying that they have about creating effective digital spaces and experiences that, digital marketing and creating those spaces is actually one of the more cost effective ways to to reach your target audiences. And, honestly, because you are able to see the ROI and see it in almost Keil time, you can adjust.”

And Molly has a few tangible steps that school leaders and communicators can take to make sure the digital experience is on point. For her, knowing you're providing a quality digital experience starts with asking the right questions. As part of these questions, Rhodes Branding does something they call a brand audit to help get districts on the right track.

Molly McGowan Gorsuch: “So when we're conducting a digital brand audit for our partners, we're typically focusing on questions like, where does your district have an online presence? And, also, where where do they not? What what can you own? Where do you needing to take ownership of? For example, when you Google search or Bing or whatever, when you're typing in the name, is it your actual page that's showing up first, or are you having to scroll to find yourself? Because then, of course, that ties into your SEO ranking. Do you know what SEO is? And if not, like, how can you improve it?” 

You can use these questions to either conduct a digital experience audit or to simply use these questions as a guide for setting your district's digital experience in the right direction. But how do you get the answers to these questions anyway? There are 2 main strategies, analytics and good old fashioned audience feedback. 

So most digital platforms that your school uses should have some form of analytics. Maybe you get these from your vendor, or maybe they use a tool like Google Analytics, where you have a dashboard that shows you how your digital space is used or not. Regardless of where you get this data, though, you should have a few framing questions to make sure you're looking at the data in a way that will actually help you move the needle on your audience's digital experience.

Three questions to start you off include:

1: Where within my digital spaces experiences the most traffic? So, like, where do parents go when they go to your website? Where do students go when they're on their learning platform or in their learning classroom, etcetera? 

2: Who among my users uses our digital spaces the most? From their activity, can I surmise or assume if they're students, parents, community members, or someone else? 

And 3: Where are the dead spots? Which platforms get almost no engagement or views? Are these a good use of our time? 

This type of information is helpful, but it's best paired with a strong survey of your community to know how well your digital spaces are living up to your audience's expectations and needs. Because it can be hard to get data from folks who aren't directly connected to your district, as opposed to people who are in your district, who you probably already have their email addresses, or maybe even their phone numbers, you should definitely consider advertising your survey on social media, or in conjunction with your local community organizations. 

When done well, community engagement surveys are strong tools that can help you transform your district's digital experience, and make decisions about what platforms and spaces need to be prioritized in the future. 

We've done some of this work at SchoolCEO, so I'm gonna put my researcher hat on, and give you a little advice. It can be easy to view a survey as an opportunity to learn as much as possible in one go, but strong surveys are actually built with a single, tightly specific purpose. You might wanna consider drafting something called a statement of purpose, which is what you want the information in your survey to help you accomplish. You can use the following sentence stem to help find your survey's purpose: “Once I have my survey's results, I want to be able to (blank).” The more specific your survey's purpose is, the more straightforward it will be to design. 

Some examples of purposes for surveys include things like understanding how and when families like to receive important district updates, helping principals decide whether or not to launch a newsletter, or how to do it, or what families would want from it. What kinds of internal communications channels are preferred by retirees without an actual connection to your district? If you have more than one purpose for your survey, try and find the single most critical piece of information you need. While surveys can, and often do, have multiple purposes, you don't want to risk muddying your data with conflicting or seemingly unrelated questions that will confuse your audience. This may mean that you need to run more than one survey, and that's okay. Surveys are cheap, and AI makes analyzing them a lot easier than five years ago. 

But once you know where your district has a digital presence and where you need to strengthen your attention, then what? This is when you start to think about how little bit of knowledge and user experience can help you nail your district's digital experience. And for this, we turn to one more expert, Pat Flynn. If you haven't heard of him, Pat Flynn is an entrepreneur and podcast host who's grown his own online community to include tens of thousands of people.

So we're gonna play a clip from his YouTube video about how to use a few of his best practices for your schools.

Pat Flynn: Now go from active audience, subscribers, followers, etcetera, now to a connected community. And remember, this is where magic happens. It's not just you talking to them, them talking to you, but it's them talking to each other. People actually have an identity as a fan of something. We want to, number one, give people attention. Right? This is what people crave today. Attention. That's the new currency online. And then make them feel like they belong. So how might we do that? Let's start small. Let's actually start simple. Let's start by You know, this is an easy way to engage your audience if you have a community or Facebook group, LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever. Ask questions. But I think we can take that one step further. Don't just ask questions, ask for the answer.

Pat's point here is important because when you think about what families are looking for in an online community, they're looking for connection. They're looking for community. They're looking for validation that their kids are in good hands, and the decisions they make, such as sending their child to your school district, are the right ones. 

In online communities, all too often, the loudest voices can drown out the so called silent majority. When I met my neighbors in person all those years ago, I met a few of them whose names I recognized from Nextdoor. But generally speaking, they were folks who were silent, with an occasional like on a picture of someone's kid selling lemonade, or maybe an offer to lend someone a ladder. They were the silent majority, and they loved living in our neighborhood, but didn't really feel like the online space was a place where they could match the culture, because the culture was so negative. 

Regardless of how it can feel sometimes, most of your families are just like them. They're busy, looking for connections, and pretty happy with how things are going. But that doesn't mean you can't go above and beyond. If you think about this silent majority, these quiet but happy parents, as your most important audience, how does this change the way with which you design and moderate your own online spaces? What kinds of questions and engagement could you ask for? This is where the real work happens. 

I've lived in my neighborhood for six years now. And when I think back to how I first perceived our neighborhood community through Nextdoor, it pales in comparison to the years and years of positive experiences I've had since. And some of that change actually happened on Nextdoor. One of my neighbors, Skye, posted once that he was tired of reading through depressing complaints, and started posting weekly threads encouraging folks to post pics of their dogs and their cats. Feline Friday is now by far the most popular weekly post on our group. Then, Suzanne, one of our community board members, saw what Skye was doing, and took it upon herself to start telling the story of different long term neighbors each month. She called this ‘People the Neighborhood’, and I found myself looking forward to it each month. It also surely, but slowly, built a little bit of empathy between us. 

To be clear, there are still complainers on my Nextdoor, but that's no longer the singular experience of our online community. And while that change was gradual at first, something happened last year that really changed how we all felt about our community—both online and in person. 

In April 2023, our neighborhood was shredded by a tornado. It was a 20 minute experience that changed so many of our lives, and although we're all deeply grateful that no one in our neighborhood was killed, it was tragic nonetheless. Homes were lost, and I honestly hardly recognized the formerly tree lined streets that initially made me fall in love with my neighborhood. But some good things have happened too. In the months and, now, year since the tornado, our online space has served as a place to mobilize help, ask for what you need, and share the silver linings of what's going on in your life. While I once knew so many of my neighbors by sight alone, I've now shared a meal with many of them as we collectively have tried to process such a life changing event. In the wake of such a tragedy, this is something we all desired for this community, and our online space facilitated us coming together in so many ways. 

At first, in the weeks after the tornado, we used it to organize debris cleaning. But so many months later, we now use it to share renovation updates and plan our monthly pot looks. 

My point is this: online spaces are tricky, and sometimes it can feel like the negativity is hard to avoid, but for so many, these spaces are vital. 

In an era where busyness and disconnection has become the norm, they can serve as integral spaces to help your school district build a more inclusive version of itself. And all of us, but parents especially, are looking for community and validation. So why not build your online space into the type of community that they can look for for connection? Connection that will last long past the school year.

The SchoolCEO podcast is brought to you by Apptegy. You can find a transcript for this episode and full issues of our magazine at SchoolCEO.com. If you like what you hear, subscribe to our newsletter and get bite sized tips on school marketing sent straight to your inbox. If you follow us on social media, we'll let you know when new episodes drop. 

Season 3 of the SchoolCEO podcast is produced by Tyler Vawser, Britney Keil, Tanner Cox, and Ryan McDonald, with Eileen Beard as contributing editor. Thank you for listening.

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