Effective PR: How to Toot Your Own Horn and Get What You Need

Educators tend to be modest. Bragging is usually considered bad form. But our programs will not get the support and participation they need if no one knows the program exists or what it has accomplished. The reality is that effective PR is a necessary part of program success.

When planning a PR campaign, we need to think about five things: the goal, the audience, the message, the method, and the on-going evaluation. Of course, we can simply rush ahead without a plan. But that is like wildly waving our arms trying to get noticed -- it's not clear that we will get the kind of attention we desire.

GOAL

Business people make a distinction between marketing and sales. The goal of marketing is to create widespread and positive awareness of something. The goal of sales is to get a specific consumer to commit to a specific purchase -- getting the person to make a decision and take an action. Too often, educators only think of PR as a marketing strategy, a method of increasing public awareness or soliciting friendly feedback. We want people to know and think positively about our programs on the assumption that warm feelings will lead to good results. But vague goals lead to vague results. It's true that public education efforts never hurt, and often help. But educators are simply too busy these days to not prioritize their time towards more immediately beneficial goals.

The most effective PR efforts have specific goals that seek to influence the decisions or actions taken by others that impact our program. To do this, of course, we need to clearly define the decisions we want made or the actions we want taken. And we need to be realistic. Trying to accomplish everything leads to gaining nothing. Better to seek permission to hire one more staff person than to create a new department. Better to seek to recruit a set number of participants than get everyone interested. Better to seek permission to do a specific activity than to start an entirely new program. Be incremental: it is usually better to mount several very focused PR efforts than to try for the impossible dream.

Even if your PR effort is not trying to immediately gain anything more than general awareness, have a specific "next step" in mind. If you are doing outreach to the local media, perhaps your secondary goal should be to get a meeting with the publisher. If you are doing a "dog and pony show" at a school open house, maybe your secondary goal should be to have a chance to talk to the superintendent.

Just as the transition to a standards-based approach to instruction has taught us that we need to "start with the end in mind" by first defining what we want our students to know and be able to do at the end of each curriculum unit, we need to similarly start our PR efforts by knowing exactly what decisions or actions we hope to have made.

AUDIENCE

Who are the people who can make the desired decisions or take the desired actions? They are our intended audience. Actually, there are three types of audiences we need to pay attention to: first, the decision-makers; second, the people who the decision-makers pay attention to, and third, our own authorizers and stakeholders (assuming they're not also the decision-makers). Once again, the key to success is having a clear focus: make a list of the specific people you are trying to reach. Trying to reach everyone means not really impacting anyone.

There is also a fundamental difference between internal and external audiences; that is, people inside and outside your school system. You have to reach further and work harder to connect to external audiences. On the other hand, influencing your peers is a much touchier process. Their relationship with you is likely to be complicated by all the other ways that you (and your program) interact with them -- presenting a clear message through the clutter of your institutional culture requires persistence and single-mindedness.

Most important, you have to think about your audience's context. In one district that had just passed through an embarrassing crisis, while the Superintendent was happy about being noticed by the local newspaper, he was furious about anything that attracted the attention of the national or regional press --even if it was about nominally "good news" -- because these stories always rehashed the recent scandal as the backdrop for the latest story.

MESSAGE

What do we want to say to our intended audience? What will induce them to make the desired decision or action? In general, you want to impart a feeling that your program is a great thing. If you can, you want to learn from the advertising industry and find a way to make the listener feel that your program's success will also meet his own needs and interests in some way. This is the marketing aspect of the PR effort.

But you also need to push for a sale. Specifically, you want the person to know exactly why making the decision or action will lead to good results both for your program and for his own agenda.

These days, the top priorities in many schools are increasing test scores and dealing with budget cuts. (With increasing the superintendent's or principal's political standing a close third.) Make sure to stress how your program helps fulfill the state's curriculum requirements, or strengthens students' academic skills, or saves money, or frees up time and resources that can be then devoted to instruction.

METHOD

Only now, after all the previous information has been compiled and discussed, is it time to think about the methods you will use to get your message to the desired audience. Here is where you can be creative. Use multiple media -- hardcopy material sent to parents, community cable TV shows, in-person demonstrations at Parent Nights or local events. To increase your impact, try to have multiple uses of everything you create: hardcopy can be posted on a website and used for press releases sent to local newspapers; traveling shows can perform for the school committee as well as at community events. And make sure you feature the kids (small dogs are also good). Even if you are promoting a technology program, what people will respond to is the sight of their kids using the equipment for some meaningful purpose.

EVALUATION

Just as we now understand that assessment has to be an on-going part of instruction, providing regular feedback that helps us improve our process, we need to build evaluation -- even if informally done -- into every stage of our PR effort.

As you go along, ask yourself: Did we accomplish our goal(s)? Were they good goals to be aiming for? Who were the most responsive audiences? Why were they so helpful? What could have been done to get other audiences to respond better? Was the message sufficiently clear? How could it be made more focused and powerful? What methods worked best for which audience and message? What didn't work?

Finally, even after you've finished the effort, even if you've gotten the decision or action you want, you're not yet done. Make sure you do one more self-examination of your PR efforts so that you can do it better next time. And if you are lucky, there will be a next time -- perhaps very soon!