It’s a competitive world out there. In business. In life. And now even with schools.

Open enrollment has simply changed the game. Schools can no longer sit quietly on the sidelines, knowing that they have a great staff, amazing opportunities for their students, and a supportive community. They have to make sure people know about it.

Since April of 2014, #SocialSchool4EDU has been serving schools. It started with a request from one district, my daughter’s school in New Auburn, WI. They needed help with communications and marketing. They wanted to launch social media, but had no idea where to start.

I set up a trial program with them, and as they say, the rest is history!

Well, I should say it is history in the making. Because #SocialSchool4EDU is continuing to evolve in the way we serve schools. With such a unique niche, and few other businesses partnering with schools like we do, it can be difficult for school districts to grasp what we can do for them. So let’s break it down. We serve schools in four main areas. Social media management, social media training, speaking, and website management.

Social Media Management

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are powerful platforms for schools to use to connect with students, teachers, parents, alumni and the world. But it can seem like a full time job to keep up with all of it! That’s where #SocialSchool4EDU comes in.

Our team of experts helps with the following:

• Set up all channels with appropriate privacy and controls needed for schools
• Collect photos, videos and stories from your staff and craft them into social media posts
• Monitor and manage all comments and activity on social media
• Create strategy for handling crisis communication and referendum campaigns
• Provide detailed quarterly report cards on social media activity. Things like:
  • How many people are we reaching each week?
  • How is our audience growing?
  • What posts have performed the best?
  • What kind of comments are we hearing?
  • How many times per day is our community hearing from us?
  • How do we stack up against other schools around us?

We do all of this from off-site. We have a system that works. In fact, we now serve more than 15 different schools across Wisconsin and Minnesota. We want to help schools all over the U.S. Geographical location does not hold us back!

Did you know? We can post in multiple languages. When Waterloo School District said it needed posts to be in both English and Spanish; we said no problem! We have an account manager that is fluent in Spanish. She can also monitor feedback in both as well. What a win for this community. We are reaching a significant number of countries with the posts from this school.

Yes, there is a cost to this service, but it is more affordable than you think! Basically if you are able to attract or retain just one student to your school, then our annual service contract is paid for.

Training

Once we started learning so much about what worked for schools, we started training other districts who were managing their own social media. We love to pass on tips and tricks that we have learned!

We do free training every week here on our blog. Check out past posts like:

Beyond this weekly training, we offer regional workshops. We are going on a summer tour in 2016 to help districts like yours take social media to the next level. Getting a plan and a system is the most critical element to successfully using social media effectively for your school.

If you’d like a little more personalized direction, we also do training with your social media team on location. We’ve helped schools such as Reedsburg and Bayfield get the entire social media team comfortable with celebrating their students on Facebook. It’s often just taking the time and having someone on hand to help you along that can really get things jump started!

Speaking

Sharing the message that social media can be a powerful tool to spread positive stories! I love communicating my passion with others at your school. We talk with students, parents, and staff, encouraging them to leverage social media to change the world in a positive way.

You can get information on all of our talks at this link. We are now scheduling summer school, August in-service days, and fall visits. There is a modest fee associated with these visits, but many schools partner up with their local PTO or even special educational grants to cover the cost.
Website Management

The final way we serve districts is through website management. One of our social media clients reached out to us to ask for some help. They didn’t have anyone internal with the time or passion to keep up with the constant updates on their website. We set up a trial program and it was a huge success!

We have a dedicated manager on our team who helps standardize the look and feel of your entire website and keep it updated with the latest news, which of course comes from your school. We are NOT a website hosting service like School Wires or CMS4Schools. We simply help you keep your website updated and looking great once you have a working template.