Hi, everyone. My name is Aisha, and I manage a small team of three. Myself included as the Director of Communication at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. Thank you all for joining me today for this session about positioning your small communications team for a success. The concepts that you'll hear today might not be new to you. You may already be a seasoned professional with decades of experience under your belt doing just this work. Perhaps you lead a large team rather than a small one. Regardless of your specific situation or why you joined this talk today, you'll walk away with a refresher on the key elements of communication strategies that create the foundation for your team's success. This session will cover the following three categories the Communications Audit laying the groundwork for the communications plan and leading with empathy. Each is worthy of its own in-depth course, so packing these into today's talk means that we won't do a deep dive into each, but together we'll identify the elements of a strong communication strategy that will guide your team in the work of telling your school story. By using research to improve your communications decision making, you'll better align your resources, improve team outcomes, move your audiences and be a stronger and empathetic leader and team player. But first, let's refresh our memory on the milestones that make up the communications journey, the audit, the team review, communications, planning, the execution, pivoting and learning in the moment and evaluation. Your team's focus should always be to keep your communications intentional. Doing so will allow you to foster strong connections with your community. Use the communications roadmap to achieve your goals. A communications roadmap begins first with the audit, which also grants you the opportunity to assess your team, their needs, their strengths, and the areas that can be enhanced through professional development and mentoring. The audit the excuse me, the audit paves the way for the strategic design of the communications plan. As a team, you'll learn from that plan as you execute it and adjust accordingly. And finally, you'll measure the success of your communications plan. Celebrating the team wins. Before starting a new journey, all great plans start with understanding what's working, what isn't, and where you can improve. You can't learn from what you haven't analyzed. Why and when to audit. The communications audit helps you understand what your existing resources are, whether they're valuable in your storytelling and in the ways in which content and tools might be improved. It's the first step in your roadmap, and it should be conducted at the onset of working with your team and then frequently thereafter. When stepping into a communications leadership role, it's important to begin from a place of curiosity. Ask questions, do research, learn from communication strategies of the past. Ask others who were involved, review what has worked and what didn't. The last thing you want is to spend valuable time building a content strategy only to uncover that the school had recently tried that and it flopped. Plus, coming in hot is likely the worst approach to starting a new leadership role. It'll create barriers instead of building a relationship with your team and the community. Remember, you cannot create a communications plan without first identifying the resources at your disposal. Assessing the performance of those resources and then learning from those findings. The ordering process includes three steps reviewing the resources that you have in your communications toolbox, inviting others to join the study and identifying the opportunities and reviewing your team's resources. Itemize the methods of communications that you use. Those that you might have and don't use, and who you're trying to reach with those methods. What is the purpose? Who is your audience? Be clear and what you're trying to learn from that data and then dive into each review Social media insights, Pull Google Analytics data, Gather reports from your newsletter, platform of Choice, and then benchmark. What are your competitors doing that's working for them? Step two Ask others. Conduct a quantitative study through community surveys. Use your school's information system or Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Whatever tool you have for recording responses, you might wish to have a survey that's modified for each of your audiences for the most accurate survey. Don't leave out any community groups. Send it all to your stakeholders. Recipients might include current families, employees, volunteers, trustees, alumni, students, past families, former employees, and prospective families. Then select your targeted community members for in-depth interviews or group discussions. These are your focus groups. Ask others about how they've received communications from the school, how they prefer to hear from you and what they believe the message is or was. Gauge of your messages and methods are resonating with the people that you're trying to reach. And don't forget. Asking others also means asking your team to include them in this study. Step three Evaluate the findings. You're going to ask yourself a whole lot of questions. Here Are the resources you've been using effective or valuable? Should changes be made? How do your audiences prefer to hear from you? What content do they want and what does your team need to be able to do this work? Listen and then act. Build your communications plan with the support from your audit findings. Once you've completed your audit and reviewed the findings and identified the opportunities for growth, it's time then to begin working on your communications plan. Your communications plan helps you effectively deliver information to your audience in support of your school's overall goal. And it acts as a guide for yourself and your team. Keeping you focused no matter where daily operations may take you. The communications plan is made up of seven components. Define your situation in your background. Think of your background as your executive summary that outlines what the problem or opportunity is, what you're trying to accomplish, and why you're presenting the communications plan, and then include a SWOT analysis. Specify Clear Communications Goals. Your communications goals will letter up to support the school's overarching goal, whatever it may be. Identify your target audiences so you have a clear picture of who you're trying to reach with this plan. Now, it's popular for big corporations to build audience personas, to help them think about specific people that they're trying to communicate to. But in schools, we know our audiences first hand and well, in many cases we have names and faces in mind when we think of the parents that we connect with, the volunteers that we partner with, the students that we speak with, etc. So when you're creating messages or content for your audiences, consider thinking of real world people while they understand what you're trying to say or do. If you believe that it will not resonate with the people in your community, change it up. Craft Messages in support of your goals. Think about what you'd like the big takeaways to be, and then list and detail your tactics. Now the tactics are your content strategy. What channels will you use in your outreach? What content will you produce? How do you think the content will meet? Help you meet your goal? After your tactics are planned, create your timeline for the rollout of that content daily, weekly or monthly. Whatever fits your vision and break down the budget that you'll need to make each one of those possible. And then the total expected expense and finally measure the results. The measurement tools you use might be similar or the same as those that you use for your communications audit to measure your results. Review insights or analytics for all of your content. Be clear and consistent in your evaluation methods. And then the purpose are you. Measuring for engagement is a lead conversion are after. Are you working on brand awareness as you work on your plan? Seek input from your team. Include them, work with them. Your plan is only as good as what you do with it, and you need an engaged team to execute it well. Before outlined some content methods, let's take a moment to quickly refresh your memory on what's included in a SWOT analysis and what smart goals are. Okay. The SWOT analysis is a tool that helps you focus your efforts and promotes collaboration. It helps you break down the factors involved in making communications decisions in an easy to follow scannable chart, including your team and a SWOT discussion will result in a more comprehensive analysis. Overall, the SWOT analysis outlines what your school is doing well, or its strengths, the weaknesses or roadblocks that might hinder your team from reaching goals, the opportunities, or the big ideas that you'd love to explore and the obstacles that threaten your success. Smart Goals help you create actionable objectives. Consider including a smart chart within your communications plan to help your team focus efforts. Setting smart goals within your communications plan keeps the project moving forward in a timely manner. It helps with accountability, and it lets you know that you're accomplishing what you set out to do. This to helps you identify what you want to accomplish. How you'll know when you've accomplished that goal. If it's realistic, whether it adds value and it helps you set targeted deadlines, following a smart chart will help team members hone in on what they need to do and then how they'll measure progress. Your tactics or the communication? The excuse me, the content plan is the biggest piece of the communications puzzle. It's where you get creative and arguably it's also the most fun part of the plan. You'll begin by identifying the resources that you'll use from your toolbox in support of your goal. If that goal includes something like introducing your new head of school to the community, then your tactics might include a video component. And here you can get creative with what that content piece will do to help you achieve your goal. So some of the channels may be digital, such as social media website, newsletters, blogs. Now they may be traditional, such as print school or alumni magazines and brochures, or they might include paid advertising or other owned media such as podcasts. There are many social media platforms available to you, so use what works for you or consider introducing something new. For example, this summer Threads is new to everyone. It isn't listed here, but it might be beneficial to you in place of or in support of your Twitter and Instagram activity. Whatever you choose to use, make sure your method is supported by the findings from your audit and ensure that your team is properly equipped to create the relevant content. Collaborating with your team on work everyone can be proud of is effective. Leading your team can only be successful and turning your school's story with a strategic communications plan in place. Without one, you have no way of measuring your team's success or understand where you need to go and how to get there, or demonstrating what your communications office can bring to the table. There is no other route to success. We all go through tough times and struggle with burnout and experience, personal and professional challenges. It's important to recognize that we're all human now. Some of us have good days where we feel like we're true rockstars in our professional spaces and bad days where imposter syndrome is rearing its ugly head. No one's perfect, and to be a great leader, we should always assume good intentions and meet our employees where they are and create the space where they feel valued and understood. Mutual respect and trust. It breeds better working relationships with better team outcomes. Happy team, Strong outcomes. Why lead with empathy? Having empathy is an essential leadership tool. In fact, it's an effective tool for every member of a team. Together, we can achieve more than we can alone and to establish a culture of collaboration and respect. We must exercise our empathy muscle every day and show sense your interest in and compassion for the needs and the hopes of our team. As communications experts, we expect to write messages that move our audiences and inspire them to become part of our school. And we can do the job best when we're truly empathetic people in the same vein. Our teams deserve our empathy, and we should always aim to move and inspire them, inspire them to bring their best selves to work every day. And you do the same. Your team is more likely to be engaged and more creative when they're happy with their environment and with their manager. Do more listening than talking. It's both more productive and supportive. In fact, according to a recent NYC survey, 86% of employees say empathetic leadership boosts their morale. In a research study, 71% of employees report reported higher levels of engagement than those with less empathetic senior leaders because today's employees expect more meaningful and human centered experiences at work. Empathetic leadership is vital because it builds trust. If fosters communication and it motivates employees. And when morale is high, so is job satisfaction, retention, productivity and creativity. How we show up as leaders matters to the success of our team. And leading with empathy isn't rocket science. Be honest, be available. Be kind, and work with your team in your efforts because you are not a one person show and always lead from a place of helpfulness. Ask them How can I help? On LinkedIn, I recently stumbled upon a talent Marketplace newsletter by a company called Fuel 50. The article outlined five key steps to leading with empathy. And here's what I learned. Take the time to listen and understand. People advocate for their career progression and growth. Look out for their well-being. Communicate with transparency and kindness and encourage and ask for feedback. Empathy is a muscle and it gets stronger the more we use it. Empathetic leadership leads to increased trust, collaboration, and effective communication. As Oprah says, leadership is about empathy. It's about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives. The takeaway here is be human. Leading from a place of empathy has incredible outcomes and honestly, it's just the right thing to do. If you'd like to delve a little deeper into these topics, follow the links that are included here. These articles provide more information around writing key messages, smart and swap templates and explore what it means to lead with empathy. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I hope this session is helpful and useful to you. If you have any questions or simply want to make a new friend, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I can't wait to meet you.

communication strategies

communications audit

communications plan

leading with empathy

small communications team