Developing Engaging Newsletters and Bulletins

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 a topic close to my heart: Developing Engaging Newsletters and Bulletins.

-The Power of Newsletters and Bulletins 
-In our digital age, newsletters and bulletins remain powerful tools for connecting with our school communities. They're not just about sharing news; they're about building relationships and fostering a sense of community.

-Crafting Engaging Content 
-Know Your Audience
-Content Variety
-Visual Appeal
-Consistency
-Interactive Elements

-Best Practices for Distribution and Feedback 
-Distribution Channels
-Feedback Mechanisms
-Analytics

-Success Story

Engaging newsletters and bulletins are about more than sharing information; they're about building a connected and informed school community. If you've enjoyed this episode, share it with your colleagues, and if you have any questions or want to suggest a topic, feel free to reach out.

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

*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. 

Transcript

Hello, hello and welcome back to School Leader Soundbites, where we delve into the essentials of K12 leadership and communications. I'm Veronica V. Sopher, your guide to navigating the world of school communications. Today we're going to be focusing on a topic close to my heart developing engaging newsletters and bulletins. If you are watching on Facebook or LinkedIn, drop some comments so I can connect with you. And if you are listening on the podcast, make sure you hit subscribe. We don't want you to miss any episodes of school leader soundbites. 

So let's start talking about the power of newsletters and bulletins. You know, in our digital age newsletters and bulletins remained a powerful tool and communicating with parents and our school communities. They're just not about sharing news, they are about building relationships and fostering a sense of community. We want to get our news on demand, we do not come home and sit down in front of the TV for the five o'clock or six o'clock news. And we're not directly going to websites to get information, we want that information in our inbox, we want it in our text messages, we want it where it is we are going so the key is delivering a newsletter and content that appeals to the right audience and the way they want to be communicated to, you know, in some recent data that was pulled together from 18 to 19. That school year 2018-2019. School communication with parents was most commonly communicated through school-wide newsletters. So that includes memos and emails. 89% of parents reported for the 2018-19 school year that they got most of their information via newsletters. And that's the most recent information that we have. So it demonstrates how important it is to leverage your newsletters as a communications tool. Yes, they still want to receive text messages. Yes, they still want to receive information in the school folders that come in, especially at the elementary school level. But the most important way that you can tap into the way our parents communicate is through digital communication, and they prefer newsletters. So let's think about this. Let's think about what a well-crafted newsletter can do to turn passive readers into active community members, we want to transition from them just reading our information to doing something with it. That's what we call engagement. And that's why it's relevant. In other words, parents and our readers want to know what's in it for them? How is this going to help them? How is it going to help them with their students with the community as a whole? How is this going to help them support what's happening in their classrooms, on their campuses and in their community? You know, homeowners without students in our schools are just as important. So how are we leveraging newsletters to communicate with that group of people? Let's talk about how that content can really engage them and how we can start driving ambassadorship. 

So there's a couple of things we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about knowing your audience, knowing how to connect our content to them. In other words, content variety. We're gonna talk about visual appeal and why that's important. Consistency, and then interactive elements, those are all going to be really important. So knowing your audience, understanding what their needs are, what their interests are, and knowing how they're connecting with us, whether it's as a parent or as a student, or as a staff member, or even as an elected official, that's going to be important for them to know too. And then making sure that there's a variety of content, mixing it up with interviews with successful stories. With upcoming events, calendars are important. Having helpful resources, having links, having videos driving them to other places, anytime you can boast that SEO, or really make a difference in what's happening in your search engine optimization process is going to be important. So make sure you're tapping into those resources. How you do that is making sure that it's visually appealing. There's lots of layouts, there's whitespace, you're being really smart with the video content and the graphics infographic style stand out, having those pull-out quotes are important. Nobody wants to sit and just read line after line after line of content, we need to make sure that it's visually appealing. So if you've got a great template that you can use, make sure that you are mixing it up a little bit. So people aren't just looking at the same format over and over. Some folks are using Canva or swarm. There's a whole bunch of tools out there that I highly recommend as long as you're mixing it up because the AI needs to be able to get disrupted when it's looking for content. And so you disrupt it with videos with art, even using student art student voice, again, using those pull-out graphics and when you're thinking about photos, make sure that photos are appealing to the parents, that they're not just group shots taken from far away. But we are using some of those tips that we learned in journalism school, and using photos that tell a story that show facial expressions that really appeal to folks. Make sure more importantly, that we're using diversity as one of our measures. So if you've got students from athletics and fine arts, making sure make sure that you throw in some academics in their robotics, make sure that we're highlighting the debate club, we want to talk about all the diverse things that are happening, maybe floral design, or auto mechanics. And then if you've got students that are in your special ed programs, tap into what they're doing as well so that parents can see what we're doing for all students in our district. It's just really important. And you can do that visually, you don't have to use just words for that. 

Then consistency, I talked about consistency earlier. But making sure that your newsletters are coming in on a regular schedule, that there's a predictable schedule, that they know that it's going to happen on a particular day of the week, maybe your newsletter is going to come out on Friday afternoons, or maybe it comes out on Wednesdays, just building habits are going to be important, we have to train our community on what to expect from us training is half of the battle. If they know it's coming, they're going to look forward to it. Now the trick with that is if you skip a week, they're gonna know and they're likely going to reach out and give you feedback on that. So make sure that if you are skipping a week, you let them know ahead of time, "hey, the district is gonna be closed next week so we won't be providing a newsletter. But for up-to-date information, check out our website or check out our social media posts," train your community on how you're going to communicate with them. Then those interactive elements are going to be important, include quizzes or games include surveys, give them a feedback form so that you know how you that they're using the information, ask them Are you enjoying this, this newsletter provide you the information you were looking for, and then use that data to drive changes because if you are using that data, to change your newsletter, then they're going to realize that you care about what they think and that you're doing something about it. So take advantage of their engagement while you've got them there and then use letter, we've got to be able to turn our passive readers into engaged readers. It's all about engagement, because we want to build trust with our community. 

So before we dive a little bit deeper, I want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor, K12 Insight, they have an amazing platform called Let's Talk. It's one I have used in several of my districts. They support school leader sound bites because they know how important it is to engage with our community. They've got amazing tools that can streamline your communications, bringing you efficiency and clarity to everything that you're doing with your district. So make sure that you tap into K 12 insight they are game changers. If you want more information, go to K 12 insight.com/SOPHER to learn more about what they can do for your new district. I'm happy to talk about how they helped me in all the districts I've been in. Now back to tips on developing engaging newsletters. 

Best Practices include distribution channels, feedback mechanisms, and then analytics. Let's talk about how your newsletters are driving your analytics and your feedback. And then how you are connecting with your distribution channels. We know that newsletters can come via email, you can send them a link, but you can also text them a link. Use your school website to highlight how the newsletter is being delivered to them, but how they can go and get it on demand if they're not signed up for automatic emails and automatic text messages. And then also make sure your social media is encouraging them to sign up for your newsletters. Because if you've got readers who do not have students in your district, they're going to miss all of your communications. So those parents or those community members that don't have students in your system, maybe their parents of school-aged kids that are in private school or homeschool, they're gonna want to connect with you. So make sure you give them an easy way to sign up for your newsletter. Maybe it's using QR codes on yard signs. Or maybe it's using QR codes in your local newspaper so that as your community is reading, those articles are connecting with you in different ways. You want to make sure that all your distribution channels are still able to connect folks so that you can get them on your email list. And then we talked a little bit about feedback mechanisms. I highly encourage you to have a call to action and every one of your newsletters. A Call-to-Action simply means that you're asking them to do something with this information like click here, give us feedback. Share this newsletter with someone and it's really important to track this data- analytics can really drive and improve the messaging that you're creating. tracked your open rates know how long they're staying on your newsletter page. Are they clicking through on all of them? Are they just watching your videos, this will actually give you a lot of information on how this particular group of people is using your newsletters. And this is going to be important as you think about election season. 

You know, a lot of school districts across the country are going to have elections at different times of year, not just in November, but they might have them in May, or maybe they may have off-cycle elections. But as those folks are going to the polls, you're going to want to drive information to them. And if you've got a strong newsletter email list, then you're going to be able to communicate with them and the times that you want to communicate. That's why it's important to also have different email lists for maybe elected officials so that you can keep them informed of what's happening in your district, especially as you think about the legislative sessions happening in your particular state. So tap into them. Another tip that I have for you is making sure that they are all branded. All your newsletters need to be branded, whether they're School campus newsletters or district newsletters. So when I think about how Ivy's newsletters and the districts that I've been in, I have oftentimes use them as a marketing tool. And that's been really successful. So when I have used newsletters as a marketing tool, I've made sure that I had different distribution channels. So I had a list of parents who were in our district with school-aged children that were not enrolled in my school district, and I had those email lists. I also had a list of folks who used to be in our district. So they know a little bit about us, but they've maybe chosen an online school, or homeschooling. And then I had a list of what I would consider those 65 and older but they weren't necessarily 65 and older. They were folks who qualified for our Gold Card, which in the districts that I've been in was a program for our community over a certain age to come into the district provided their contact information, and then have a card issued to them that gave him free admission at all athletic events and fine art fine arts activities. So when we put together a newsletter just for them, I usually did it quarterly, I highlighted whatever they were interested in, whether it was fine arts or athletics, and then I also invited them to connect with us in a lot of different ways. And that was really successful. So when I got them to engage with us, we were able to tap into them know who those people were, see how long they were on our website or in our newsletter, and then drive more information to them as election season came. So that's another way to really connect with them. And that was a key insight for my teams. As we thought about different projects that we were that we were investing in, especially in the communication space, so make sure that you share your videos with them. You share testimonials, you share great photos and great successes. Everyone wants to know that their tax dollars are really being used wisely and that the district is a good steward. So make sure you also share some building progress and infrastructure progress whenever you get a chance. 

So as we wrap up this episode, remember that engaging newsletters are a great way to not only share information, but to create ambassadors to build trust, which is one of the fent foundations that you need for a successful school district. We want to connect those passive readers into engaged readers, readers who are sharing your content, who are connecting with you who see themselves in what's happening in the district who are proud of what's happening in the district. And they ultimately become true ambassadors for the district. So make sure you're giving them information. So as I wrap up this episode, make sure that you connect with us share information with other colleagues in your district and know that School Leader Soundbites is here to support you and all of your communication needs. So if you have any questions, drop some comments for us. Send me a message you can find me at Veronica at veronicavsopher.com. And we look forward to sharing more information with you in future episodes. Until then, happy engaging.