S1 E35 Learning How to Make an IMPACT in Your District

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 are Learning How to Make an IMPACT in Your District.

◾Internal audience

-All of our internal staff (our personnel) needs to have a strong understanding of who we are, what we stand for, our marks, etc.

-Everyone needs to be on brand

◾Messaging

-Create a messaging guide and include the verbiage you are going to be using- have a brand guide

-Everyone needs to know where to go to get it

◾Purpose

-Why are you putting this all together, hone in on your processes

-What’s trending, what are people looking for when they come to your website

◾Alignment

-Everyone is using the same template

-SOP’s (standard operating procedures) in place for unprecedented times

◾Collaboration

-This is key

-Have shared retreats, shared meetings so we can share how to get that work done together- treat each other well

◾Technology

-Technology is our friend

-2-3 times a year, someone with a lot of expertise show staff how to use technology tools

If you are looking for ways to Master Your Mark and need some help, head to veronicavsopher.com. If you want more info, please contact me or drop questions in the comments and be sure to share this episode with your colleagues! If you have any questions or suggestions for future topics, I'm here to listen. Thanks for tuning in to School Leader Soundbites.

*School Leader Soundbites* is your essential podcast for navigating the complex world of K-12 leadership with confidence and clarity. Hosted by Veronica V. Sopher, a 25-year veteran in school public relations, this podcast delivers actionable insights and innovative strategies to elevate your school's marketing and communications efforts. Veronica V. Sopher is the strategic designer behind several award-winning marketing campaigns and has crafted winning bond and tax rate communications plans. With extensive experience in crisis management—including handling weapons and deaths on campus, natural disasters, and polarized political landscapes—Veronica is an expert passionate about public education as the great equalizer. Join Veronica as she shares her expertise and offers practical tips that will optimize your leadership and support your district's goals. Whether you're looking to enhance community engagement, improve transparency, or turn feedback into actionable results, *School Leader Soundbites* provides the tools and knowledge you need to succeed. Sponsored by K12 Insight, this podcast is more than just a resource—it's a catalyst for meaningful change. Discover how K12 Insight’s solutions can strengthen relationships with parents, students, and staff, fostering a culture of trust and collaboration within your school community. Veronica is also available for consulting and public speaking, specializing in leadership development and executive coaching. Tune in and transform your leadership journey with insights that make a real difference.

Find me at: https://www.veronicavsopher.com/

Social: @VeronicaVSopher

*About Our Sponsor:* K12 Insight partners with schools and districts to build stronger relationships with parents, students, and staff. They believe trust is the foundation of successful education and offer solutions designed to foster engagement, promote transparency, and turn feedback into actionable results. Want to explore how Let's Talk and K12 Insight's comprehensive suite of customer service solutions can amplify your school's efforts and strategic goals? Visit: go.k12insight.com/sopher

Transcript

Veronica Sopher: 0:07

Hello, hello and welcome to School Leader Soundbites. I'm your host, Veronica Sopher and I have the honor of coming to you every week, dropping new episodes of our podcast where we talk about school communications, public relations, marketing and advertising. So if you are looking for some content on how to improve your school district's visibility strategy, you have found the right place. I come to you every week with more than 20 years of experience in school communications, and I love talking about all the things that you need to know to improve your school district's presence in your community. So let's go ahead and get this episode started, but before we do, don't forget to hit subscribe. We don't want you to miss any episodes of school leader sound bites, and if you're watching on YouTube or Facebook, drop us some comments. Let's talk about the impact process. So you've heard me talk about how important it is to master your mark, and how there's different ways that you can really grab a hold of your brand and bring it to life in So I'm going to share with you my Impact Educational System, your district. because I think it's really important for us to address one of the first lines of defense when we're talking about our brand, and that is our internal audience, our personnel, our teachers, our staff, everyone that works for the district, everyone internally, needs to have a very strong and clear understanding of who we are, what our identity is, what we stand for, all the things that make us great are all of our marks and all of the visuals that go along with it. Everybody needs to be on brand, and it starts with educating those folks. So let's talk about how we tap into our internal audiences to really master our mark. And I like to talk about our impact educational process. So with our impact educational process, the first thing we do is we talk about the promise. That's your that's your true north. It is the the thing that pulls you to the center. It's putting together your mission, your vision, all of your guiding documents, your values, any strategic work that your district has done. You pull it all together, and you identify what that true north is. What is that magnetic pull that guides the work that's being done in your district? And so once you have all of that together, you brand it, you make sure it's on posters, it's on social media posts. It's visual throughout all of the places where our staff is working, whether it's teacher lounges and boardrooms and conference room those kinds of things, because you want to make sure that your identity is front and center. It's your promise. It is your brand. And if you have all those guiding documents in place in your system, there's really just it's an easy process to just synthesize it and come up with a true north that will help everyone identify the words that they want to use to guide us back to the center, to the core, of why we exist. So that's why I like to start with the identity, and you want to definitely do that with your internal audiences. So now let's go to the M and impact messaging, creating a messaging guide, making sure that you've got all of the the verbiage that you're going to be using, all of the colors and the fonts, the key phrases, all of those things that pull your messaging together, that they're in one precise place. In other words, you're gonna have a brand guide. You're gonna have a brand guide that anyone can easily access, that they can pull up on your intranet system or even on your website, if that's important for you to have out there, so that people know that your visual elements and the words that are being used to talk about your school system are aligned to the messaging. So mass messaging is so critically important, everyone's got to know where to go to get it. All of the links, all of the marks, are easily downloadable, and they are in lots of different formats. Because what I will tell you is, when we put our marks and our logos and our visuals out there, we need to make sure there's a lot of different ways that people can use them, vertically, horizontally, sometimes we need them with the transparent background. Sometimes we need it all in black or or in full color. So making sure that you have put together all of those different ways that people can access your visual assets. Label them appropriately, because that's really important and easily accessible. This is going to be important for your secretarial staff. For anyone who is putting together PowerPoint presentations, memos, flyers, all of those templates, templates need to be ready and available to folks. So I just like to remind people that labeling is super important, because nine times out of 10, one of the ways that we think something should be labeled is not what other people think. So just have some standardization around that and make sure that they're in multiple places. So if it's your intranet, great. If it's a shared drive, I know a lot of our school districts are in Google Drives. Make sure you've you've named it, and you directing people where to go to get the door, the source document. The other thing I like. Do is remind people that there's an opportunity when you have a brand guide to make it clear on how you want people communicated to. Are you going to capitalize titles like superintendent, Board of Trustees, Assistant Superintendent, Principal. Just being standard across the board is really important. So when you put together your brand guide, use this opportunity to add a couple of pages of how you'd like to see words written so that everyone is consistent. So make sure that you look at that every single year and you update it. And part of the way that you can make sure that everyone knows they have the latest version is by labeling it on the front cover and then also in the footers. So that's another little trick I like to remind people to use when you're doing your onboarding with staff at the beginning of the school year. Invite them to go make sure they have the latest version of your brand guide where it's located, and invite them to download it so that they can access it, have access to it easily on their computer. So now let's talk about the purpose. Okay, your purpose. Why are you putting this all together? What? Where is there clarity? What do people have questions about? What's Trending? What are people looking for when they come to your website? Are there big silos that people are working in that need to be broken down? Are there some rocks that are stopping collaboration from happening and really just understanding workflow. So when you when we start to address the purpose, now that we know who we are, what our message is, now we start talking about the purpose and how it actually flows in the work, then we need to make sure that we've identified what's stopping us from being completely optimized, because a lot of times old way of doing things, doing it the way we've always done it, because that's the way we've always done it, not tapping into new technologies and resources that we have prevent us from being completely optimized, which is really frustrating when we have new team members that were onboarding that might have come from another organization where things were optimized. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with doing things in triplicates. I know we still have districts who use forms that are in duplicate triplicate I'm sorry, but if there's an opportunity for you to digitize that and make it easily embedded into a system you're already using at no additional cost, think about the man hours it's going to save you from going from paper to electronics. So those are the kinds of questions that we ask you to look at when we think about our internal audiences, really honing in on their processes and the purpose in which we're doing it. And then, of course, there's alignment. We need to make sure that everyone's using the same template. So we've got SOPs, those are standard operating procedures. If you don't have SOPs, you need to start thinking about how to get them, because unfortunately, we do have times when we have to close schools and work from home, like we've done in the past. And if we don't have those manuals or their standard operating procedures that dictate what order in which things get done, then it's hard when we change environments to make sure that we're doing it the exact same way and that we're in compliance. So when you bring on new team members, oftentimes I like to ask our leaders to revisit those SOPs and see what needs to be updated. Because we may have changed technology, we may have changed accounts, there may have been a shift in the workflow, so updating those at least once or twice a year is going to save you so much time, especially when you've got a new person coming in, you want them to learn the absolute right way of doing things for your organization and really creating a statement purpose of what that looks like. This is who we are for the district, if you're the HR department, this is who we are for the district. This is what we're about. This is in this is who works in our department, and this is the areas that their expertise in. And making sure that those names and those contact information are readily available for anyone in your organization is super helpful superintendents, as you are onboarding new leaders into your system, remember that we can all use a thought partner, especially as we are onboarding into a new district or into a new role, having a thought partner there to just bounce ideas off of and get some one on one coaching is crucial to optimizing your leader, especially as we deal with budget crunches and polarizing narratives in our community. If you want to learn more about our thought partner Alliance, then make sure you click the link below to give your team that extra support they need with the thought partner Alliance. And then really getting to one of my favorite pieces, which is Alignment and Collaboration. Collaboration is going to be key, and one of the ways that we tap into aligning with the different departments is having shared retreats, shared meetings, opportunities for thought partnership to really identify how we can help each other get that work done together. And I always like to promote. How that is celebrated, letting everyone know that, hey, this department and this department came together to improve this process, which is going to benefit teachers, or it's going to benefit students, or it's going to be make us more efficient, maybe with technology, maybe we're implementing a new ticketing system for phone calls that we get. All those kinds of things, celebrate those collaborations as part of your alignment, and think about how to create cheat sheets for people. Cheat Sheets are one of my favorite things to put together, because they're very visual and they demonstrate flow. So if someone can easily take a look at it, see someone's name, their telephone number, who to call when something happens? Oh, it's not that department. I actually go over here and go down a level. That's a really great way of not only training your internal staff on how to utilize the systems that the district has put into place, but promote how agile you are and how there's multiple ways to get the information that you need. Make sure that those cheat sheets are branded, that their dates. Make sure you put the date on them, so that people know how old they are and when they are updated, change the date and send out a blast, letting everyone know, hey, this new system is being implemented. This is the cheat sheet that's now replacing it. Be sure to print this out and put it in your break room, or print it out and put it next to your your computer. Those are some really great ways to ensure alignment and collaboration. And then we want to always think about one of my one of the things that I think is most effective for school systems to be successful, and that's making sure that customer service is addressed at every level. Now when we think about customer service, the first thing we do is we want to bring in a trainer, and we want to talk about the latest and greatest, and we want to introduce people to the concepts. But what we miss an opportunity at sometimes is starting internally, first making sure that we identify who our internal customers are. It's the departments that we work with on a regular basis. It is working with the various campuses. It is working with the feeder patterns or the other offices in our in our district, making sure that we all are using email signatures that are alike, that have the really important information that we already identified that we need, making sure that when we are sending appointments internally with each other, that we include the location, or we include if, whether or not it's going to be a zoom link or a teams meeting, or is it going to be a Google meet. There's a lot of different ways that we put communications together, especially on people's calendars, but we're not consistent in how we do it. So good customer service internally is making sure that we have a standard operating procedure for put for establishing a meeting and what it's going to look like. Oh, we're going to use a break room. This is the room we're going to be at. Here's the agenda, posting those agendas ahead of time so that someone can either make sure it's pulled up on our laptop or our device or printed, if that's the So lastly, let's talk about the technology. The T in the impact preferred way of communicating. So just thinking about how we process. Technology is our friend, the idea of using a can support each other internally, when we say customer voicemail, about using out of office responses on our email, service, instead of just thinking about dealing with our providing meeting links, all the different ways that we can utilize technology, some of us are really great at doing it, external customers, which that's very important as well. But when and others of us aren't so great at doing it. So I always like to we think about an impact process and how we want to really recommend that two or three times a year, someone with a lot address some of the issues that are happening internally in our of expertise provide little webinars, or maybe in person lunch and learns in a conference room, and show everyone else how organization, it starts with treating each other well, by to tap into the tools that already exist in this. giving each other all the information we need to be Technology that we have. One of the reasons why I really like successful when we're collaborating, that's going to doing this is because it allows for documentation, and it allows be really important, and then making sure that there's a for us to track what's happening. So if we know there was a meeting on one particular day, someone provided the feedback loop in in in lots of different ways that we can agenda, then there was a follow up. All of that is trackable, connect, whether it's through surveys or I know a lot of and we can easily go back and find that information, versus companies have resources out there that were that were sifting through a whole lot of emails that maybe not everyone got copied on, or maybe just a few people got copied on. So tapping into some of them are free, some of them are paid. tapping into someone that's got their pulse on what's happening Some of them are embedded in the system that we're always that and the technology that your district is using is going to be we're using. Sometimes it's just great to have a good old really, really important. So if you think about using all of these things and starting to really make a difference in how fashioned exit ticket after a meeting. So make sure you internally you are addressing your staff, it's going to make a provide people an opportunity to write down questions that they big difference. Really build trust and be ready for you guys have. Make sure that when you are meeting, we have a parking to impact everyone outside of the system. So remember, with the impact system, we want to be crystal clear on our identity. lot available. Someone's writing notes down if questions come up, We want to make sure that our messaging is on point. It's put them on the parking lot, and then make sure that someone is branded. Everyone is clear on who our purpose is. We are assigned to revisit them. Thank everyone for coming to the aligning. We are making sure that we collaborate. Customer service is a priority for us, and then, of course, tapping meeting electronically and any follow ups that were included, into technology. So with that, I'm going to end this episode of School Leader that's another great way to amp up the customer service Soundbites. I hope you found this very, very helpful. I've internally. This is all working towards building trust, because got some great blogs on my wife's website, at veronicasopher.com that might help assist in some of these our brand is our promise, and if your promise is what you say, ideas. So if you are looking for more content like this, then make sure you hit subscribe. I don't want you to miss any it's going to be that people have to trust it. And one of the episodes of school eater sound bites. If you have any questions, you can just drop me some comments on Facebook or most important ways to do that is starting internally first. LinkedIn, and I'll be sure to slip up.