AN EASY-TO-USE PLATFORM TO CELEBRATE SCHOOL SUCCESS
Take a deep breath and for a moment, rewind back to 20th March 2020. Everything changed for everyone. Schools were closed across the nation and thrown into an abyss of the unknown with 48 hours’ notice.School communications formed a huge part of this never-seen-before territory. Very quickly, current platforms had to navigate emergency and last-minute messages to parents and were being tested to their absolute limit.
The humble newsletter, traditionally packed with student achievements, special assembly round-ups, sports reports and important dates, was quickly replaced with cobbled-together home learning plans and official responses to constantly evolving government policy.
At the same time, schools had to quickly find ways to engage deeply with a confused parent community, many of whom they may have only previously connected with on a transactional and superficial level (if at all!).
And so this pattern continued for the best part of two years, with schools seeking to constantly refine and improve the way they communicate with parents as well as their students. As a result, schools quite rightly demanded more from their parent engagement platforms, with many switching to something more suited to the present day climate.
Looking again at the present day, with hopefully the last of the unpredicted school closures behind us, the nature of what we are communicating to parents is changing yet again. After taking a back seat for a long period, the school newsletter is now very much a priority for both schools and parents, with a huge focus being placed on celebrating positive news. More than ever before, there is a demand for an easy to use system that helps communicate success, or as Schoolzine likes to say ‘Good News-Letters’!
An easy-to-use communication platform
The pandemic has highlighted how schools have overcome adversity in order to communicate important messages to parents and students about remote learning. It has set a new standard for parent engagement, and now schools expect so much more from their platforms. If communicating emergency news can be easier than before, then communicating positive news should be, too.
It’s all very well wanting to focus on the positive after such a challenging period, but if creating these ‘good’ newsletters is laborious and time-consuming, it’s just not going to be sustainable. Enter - the Schoolzine Digital Newsletter-Builder & Live News Stream. A system like this allows you to build exciting, interesting and relevant multimedia newsletters in minutes, not hours.
The content is easily written in the control centre, with supporting videos and galleries of photos added in at the drop of a hat. What’s more, the finished product is responsive across all types of platform, including mobile and tablet as well as desktop.
Student driven content
If there’s one thing that’s better than a sports match report, it’s a match report that’s written by the students themselves. With our unique submit content function, students, parents and teachers can submit content to the control centre, ready for approval to use in school communications.
Imagine having a bank of student-created content, ready to add in to your newsletters. The opportunities to include a broad variety of articles and galleries of photos are sure to include the readership of every single communication.
Push out via multiple channels
Once you’ve created your newsletter masterpiece, it’s important to focus on the best-possible distribution. Whilst it’s a step in the right direction (and expected) to email it out to parents, it risks being lost in a sea of other content that your community may simply gloss over. If you are also able to push it out via an app notification, it’s likely to be more successfully received by parents, thus increasing its readership. Does your current communications system support this?
If celebrating success in your school is a priority for you this year, get in touch with us for a chat about how to make it super-easy.
