Michael Braun's Blog

In the second part of my School Technology series, I move away from criticisms of certain technologies and on toward recommendations for making communication work for your school. Blogging, in particular, offers a unique way to give your school a public face, communicate important information to parents and the community, and control your school’s message. Here are some tips on making it work.

1. Establish one person to serve as blogging coordinator.
Blogging takes work. For a blog to be truly successful, it needs to be updated regularly. This attracts repeat visitors and encourages use of the blog as a vital source of information. It also gets you in a rhythm that will sustain itself after just a few months of regular posting. But for this to happen, one person needs to be responsible for making sure the blog gets updated. This person shouldn’t be the only author on the blog, but rather should solicit posts from different individuals and take responsibility for posting them.

This job shouldn’t take much time (a couple hours a week), but must be done by someone with a real stake in the blog. That being said, there is real value in rotating this position. Especially if your school has one primary technology evangelist, blogging may serve as their baton to beat others who are less comfortable around technology. By keeping this power rotating, your blog is likely to post a greater variety of information.

2. Establish clear criteria for what is and is not blog-worthy.
Schools are busy places with lots of people producing excellent, and blog-worthy, results every day. But that doesn’t mean that an individual student’s high ACT score carries the same weight as a sports team’s victory. You must establish what qualifies an event or achievement for blog recognition. Similarly, if the blog is only about achievements, or if it features achievements of only a certain type, it’s not likely to carry maximum appeal.

To make your blog most appealing, post only about major successes involving large-scale efforts. A team win is more important to blog about than an individual’s victory. Keep even the mix between informational posts (upcoming events, et cetera) and achievements. And finally, solicit posts from all areas of school. Just because one department is very good at producing a lot of winners doesn’t mean it should be featured more heavily than another department. It might be good to specifically rotate between departments to make sure the mix is kept even.

3. Work with established school networks.
The blogging coordinator doesn’t have to reinvent communication. Instead, she can work with existing school networks to produce blog content. Let the journalism class write pieces about various departments. Take items from the school’s newsletter and publish them on the blog first. Work with your school’s student newspaper to further vary the types of posts. Contact the school’s community outreach coordinators (official or not) to post information that will be most interesting to community members.

4. Set goals.
If your blogging coordinator is especially fired up about the task, you are likely to notice a spike in posts as your blog starts, followed by a gradual decrease in the number of posts. Stop this from happening by setting clear and reasonable goals. At first, limit yourself to 3 posts a week (or an equally manageable number). Once the thrill wears off, stick to that goal.

Goals can extend beyond number of posts. Post length is important too, as well as post variety. By setting up tags for post content, you can track to make sure you are balancing yourself in the type of information that you present. A good first month goal might be to represent each school department in at least one blog post. Or perhaps you might strive to recognize each student organization or group in at least one post. These types of goals make your blog better and keep you motivated.

5. Promote, promote, promote.
Call the local newspaper. Inform parents in a newsletter. Have your business class come up with marketing materials for local businesses. Email links to school contacts. The more you can promote your blog, the better. If it is truly to serve as a conduit from the school to the outside world, then you must attract readership. Don’t wait for your site to spread virally. Inject it straight into the arm of the community.