Master Your Mark System - How to Improve Your District Comms, Culture & Processes

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 discussing my Master Your Mark System - How to Improve Your District Comms, Culture & Processes.

◾Impact

-You internal audience is your biggest group of people who can tell your story well (staff- teachers, paraprofessionals, etc)

-Look at the blueprint for communication and messaging

-Does everyone know what our strategic plan looks like?

◾Reach

-External audiences- make sure you know who your target audience is

-Understand how your external audience communicates with your district and where they go for information

-Consistency is key

◾Trust

-How to connect with thought partners

-Make sure everyone is using the right kind of content at the right time of year

-Timing leadership messages is really important

◾Win

-All about bringing people in for success and creating a welcoming, winning environment

-We talk about how important it is to create and foster a culture

-This is where we make sure people feel welcome and part of the team

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.

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

Social: @VeronicaVSopher

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*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

Veronica Sopher: 0:01
All right, so let's talk about the master your mark system. You know, the last couple of months, I have been traveling the country. I have been working with school districts of all different sizes, with all different kinds of student populations. And there are a couple of things that are just the same, no matter where you go. One of them is that we are all trying to make sure we're doing the best we can for students. And to a lot of us have challenges that are out of our control, whether it's school finance or whether it's a national narrative that it's made its way down into our community, whatever it is, those challenges look about the same no matter where you go, and so this is where I have come in and really tried to fine tune some of the solutions that districts can start implementing to make sure that we are addressing those issues. So let's go ahead and dive right into the master your mark system. So after 20 some years in public education, specifically in communications, I realized that there was a strategy that we really needed to hone in on to make sure we were doing all the things we could from a lot of different perspectives with a lot of different disciplines and a lot of different departments, to make sure we were mastering our mark. And that's really how I came up with the system. It's a proven K 12 leadership framework. That's really what it is. We do this in the academic space. So all you superintendents and academic folks who are really in the curriculum part this is really using the same kind of framework. It's a leadership framework, and it revolves around four key processes that I want to talk about. So today I'm going to give you an overview of the master your mark system and how easy it is to engage with my team and I, or use something similar to make sure that you are aligning all of your work to leverage your brand. Because at the end of the day, your brand is your promise, and you want to make sure that you are leveraging it to the best you can, to the best of your ability. So let's talk about what that looks like I've developed four processes that are trademark that school districts can utilize at any given time by just jumping into the process and making sure that the framework is robust. So let's talk about those four process. The first one is impact. Second one is reach, the third one is win, and the fourth one is trust. So when you are working with my team and I, we're going to bring you into the master your mark system in one of those areas. So impact is specifically around internal audiences. And you've heard me talk about the importance of working with your internal audience. Those are your staff members, your teachers, your paraprofessionals, anyone who volunteers in your system, and sometimes even even your students. It depends on how your district is put together, but in the impact education process, what we do is we arm all of our internal audiences with information. We do some research, we do some true north discovery. We look at the blueprint that we have for our communication and our messaging. Does everyone know what our strategic plan looks like? Is it something that they can repeat? Is it something more importantly that they can explain? Is it something that they really believe is going to move the district forward? So when you invest time in explaining what your district's guiding documents are, then it's easier to create ambassadors who can go out and share that with you. So we do a lot of different work inside of the impact education process. We that's where we do team buildings. Oftentimes you'll hear me talk about the importance of team building and retreats and making sure that your teams separate from the work for just a little bit, to make sure that there's alignment, that there was a shared understanding, that there was a shared vision. And so sometimes you have to do some work like auditing. So if any of you have ever gone through a communication audit, then you know that we take a look at all of your digital content, all of your collateral material, everything that's out there, the way you engage with stakeholders, the way you engage with elected officials. So we really take a deep dive into the materials that you're sharing with elected officials that you're sharing with stakeholders. We even take a look at your slide decks from board meetings and say, Is this aligned to your brand? Does this represent who you are and what you're doing, and how does it align with your strategic plan or your strategic blueprint, or how does it reinforce your your guiding documents? And if it's not, how does it so yes, that work is very important for newsletters and for digital content and your website. But let's dive a little bit deeper and talk about how we're presenting information when we go to conferences. What does that look like? Is that information branded? So in the impact education process, we really dive into that work. And, you know, I'll probably do another podcast to dive into some of those areas, because I think they can be a podcast all of themselves, but your internal audience is your biggest group of people who can. Tell your story and tell it well. So we got to make sure we're investing in our internal audiences with our impact education process, and then we go to the reach process. And the reach process is for our external audiences, and that's making sure that we know who our target audiences are. Is there clarity in the message? Do we know who they are when they're on social media, when they open emails, what type of emails do they open? What videos are they watching? Where are they expressing their concerns on? What platforms are we out there? Are they using our feedback loops that we've presented to them, or are they ignoring them? So really understanding how your external audience communicates with your district and where they want to go to communicate with you, and then we assess their targets and make sure that we know what their goals are, or you know what trends are really popping up in their communication. Are we seeing a lot of parents concerned about transportation? Are we seeing parents concerned about accessing their students grades or better understanding the tardy policy, anything like that. So really diving deep and reaching out to them so that we can support what it is they're doing. And again, that's something that we can assist you with, and really doing that communication strategy that's going to push all of those levers together to make sure that we are providing exactly what our external audience needs. And just like you heard me talk about in the impact education process, with working with our internal audiences, your messages need be clear, concise and readily available to them so that they can share them with other people. So if you are reaching out with external newsletters, make sure that they're timely, that they're going out at the same time you said they were going to go out to the same group of people that you said they were going to go to using the same calendar, right? So we don't want to be inconsistent. If you say you're going to have a monthly calendar, don't send it out once every two to six weeks. You want to be consistent. If there's content that you know you need to get out there, and it's not quite time for a newsletter, then give them a little bit of extra go the extra mile, or that one extra degree by providing bonus content or maybe a bonus newsletter. But don't brand it the same, because then it's going to demonstrate inconsistency. And at the end of the day, consistency is key with our external audiences, so making sure that we put that we put that information out there is going to be really, really important. And then the third part of our master your mark leadership framework is really about trust, and it's called the trust partner, the trust process. And in it, we talk about partnerships. We talk about how to connect with thought partners, with our volunteers, making sure that people's branding our leaders are branded correctly, that our board is branded correctly, that our superintendent is branded correctly. We make sure that the leadership has a line of messaging on the social media content. We make sure that everyone is using the right type of content at the right time of year, because we know that's important when it comes to school finance, when it comes to testing, when it comes to graduation, and even just recruiting talent, right if we want to recruit talent and have the best teachers applying for our district timing, our leadership's messages are going to be really, really important. So in the trust process, we work together, we have a thought partnership Alliance, which really helps bring content to our leaders. So if you're looking for templates, if you're looking for a vault of resources and courses, that's certainly something that we can give you access to. So we're really excited about the trust process, because it becomes an opportunity for you to actually start executing on some of these things, and you've heard me say over and over, how incredibly important it is that you batch work. So during the summer months, we should have been working on our content to talk about inclement weather and delays and outages when it comes to electricity or maybe we have a water issue on a campus, all of those posts and messages should have been batched all at one time. I like to take a half day to do that myself and really plan out for the year, tag them appropriately in our filing system, so that if we do have an issue and water is turned off on a campus and we have to bring in bottled waters, or there's something that we have to address when it comes to lunch, making sure all those messages are already templated out is going to save you so much time, but it doesn't do you any good if you haven't labeled the files correctly. So make sure that you have all those files labeled correctly, and, more importantly, that you've shared that with someone. So not only do your administrative assistants know where to go get the information, but maybe your assistant principals also know where to go get that information, because oftentimes our campus leaders are not on campus when we need those kinds of messages. So making sure that everyone's trained on that. Now, if you miss the summer months, it's not too late when. School. School gets rolling, and we have some downtime. Take some of those professional development days that you have set aside if you haven't brought in some facilitators to do some team building. Then make sure that you use that time wisely internally to create those processes, because the trust process is really, really important. And then let's talk about when. When is all about bringing folks in for success, making sure that we are supporting innovation, supporting new ways of communicating and creating a welcoming environment. So in the win process, we talk about culture, and this is really relevant for those of our for those of you who are over human resources or talent, and you're talking about onboarding your staff. What are you doing for Culture Day? What are you doing to make them feel welcome? How are you making sure that they feel like they're a part of the team? Are they getting the t shirt that everyone else got at convocation because they got hired in a couple weeks late? Are we making sure that they've got the signature line for their email just right to introduce them to the campus or to the department. That's really, really important. So inside of the win process, we talk about how important it is to create a culture, to foster that culture and to ultimately nurture it. This is where we create innovation. This is where we go the extra mile. This is where we make sure that people feel like they are welcome in our district, and that they are a part of the team, because pride is the best way to tap into the talent. So remember, if you are looking for ways to master your mark, to make sure your brand is living and it's out and about and people know what it is. There's a lot of different ways you can do that. So with our four systems and our four processes that we've developed, we can come in at any given time and support a district at the end of the day, whether you work with us or you build a system for yourself, make sure that your leadership framework includes communication that is embedded in everything that you do and that you are being strategic and really intentional about how your messages come across, you need to make sure that you're supporting your internal audiences, your external audiences, that you are building trust and culture and, more importantly, that you are fostering innovation and supporting your brand. So you are. Many of you have already started the new school year. The rest of you will be kicking off right after Labor Day or right before Labor Day, and it's just a great time to revisit your processes so that your 2425 school year is successful. So with that, I'm going to wrap up this episode of school leader sound bites. I think so many of you for having me in your districts all summer. It was a fantastic way to spend my summer months making sure that school districts were getting the support you needed. If you ever want to connect and learn more about the master your mark system or how my team and I can come in and support you, be sure to visit Veronica sopher.com you can always send me a DM as well. I would love to address any questions or comments that you have. So if you are watching on YouTube, drop some comments. If you are listening on the podcast, make sure you hit subscribe. I don't want you to miss any episodes of school leader sound bites, and I promise that I'll hop back in and talk about all of these systems individually so that you can think about how you can start implementing them in your district. So with that, I will end this episode and we will see you next time you.