As an educational leader, you communicate with many different audiences. By this, I mean that you must communicate not only with staff, parents, and other community members but also with various types of people within stakeholder groups. And you must communicate with each of these audiences differently.

For example, we consistently find in our surveys that parents who are, say, forty and older want to be communicated with differently than younger parents do. This should not be surprising, as people, especially those in different generations, are comfortable with different types of technology.

This is why conducting a communications survey is so important.

Using different tools for communicating with various audiences can be confusing not only for you and your staff as communicators but also for audience members.

This is why it is important to create a simple one-page document that is shared with parents and posted on the school’s or district’s website. The document should explain what types of communication tools will be used and in which specific ways.

This is especially important when it comes to communicating things like school closures, crisis situations, and other emergency issues.

Make a point of updating this document every year, or better yet, twice a year.