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You'd think the following would be priorities for a school:
- Saving paper and printing costs
- Ensuring that parents and students are able to find out information about school activities quickly and easily
Yet my local school at least, still relies of vast quantities of printed letters, sent home by pupil post, and often quickly lost in the piles of paper that tend to accumulate.
There is a better way.
Imagine a school where only private correspondence gets printed by default. Where parents have to opt-in to receiving letters by pupil post.
Instead, letters are uploaded as PDF's to the website.
But, wait, how will anyone know that something new has been added?
That's the easy bit... If you use software like Wordpress to drive the website, it comes with a simple piece of technology called "Really Simple Syndication" (RSS). You can very easily use this to make sure that anything new gets sent to immediately and automatically to Facebook, Twitter, and people who subscribe by email.
It's similar to the network publishing approach I use:
There are lots of ways to organise stuff inside Wordpress. You could have separate sub-sites for each year group, each with their own design. Or you could organise posts by categories (which makes it easy to attach posts to multiple year groups). Each category can have its own separate RSS feed, so people are only fed the content they want to see.
Once the letters and notices are on the site, they then become a valuable resource for when a vital piece of information is forgotten. There's always a central source of information that parents and students know they can get to.
In the corporate world, this is known as "channel shift" (link is to a Publicnet.co.uk report). It takes time and effort to make work, and there will be people who will resist the change - some for good reasons.
What you're trying to do is make your communication methods more efficient, by reducing the spend on the input, and increasing the value of the output.
When the majority of your parents and students see the value of engaging with you online, and lose the expectation of receiving paper letters every week, then you'll have achieved channel shift.
Of course, the ultimate in channel shifting a school would be to make better use of the digital space for teaching and learning. I alluded to this in my post last year about snow days. Channel shifting away from the need to be in a certain place at a certain time would greatly improve the efficiency of schools, and increase their resilience during times when the school building is not able to be used.
