Learning ideas, resources & professional reflection since 2011
Yes it is. In this recent talk (30/09/16) given under our exclusively education Blippit Social brand by founder John Bidder, you can hear tips, advice and hopefully get a better understanding of why schools choose to work with us as their partner in this challenging area.
Also available as an iBook
These videos are a follow-up to and expansion of my previous article for Head Teachers, Governors and anyone really thinking about taking first steps. Feel free to pass a link along and of course either comment or get in touch directly if you like.
1. Why use social media?
This is an important one to know. Typically schools want their community to ‘get’ their values and ethos. In short, schools want ensure parents can buy into what they’re offering because, while it’s a fantastic product, actually they’re only aware of the tip of the iceberg. Also, a teeny weeny bit of school wants to know what the wider community knows so ‘social’ makes sense.
2. What about the school website?
It doesn’t cut the mustard anymore on it’s own. People only use it when they’re booking holidays or if a disaster happens to cause school to close. The main audience for the school site now, unfortunately, is Ofsted with the occasional new family or grumbly parent looking for pupil premium stats.
3. What about school newsletters?
The ‘news’ and how people consume it has changed radically since social media became established. The weekly/monthly Friday newsletter has become routine, easy to ignore and taken for granted. Its almost invisible. Newsletters consume school time and energy as well as trees. Adding them to the school website feels like a good green idea but in reality it benefits very few, if any, parents. If you have web stats they will bear this out. Linking to resources on the website from social media is a much better way of targeting information and getting parents to share it for you with their networks as well.
4. What do people in your community use every day?
It’s such an obvious question to ask parents that literally no-one does it. Ask some parents what they use on a daily basis in terms of social media platforms. You don’t need to craft a letter to all parents or create something clever using Google Forms. Target a welcome evening for new parents and slip the question in for a show of hands. Make sure that colleagues who need to see the response are there to see it. You’ll get a sense of what people think about it and what if any pros or cons parents might see arising.
5. Can we just dip our toes?
If anyone in school is saying “Let’s just use Twitter for now”, be bold enough to ask why as this is often an anxiety-led response to the idea of social parental engagement in a strange environment where control is not absolute. Don’t proceed past ‘go’ until school is clear on both the needs of parents and the school. These needs will help tell you to choose the best social platforms to use. In my experience at least, using Twitter alone for effective parental engagement is like wafting a wet woolly mammoth dry with a flat cap. You’ll expend lots of energy but will hardly touch the surface and eventually you’ll wonder why you bothered. For some schools, the idea of using Twitter is appealing at first because comeback from any followers will be negligible. In fact with a bit of luck hardly any parents will notice school tweeting. School will however still look cool because of the Twitter logo on the website home page. Avoid the temptation to dip your toes in Facebook for other reasons. More harm can come from a half-hearted conversation starter with parents on Facebook because it reflects badly on school values. Parents are typically very pleased indeed to see you have joined them where they are but pretty let down if school doesn’t show commitment to it.
6. Clarity of purpose
If your school knows where it’s community is and then joins them on a particular platform, such as Facebook, it will really help school to be clear about why it’s there. Agree your overall strategy for communicating with parents throughout the year as social media does not operate on an island. Consider what the stress events for parents are so that you can be well positioned even before they arrive. Timely, concise, low-key and friendly updates lower parental anxiety leading to a calmer community who are able to deal with an upcoming stress point e.g. parents evening, admissions, school closure, non-uniform day (yes even that!) With data you will be able to see when, who, how and where people are engaging.
7. The Parent Journey
Improving the parental journey is often the main ‘why’ behind schools using social media to engage on a more targeted and timely level. Years ago research was done by the Cabinet Office to look into something called ‘the customer journey’. It highlighted how people’s emotional state fluctuated when they had to go through a particular and often bureaucratic process. Imagine, for example, the steps involved in taking a much loved pet the vet, reporting the death of a family member to the local council or even being a competitor on the X Factor. With the right kind of interventions along the way through these processes it is possible to flatten out the emotional spikes for parents along the way resulting in a less ruffled and more appreciative community at the end of it all.
8. Your School Story
Your school has it’s own story arc and each member of staff is a major character in the plot with parents and children moving fluidly from audience to guest stars on a daily basis. There are lots of happy endings, plenty of plot twists and the occasional sad event. If school can be clear from the start about what you will and won’t be sharing with parents from the outset then the chances of having to deal with unexpected topics on-the-fly are reduced.
9. What about Safeguarding & things that begin with an ‘e’
Safeguarding was commented upon by Ofsted last year in one of the schools we work with in that the work on Facebook (plus other activity that fed into/off it) made a very positive contribution to it. So many schools try to have e-safety meetings for parents that noone turns up to or ‘the wrong people come’. Sometimes, a different tack can work with supporting and educating a school community and it doesn’t always have to include someone standing at the front in the hall for half an hour. Drip feed your parents tips via social media – ideally Facebook – and they’ll share them as well as follow them.
10. Know your audience
Heads know their parental community but they have a heightened awareness of certain parents who colour the Head’s expectations of what will happen if the school uses social media to reach out to it’s community. If you’re a Head Teacher you’ll have certain parents ‘front of mind’ and will often unwittingly apply the vibe these people give on to the rest of your parental community. Phrases heard in the playground such as “Everyone is really unhappy about…” are bound to make Head Teachers uneasy but the reality in my experience is that ‘everyone’ comprises of just one or two slightly high maintenance parents. With social media, you have it in your power to fill the air with positivity and celebrate the great things that the children and staff do every single day. Your majority audience is happy, has got your back and will champion the school far and wide. They have invested their child into your school and parents are very keen to tell others, in this era of buying based on peer recommendation, what a great decision it was they made to send their child to your school. School has a wonderful opportunity to act as a social role model for parents and families and the contribution it can make to safeguarding shouldn’t be underestimated by being in the same space.
Some Lancashire primary schools affected by the recent disastrous floods are finally getting back to business almost as usual. It’s been a horrendous time with highly stressed families, children (mainstream & specialist schools) and last but not least everyone employed at the schools themselves.
To add a little extra stress into the mix, as sub-stations became swamped, power cuts had far reaching effects such as knocking out phone network transmitters. Broadband was no exception going down for many people for many hours.
Take away the ability to heat anything, dry anything, at night time to ‘see’ anything, drink fresh water or flush toilets and add the fact that many families were kitted out for Christmas and you’re only part way there.
With Nativities rehearsed, costumes made, lines learned, relatives invited, tickets part-sold and in already scarce supply due to school fire regulations (which winds people up every year) you could say it was a perfect storm.
Communication is critical in this kind of situation and at times over the last week there were no options open to schools at all. It was grim.
However, in amongst the pockets of communication blackouts, at four of the schools we work with as Blippit Social, the messages that squeezed out from each school’s Facebook presence were amplified and carried along by parents to reach those who needed to know what was or wasn’t happening.
A special mention went out to a local radio station called ‘The Bay’ who by all accounts did a pretty amazing job at getting people home, bypassing destroyed routes with timely and accurate information updates.
Heads knew that if they asked parents to share updates that originated from the school on Facebook that these updates would carry more authority and hopefully more clarity and this does seem to have been the case. Interestingly, when the school updated that it needed help, to gain clarity on the current status across the area, it was effectively counting on the wisdom of the crowds. Some might have said that Heads should have closed down their schools’ presence on Facebook for fear of virtual looting and vandalism but wisely in my view they chose not to.
Together we have learned that the vast majority of parents live up to the bar set for them set by the school. As a model of good practice for how to use social media effectively and reasonably, parents could not be linked to anything better than the school. Less savvy parents most definitely got some fantastic guidance too from their peers – it wasn’t all about the school.
…understanding leadership from a distributed perspective means seeing leadership activities as a situated and social process at the intersection of leaders, followers, and the situation.
(Source: Wikipedia ironically enough!)
Our data for the last month, aggregated across the four schools on Facebook, puts forward a simple view based on experience and evidence and it’s something like this (though the words aren’t right just yet it must be said).
Parent/school social networks can be complementary and highly effective during difficult times thanks to distributed leadership, trust, respect and an increased sense of transparency in the relationships.
Blippit Social monitors all the schools it supports and can explore the social data pretty much on demand. The following report extracts show data for the month leading up to and including the last 36 hours and as such show an interesting contrast to ‘normal’ business.
[slideshare id=53978663&doc=blippitsocialintheparentzone-151015144743-lva1-app6892]
Blippit Social has grown as a service and product over the years to become a 3 pronged school strategy for parental engagement using social media, data and now web sites too which we call Blippit Sites.For an insight into what Blippit Social is all about we’ve just released a downloadable leaflet that sums everything up, we hope, very succinctly. It’s ideal for Senior Leaders wanting to quickly understand what Blippit Social can bring to school.
Download the PDF and contact us anytime if a chat would help.
“It’s less about locking the technology down and putting filters in place…it’s more about [user] behaviour.”
You may have received our recent email about how we already help Lancashire schools reach and educate parents regarding e-safety matters. To arrange a meeting at your school or to slot us in to an existing agenda perhaps at Cluster level to take questions, just call 0843 523 5578 or email support@blippit.co.uk
httpvp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyorCBI2t59c3X3yG8djOXIxOcd1yK21J
This January 2015 there will be 10 new schools with whom we’ll share what we’ve learned from working in the powerful area of social parental engagement. Our network of socially savvy schools and families is ever growing.
This year it’s impact and engagement data that’s a big focus for us now as we’ve seen it support Heads through inspection, Governors and SLT reviews when faced with the question “So what?”
If you’d like to know more about answering the “so what?” question do drop us a line and we’d be happy to help whether you have an existing social presence or not.
Topics are derived from conversations that friends, fans, followers and connections are having. The two graphs here represent – top level general discussion topics categories and more specific sub categories. It’s just the tip of the iceberg and we can’t wait to dig deeper to help schools understand the impact of their engagement with parents.
Below I’ve only focused upon ‘topics & more detailed sub-topics of conversation’ across our schools. If you take a look at the graphs below we’ve created by sampling across schools we support it seems not unreasonable to say that things don’t look too bad! Have a peruse. You may feel that more information is needed to infer a degree of success on the schools’ behalf in engaging with parents and I’d probably agree.
Next week I’ll be talking about how we’re now able to more confidently support Heads demonstrate and evidence impact brought about by engaging positively with parents on Facebook. Of course data is only ever just a part of the picture like with anything, but it’s one that we believe is important.
This term we’ll be looking at different strands that open up the parental engagement picture a little to help us draw conclusions about, for example,
At our Blippit Social CPD event next week, “The Positive Head Teacher’s Guide to Parents & Social Media”, we’re filming the whole thing so at some point that’ll get released for general consumption here on the blog and more on the data conversation will appear then. In the meantime I hope you might find the graphs below interesting at the very least.