S1 E4- K-12 Crisis Communication: Strategies and Best Practices

Welcome to School Leader Soundbites, a podcast dedicated to empowering K-12 leaders with the latest insights and strategies in marketing and communications! Today, we're focusing on K-12 Crisis Communication: Strategies and Best Practices, a critical aspect of school leadership.

• The Importance of Crisis Communication
  • In the unpredictable world of education, being prepared for crises is non-negotiable. Effective crisis communication can mean the difference between chaos and calm, misinformation and clarity in the school environment. It's about creating a two-way street where dialogue and collaboration lead to shared success.
• Developing a Crisis Communication Plan
  • Identify Crisis Team
  • Define Scenarios
  • Communication Channels
  • Key Messages
  • Training and Drills
• Best Practices in Crisis Communication
  • Transparency
  • Timeliness
  • Empathy
  • Consistency
  • Post-Crisis Evaluation
• Success Story

Remember that effective crisis communication is a blend of preparation, clarity, and empathy. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your fellow educators. And for any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out.

Connect with Veronica here:

https://www.veronicavsopher.com/

Social: @VeronicaVSopher

K12 Insight partners with schools and districts to build stronger relationships with parents, students, and staff. They believe that trust is the foundation of successful education, and their solutions are designed to foster engagement, promote transparency, and turn feedback into actionable results.

Want to explore the impactful ways Let's Talk and K12 Insight's comprehensive suite of customer service solutions can amplify your school's efforts and strategic goals? Get an in-depth look at how these tools can benefit your district, visit go.k12insight.com/sopher

Transcript

Veronica Sopher: 0:07

Hello, hello and welcome to School Leader Soundbites the go-to place for K12 leaders looking to enhance their school communication strategies. I'm your host, Veronica V Sopher, here to guide you through another insightful episode. Today we're going to be focusing on K 12 crisis communication strategies, best practices. You know, this is an important critical aspect of what we do as school communication leaders. And it includes being prepared. It includes making sure we know how to communicate what to communicate, when to communicate, and oftentimes it can be really overwhelming. So we're going to break this process down. Let's talk about the importance of crisis communication. First of all, it's unpredictable, we know that it's a non-negotiable to be prepared, effective crisis communication can really mean the difference between chaos and calm, and misinformation and clarity. It can really divide a community if we're not doing well, or it can really unite a community if we're doing it well. So crisis communication is the true test to how prepared we are to connect with our community in a crisis. And it's going to be important as we have this conversation, to think about what you're doing in your district, and what you could be doing in your district to improve that process because we all know that practice makes perfect and we can all use a little bit of strategy and improving whatever it is we have in place. So we're going to break it down for you. Before we do that, let's talk a little bit about what we know and what the data shows. So the state of K12 Customer Experience report that was recently put out by K12 Insight, which is our podcast sponsor, broke down some of these questions, it was really interesting to see that they had about 500 responses from national school and district leaders, so it included superintendents and other district leadership. While 90% of them said that community trust was important, because it absolutely is. Preventing a PR crisis was listed as one of the lowest priorities with only 63% of school leaders agreeing that it was important. So there's a little bit of disparity between the trust that we all agree that we need to be successful as a school district, and how important it is to prevent a PR crisis. And so let's talk about how we can narrow that gap a little bit, because it's really going to be important as we look at what's been happening in the K12 space. So personally, when it comes to crisis's and crises in the K 12 space, for me, it's not a question of if, but when, from my experience, it doesn't matter what size your district is, where you're located, whether you're an urban district or a rural district, it doesn't matter how many students you have, you can guarantee that there will be a crisis. How it is handled is going to determine the success of the school schools and school administration's tenure. Because we can easily earn trust in this process, or we can just as easily lose trust. And that's important when we are going to the taxpayers for maybe a bond referendum or a tax increase. So there's always implications down the line of how we handle a crisis, especially when we're talking about loss of life, or a tragedy. So we just need to plan for my experience, planning is key. And how we communicate that to all of our stakeholders is going to be really important. If you're looking at your plan, there's a couple of things I want to breakdown for you developing a crisis communication plan is not just about having a plan that's on paper. It's one where everyone knows what their role is. They know what the expectation is. And they've got the end in mind. They know that we're going to debrief that we're going to look at every aspect of the crisis. And we're going to take it apart and make sure that we know what to do next time to make it less impactful on the campus or on the district in particular. The first step in having the crisis communication plan ready to go is identifying your crisis team establishing who is going to be on that crisis communications team. Is it your commander-in-chief? Is it going to be your superintendent that's going to be the spokesperson? Is it your department head? Is it going to be the communications person. What if you don't have a communications person, maybe you're in a district that doesn't have a designated position to be the PIO, your Public Information Officer, because many of our districts don't have that position. For districts that do, they usually have someone who's trained who has done this kind of work before who is used to working with your emergency management folks, but for districts that maybe might be relying on the superintendent or even a principal, there are a couple of things that you need to know. First thing you need to do, is make sure that that person has had some training, that they understand what the expectations are not only from parents, but for staff, and for the media in particular, and that we've got a clear process for them. In other words, there's a blueprint, we know exactly what it is that person is going to be doing. That's what we call defining the roles that people are going to play. And then also making sure that we've done the same thing with the various scenarios have we defined those scenarios? Do we know on the flowchart, what it's going to look like if it's a natural disaster, like a tornado, or a flood, maybe a lightning strike, because we've had that happen too. Maybe it's a fire that's happened, or maybe there's a gas leak in the area, or maybe it's a security concern. We're talking about an intruder, or even a student who maybe has a firearm, defining what those scenarios look like. And our communication plan is going to be really important as we move through how we take those next steps. Sometimes people even have a chart, if it's not a flow chart, it's maybe a flip chart. So, as we prepare for our crises, knowing which scenario applies to us, sometimes there won't be a defined scenario. So we have to piece them together, because we know that preparing is key but sometimes we can't prepare for every scenario exactly the way we would want to. So we will have to use a little bit of ingenuity, as we are working through those different scenarios. Then when you're developing your crisis communication plan, it's gonna be important that we have our communication channels identified, knowing the most effective channel for that particular crisis disseminated information quickly, inaccurately, and that's going to oftentimes be determined by the type of campus, whether it's an elementary school campus or a secondary campus, or maybe it's going to be an early childhood campus- they're going to have different ways that they're going to need to be communicated to based on that crisis. Maybe it's going to be text, email, or phone calls, having those communication channels defined, and knowing when you're going to use those channels is going to be really important. So as you're thinking through those scenarios, identify the types of communication channels that you might be implementing, that's going to go a long way. Because in essence, what you're doing is you're streamlining it, and you are helping the person that's going to be hitting sending those communication buttons, helping them to know to which communication channels to push. And those key messages are going to have to be concise, they're going to need to be clear for the different stakeholders. So parents are going to need to know one piece of information, while students are going to need a different piece of information. Oftentimes, staff are going to need to know all the information, as well as sharing what messages you're sharing with parents, so that the staff can help you reiterate, and then of course, the information that you're going to share with the media. So those key messages are going to need to be defined, depending on who the target audiences, and then again, defining how we're going to communicate those messages to those different groups of people. So how you go about doing that is going to be determined by the training and the drills that you do. So regular training, regular drills, and tabletop drills are going to be crucial for ensuring that everyone knows the role that they play. Here's another consideration, what happens if someone's out on leave, maybe they're out on medical leave, or maybe they're out sick, that particular day, having a backup person is also going to be important. So as you're thinking about those drills, and you've identified maybe the principal or the assistant principal, as being the person who puts together those communications and puts them out on your emergency management systems, make sure there's a backup person, and that person has the passwords, because oftentimes we get tripped up when we don't have all the current passwords. And make sure those passwords have been tested. Because sometimes what happens is, we get on to that particular platform. And it's been so long since we've logged on, that those passwords have to be changed. Quickly, in a hurry, we're changing all those passwords. And maybe that link is being sent to someone else on the team and we don't have access to their email. So pretty regularly checking in on all your platforms, and making sure that we've got current passwords is gonna be really important. There's been a couple of times where teams have been halted and challenged because we haven't been able to communicate quickly. So just make sure that we've got all of those things in place as part of our drilling. Because we've got to be able to define those scenarios. Know which communication channels we're going to be using. We know who the crisis communications person is going to be. We know what the key messages is going to be. And we've trained it regularly over and over. That's going to be really important as we are dealing with a crisis. Before we continue and start talking about some best practices, let's take a brief moment to thank our sponsor, K12 Insight for supporting this amazing podcast. You know, K12 Insight helps school districts build trust, which is what we're talking about, and developing strong relationships with communities through superior customer service and their amazing platform, Let's Talk. It's a platform that I have used in multiple districts. And it has been instrumental and making sure that we're communicating in a way that holds the staff accountable, and then also gives people information in real-time, especially in a crisis. So if you haven't talked to them recently, about any of their products, I highly recommend you do, especially Let's Talk because it can come in handy during a crisis, for sure. So if you want more information, go visit k12insight.com/sopher, and make sure you connect with them. All right, so let's get back to best practices in crisis communication. So a couple of things we're going to talk about

next: 10:51

Transparency, timeliness, empathy, consistency, and post-crisis evaluation. Those are all important to crisis communication. So going back to transparency, let's talk about what that looks like. Well, it's going to look different for each community. Because each administration, a school district has set the standard of what transparency looks like, looks like and each community has set their own expectations. So whatever those expectations are for your community, we want to make sure that we're living up to it. At the end of the day, we want this process to build trust, especially during challenging times. So if your community expects you to send out information, repeatedly through multiple channels do so that's what good transparency looks like in your community, in your community. But if you are in a district, where parents expect to be told as much information as you have, at a certain amount of time, then honor that, because we've trained our communities on how they want to be communicated to. Being transparent means that you are honoring your community's expectations about communication, especially in a crisis. Timeliness is going to be really important. It is essentially the key to your success. Being responsive as quickly as you can with what information you have is going to be best. The sooner you communicate the last room, the less room there is for rumors, because we know that rumors can really hinder what it is we're trying to do and the safety that we're trying to have on a campus, especially in a crisis. Timeliness means that you are sending information out quickly, even if the answer is we don't have new information yet. But we're going to update you in the next 15 minutes, or we're going to have a press conference in the next 30 minutes. Timeliness need means that you are connecting with people and reassuring them of the information that you do have the facts, even if it means you have to reiterate, maybe you use the statement like, as previously communicated, we are working with law enforcement to get you the latest update. And always timestamp your communications. I like to start every communication with a

timestamp: As of 3: 13:04

05pm, as of 3:25pm, as of 4:45pm. That way, that way parents know that you are constantly engaged with them, and you are giving them the information that you have. And sometimes there is an update. And so you want to make sure that they feel confident that they're getting the latest information. So timeliness is key. I always have to remind our administrators that empathy is going to be incredibly important, especially when there is a loss of life, show empathy. Remember that you are addressing scared parents, scared students and even scared staff. The more they know that you care, the better. So most of us use some boilerplate language like student safety is our number one priority in the district. If that's boilerplate information that you have to make sure you open your communications and your communications with that demonstrates some empathy. Maybe you want to share a resource that you've got available to them in your community, like maybe some counseling support that's out there. Maybe you're working with the Red Cross or some other nonprofit to provide support. Demonstrate empathy by giving parents information and resources or even your community. Make sure you're consistent. Consistency means that no matter what channel you're communicating on, the message is generally the same. It doesn't need to be copy and pasted the same because what's going to be appropriate for X or Instagram might be completely different than what's appropriate for your website. But as long as the information is consistent, then you have demonstrated that you are being transparent, that Then post-crisis evaluation after crisis, you want to you're responding quickly, that you're demonstrating empathy and that no matter what channel parents are getting their information from, or the communities getting their evaluate your response, what worked, what didn't work, what information from, that it's consistent. Make sure that you are also driving folks back to the main hub. So maybe your website is where you're giving a lot of detail. So your social media channels need to be guiding folks back to your types of continuous improvements are going to be important to website, if that's what you're, if that's what you're doing. And I highly recommend that because you've got a little bit more control over the time stamping. And you can oftentimes provide additional links, you can provide maps, you can provide a this process. Every time you have a crisis, you need to go lot of other information that don't always translate as well on social media as they do on your website. back, make sure that you're reviewing what worked, and make sure that you have an improvement plan that you can implement into your next drills, and your next training. I like to work with our principals pretty regularly in whatever district I'm in. So every month, I request time on our leadership trainings that we have, to do some tabletop drills with our principals. And then I also make sure we drill that down to the You know, I've dealt with a lot of crisis throughout my 20 some careers in schools. And the ones where we lose life are hardest, especially when there is a death on a campus. I was thinking back assistant principals, and at least once or twice a year with to one of the hardest ones we dealt with, when we had a suicide on the campus. Unfortunately, the suicide was in the building, in a bathroom. It was an isolated incident, a our clerical staff. We can't miss an opportunity with our firearm was used. So there were some additional security measures that we had to put in place. But one of the things that we did that was, I would say, most important for our clerical staff or anyone answering the phone to train students protection and their safety is, evacuating the building, and making sure that the building was secure, that there were no other firearms on the campus. Before we had to have the students come back in though, we them on where to go for crisis communication response on the had communicated to parents in a timely manner. We told them what to expect. We told them how we're going to be dismissing, what our bus riders were going to be experiencing, what our car riders were going to be experiencing, how the flow of types of information that our parents need to know. And where traffic was going to be transitioned a little bit differently for the day. But we'd also communicated that very clearly with maps with our media. So our media was super helpful in helping parents know how we were going to be to go for that information. Do not miss an opportunity. Because dismissing for the day and what the building was going to look like. You know, one of the challenges that we had in practice that we learned, is that for kids that were driving, they weren't able to come back into the building to access oftentimes, I've had folks say that the information on the their backpacks, or their purses are where they have their keys because most students didn't take their car keys with them. So we had to develop a process for allowing, not only students, website was great, and the information we sent out, but but staff, to come back into the building to get their car keys so that they could leave in their vehicles. So what we learned from that incident is that we've got to prepare for all of those different scenarios. Luckily, we were able when they call the campus, the campus didn't know what to say. to have a strong response team on the campus. So the next day, we were able to make sure that they were counselors there in the building, not only for our students, but for our staff, but also for some of the family members. So when it's a And that is where we lose trust. Anytime we lose trust, we're high-profile student who maybe was an athlete or in the fine arts, any type of loss like that can also be seriously difficult for the campus to address. So making sure that you've pulled losing an opportunity to create ambassadorship and support for all your resources available to you is going to be important. And then communicating that over and over and over. And I did use a tool. In fact, we use Let's Talk to help parents know we had an identified button on our home page that said "if your student our districts. So make sure we're tying up all the pieces or you need support, click here" and we will able to immediately connect them to resources. So anytime there's a tragedy on campus, just know that the more often we communicate resources, the more trust that we're building with the community. with everyone in our district. They need to know that we care about our students, we care about our staff, and we're here to support them in any type of situation even if it involves loss of life, or even if it's a natural disaster. So make sure that you are looking at your crisis communication plan that you have practiced it that you know exactly who's going to be doing what, when they're going to be doing it, how they're going to be doing it and different samples and templates of your communications. And don't forget to have them ready to be translated, if you need them translated depending on your community. We're going to be working with transparency, we're going to be mindful of timeliness, demonstrating empathy, we're going to make sure that we're consistent and we're always going to make sure that we are evaluating and anytime you can use a tool to evaluate, you'll be able to look back at your analytics and see where you've got some growth opportunities because we want to make sure that we take advantage of every crisis to learn and grow to do better for our students and for our staff. So as we wrap up, remember that effective crisis communication is a blend of preparation, clarity, and most important, empathy. So I hope you found this episode helpful. Share it with your fellow educators. If you did, make sure you hit subscribe. We don't want you to miss any episode of school leader sound bites. And if you have any questions or topics that you'd like me to address, make sure you drop them in the comments reach out to us. You can always reach me on my website at veronicavsopher.com. And thank you so much for joining me on School Leaders Soundbites on Veronica V Sopher and I look forward to connecting with you again. And until then, happy communicating