Download and read Ken’s school communication articles:
Crisis Communications in a Digital World
The Post-Crisis Crisis: Managing parent and media communications
Communicating Safety to parents and the media
Communications and social media evaluation in school security and emergency preparedness assessments
We work with your administrators and communications staff to analyze your web site, review communications policies and protocols, identify ways to coordinate messaging with community partner agencies, and share the latest strategies from traditional to digital media. Our expertise comes from extensive work with news media companies across the nation. Our work with preK-12 public and private schools connects us to your school safety communications challenges.
The pipeline to parents and the media
You have many positive, exciting things going on in your school district that contribute to school safety. Are you missing ways to get the message to your parents and media? You district can have a game plan for working with traditional and non-traditional media to tell your stories of school safety, and building strong school community support:
- Media plan: why you need it and how to create it
- Telling your story and selling your story
- Think like a reporter
- How to map out the local media landscape and target your message for broadcast, newspapers, online and social media
- Secrets to getting your good news story out
- How the newsroom works
- What reporters want
- Your website: What should and should not be on it
- Easy ways to update your site daily
- Generating buzz without traditional media
- Developing messages that create credibility and trust
- Hot topics in school safety likely to thrust your district into the spotlight
- Strategies when you’re the target of an investigative report
- Managing aggressive reporters
- Public records request: Is trouble on the way?
- How to anticipate and prepare for the big investigation
Social Media: Keep your friends close and your frenemies closer
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms can be your best tool for building support and positive buzz in the community. Things to consider in building your own newsrooms and platform presence might include:
- Your identity online: build it and monitor it.
- Manage your online reputation
- Build followers and engage with the community
- Sidestep traditional media and get your message out thru social media.
- Truth, transparency and trust: the currency of social media
- Creating your own news channel
- The 24 second news cycle
- Rumor control
- Monitoring gangs, fights, suicide talk
- What to do when a hallway fight lands on YouTube and Instagram
- Threats by proxy server
- Managing negative comments and threats on social media
- How social media can keep reporters off your back
- Why listening is often more important than talking
Effectively managing difficult community meetings
Do your public meetings get hijacked by individuals on a mission? Consider areas such as:
- Delivering key messages
- Handling wringers
- Responding to politically charged questions
- Agenda driven traps
- Moving the meeting forward
Crisis Communications: You do have a plan, don’t you?
From violence to severe weather to bus accidents, some of the topics to consider include:
- Critical first steps – Who does what during the first hour
- Who should be on your priority contact list
- Best ways to notify your staff, your parents, your community, the media
- Preparing for your first news conference
- Six critical comments to avoid if violence strikes your school
- What the media needs from you
- What parents expect to hear
- Holding statements
- Dark website
- Social media control center
- Rumor control
- Monitoring the media
- Correcting misinformation
- Hardware and software you will need if you are evacuated from your building
- Best ways to keep parents informed during an ongoing situation
- Managing texting and social media when student safety is an issue
- Handling communications in the weeks after a high-profile school crisis
Media Training: Do you duck for cover when you see reporters coming?
Are you prepared to navigate the sea of cameras and field reporter questions – from the news conference to the ambush interview? Things to consider may include:
- On air training workshop
- Strategies for news conferences and live interviews
- How to look your best on camera
- Learning the language of sound bites and quotes with short and meaningful messages
- Rules of the road for on the record and off the record comments, and other conventions of traditional journalism
- Keeping control of your message and staying on point
- Pitfalls: What you should never do in an interview
- Handling difficult questions and ambush interviews