A blog can be a place where a school district’s parents, students, staff and the general community can read some of the latest news, thoughts, and information from school district leadership and engage in respectful dialogue.
Sounds easy, right?
Actually it takes a little finesse, planning, and execution to be successful.
To start off, you need to try to answer some important questions:
- What do you want to say?
- Who is your audience?
- What types of things do you want to tell them?
- How thick is your skin?
- How open and honest are you willing to be?
- How important is being human to you?
- How often will you want to post?
- What do you hope to achieve?
Click the link below to read the rest of the article and learn about how to do it, what to do with negative comments and establishing some ground-rules.
Here’s one way to do it
A district and its schools belong to the community. School districts can be faceless, cold, and lumbering entities. We use our district blog as a way to pull back the curtains on the process. It’s about ‘how’ and ‘why’ we do things. Of course we try to share in the successes of students and staff, but ideally it’s a place where we can explain things and hopefully simplify complexities. It is also a great listening outpost to gain important feedback on topics within the district. As such, we attempt to provide relevant topics and issues for the community.
What about Negative Comments?
Negative comments and feedback are facts of social media life. Again, how thick is your skin?
We know community members are not going to appreciate all of the decisions that are made in the District. Those that really are against an idea or process may seek out an opportunity to vent. Wouldn’t you rather know what they are ranting/venting/sharing rather than being oblivious to it? This falls in the listening and monitoring role of district communicators.
I highly recommend having guidelines in place to lay the ground-rules for the community.
- Comments on the blog are at the discretion of the editor(s)
- School districts should moderate comments
- Negative feedback is ok
- Negative feedback is ok (yes, it’s worth repeating)
- Abusive feedback should not be tolerated
- Review comments before publishing
- Set the rules for comments and stick to them
It’s wise to tell your community what you will and will not publish. In other words, DO NOT publish comments that:
- Break the law or encourage others to do so.
- Contain abusive or inappropriate language or statements. This includes remarks that are racist, homophobic and sexist as well as those that contain obscenities or are sexually explicit.
- Easily identify students and/or staff in defamatory, abusive, or generally negative terms.
- Do not show proper consideration for others’ privacy or are considered likely to offend or provoke others – i.e. don’t pick fights or goad others into inflammatory debates.
- Are spam – i.e. repeatedly posting the same comment or comments that are simply advertising/promoting a service or product.
This is just the beginning. Next time we’ll explore some blog writing ideas. What do you think? Are this good rules? Have you had a different experience with setting up a district blog? What other specific topics would you like to see covered in this space? The comments are yours.
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Tags: blog, community relations, district blog, negative comments
Good job Ritchie. The biggest fears that most school districts have is that they think that a blog is a free for all. You are right. Establish ground rules right from the beginning and set your blog policy in stone. Don’t ever wave from it and it can be a great working tool.
Thanks Brad, great point about sticking to the ground rules. I figured you’d have some thoughts to share on the subject