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Don't Go Quiet: Building a Summer Communications Plan That Sets Up Your Best School Year Yet
It’s the last day of school. The bell rings for the last time, and most districts go nearly silent for ten weeks.
No newsletters. Sporadic social posts, if any. A website that still has May's calendar on the homepage. An email list that won't hear from you until August, when suddenly everything is urgent again and families are expected to snap back to full attention as if nothing happened.
This is the summer lull, and it's not just a missed opportunity. When districts go quiet it's a strategic mistake dressed up as a well-earned break.
The Enrollment Funnel Nobody Talks ABout
We’ve all been there: the meeting to discuss enrollment concerns. The real problem isn't your open enrollment process. It's that you've been treating enrollment as an event when families experience it as a journey. That journey often starts 12 to 18 months before they ever fill out a form.
Building Your K-12 Communications Calendar
There's a version of this job that feels like whack-a-mole.
Reactive communications are exhausting, produce inconsistent work, and makes you look disorganized to the people watching. Given the amount of resources you touch on a given week, a lot of people are watching.
A communications calendar doesn't fix everything. But it fixes this.
READ MORE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE CONTENT CALENDAR TEMPLATE
You're Not "Just" the Newsletter Person
School communications is one of the highest-leverage functions in any district. Every message that goes out either builds trust or erodes it. Every enrollment inquiry that gets a warm, timely response is a family that enrolls for next fall. Every crisis that gets handled with transparency and humanity is a headline that doesn't happen. Every bond campaign that wins is built on months of carefully crafted community messaging. The stakes are real. The impact is measurable. And yet the role is persistently underestimated.
How a wrong AI answer about your district can cost you enrollment
A new challenge has been added to enrollment strategy. Before families visit your website, before they ask a neighbor, and increasingly before they even know which schools are in their area, they ask an AI.
What is AEO and why should K-12 districts care?
There's a new front door to your school district, and most communications teams don't know it exists.
It isn't your website homepage. It isn't your Facebook page or your community newsletter. It's the answer a parent gets when they open their phone, types "tell me about [your district name]" into an AI assistant, and hits enter.
Are you in control of what its telling them?