How to successfully keep in touch with parents over the summer holidays
The school holidays are a time for staff to take some time out, relax and regroup. For senior leadership teams, it’s also a time to plan for the year ahead.
The summer holidays are unique for two reasons:
- At around six weeks (longer in independent schools), it’s by far the longest break from school. This holiday is three times longer than any other in the year.
- Following the summer break, schools welcome a brand new cohort to their community.
For these reasons, it’s important to have a communication plan in place over the summer, for both existing and new parents.
What are the benefits of engaging with parents over the holidays?
- Parents often have a break to normal routine themselves, and as such, have more time on their hands to consume information.
- Schools can help relieve the anxiety of new parents with useful information about settling their child into their new school.
- Parents and students can prepare better for the autumn term with details of upcoming events.
- Maintaining a dialogue with parents improves their engagement with the school.
With this in mind, here are some ideas how you can keep the conversation going with your parent community over this lengthy period:
Ensure your school website is up to date
The summer holidays is one of the key times that parents and prospective parents will go onto your website unprompted. They will be looking for things like uniform lists and suppliers, details of term dates, teachers’ names and contact details, and exam results day information. Therefore, before you close your doors at the end of term, it’s crucial to ensure your website is up to date.
To do this easily, it’s helpful to have a school website that’s easy to update. One that allows you to edit information from the front-end, for example, or includes a dynamic calendar which parents can easily view on their phones. For user experience, it’s vital that the website is mobile friendly.
Ensure all your important dates are correct, the information is clear and concise and any links are up to date and work properly. It’s also worth considering adding a contact email address that will be monitored periodically throughout the break.
The summer holidays is a great opportunity to look at renewing your website, and that’s something we can help with. If you’d like a no-pressure demo and navigation of our platform, simply contact us and we’ll arrange it with you.
Have information available in one place
Current and incoming parents will benefit from having any relevant information readily available on their phones, and this goes beyond simply a mobile-friendly website. They will probably want easy access to past messages and notifications, as well as the school calendar, newsletters and uniform lists.
A school app is the perfect solution here. Schoolzine’s app allows you to customise your home screen ensuring parents can get to where they want to quickly and easily. In addition, you’ll be able to push out information via app notification, which is a lot more cost effective than text messages.
Be selective and sparing with your app notifications, though. Parents do enjoy the break from persistent school messages and will quickly ‘zone out’ if they are bombarded. We’d advise consolidating information into a few well-chosen communications.
Send out one summer holiday newsletter
Distributing one informative yet media-rich school newsletter is a great way to combine a variety of important and interesting news. It’s also an opportunity to engage with different groups of parents in one go.
Examples of content might be:
- A video, showing a day in the life of a reception student
- A school uniform checklist
- An update on exam results day
- A round up from the last week of term
- A student report and photos on the year 6 residential
- Important information about the first week of term
- Year 7 students - where to head on your first day
- A link to the school calendar with all important dates
- Explanation on how to get logins and access to all digital platforms
Getting parents prepared and students excited about September whilst also streamlining information you communicate is a fine balance, but with the right approach and tools, it has the capability to strengthen your engagement with parents.
If you’d like to discuss using a holistic communications platform that will help you achieve that, get in touch with one of our friendly team.
