The way schools communicate is, at times, not as effective as it could be. Even in higher education, this much is true. The staff of any educational institution puts more time in than they need to, and education communication being streamlined could save so much time, leaving staff free to do more. Here are some tips to improve education communication at all levels.
1. Have different targeted landing pages for your institution. Landing pages can supply a lot of information and also give your school a place to put surveys, signup forms, and other handy resources.
2. Recruit volunteers and give them an outline of your tentative schedule. Keep them up to date, and remind them of events. Let volunteers know that they will receive reminders. Make it easier for people to volunteer. A lot of people would volunteer but have accessibility issues, such as a lack of vehicle or other transportation. This is especially true of rural areas, where the school can be well out of the way of the students' homes.
3. Utilize social networking. Quite possibly the greatest word-of-mouth engine right now is social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. As such, if you have a message to send out to as many people as possible, you want to use social media to your advantage.
4. Get your students on board. Nobody knows the ins and outs of social media better. Put those students to work writing, filming, and otherwise developing student-driven material about the culture and lifestyle built by your institution to be published online.
5. Find the middle ground between professional and personal. Students need to see you as people as well as mentors.
6. Manage your contacts effectively. With the proper contact manager and connected resources, you can send specific messages to individual groups, keep track of changing contacts, and track contact behavior. You can easily identify the struggling students, the ones who excel, students who are late on their fees and more.
7. Engage your instructors. When you're in a classroom, adapt material. Relate to real world happenings, get professors engaged in the media to create discussion around current events, offer individual classes online or in your community. There are dozens of free courses available online from reputable universities. Engage the public, and help them find the field that they want. Hold conferences with locals about issues that affect them. Engage your instructors not just as teachers by trade, but teachers and experts by choice and by passion.
8. Promote new ideas for student learning. This is necessary in higher education institutions, but can easily be considered in earlier education as well. Students learn differently, and it's a great idea to get their feedback about how they would like the course to be structured and taught.
9. Address language issues. Even smaller institutions can have an international online presence. Offer your website and online publications in several languages and keep in mind specific local issues when going abroad to present at fairs or give lectures.
Many of these tips can be easily taken care of by using an automated communication solution such as Simplycast 360, a platform designed to streamline customer communication, free up time and save resources for multiple industries. We allow for communication over multiple channels at once, and communication can be completely automated.
The SimplyCast 360 solution is available in eleven languages and is capable of sending specifically targeted communications to different groups depending on their status within contact lists. SimplyCast 360 can help you to plan and execute virtually any communication scenario, and it is customizable to your unique student and faculty communication needs.
