In the increasingly competitive environment in which many public schools and districts are finding themselves, good communication is very important.

In this blog, I discuss tips and strategies for getting your messages out. But in some cases, the unintentional messages that your district is communicating speak the loudest.

If a staff member does not greet parents who telephone the school in a friendly and helpful way or if emails go unanswered, what message does that send? What if a parent who is considering sending her child to your school visits your website and finds outdated information or broken links? Finally, what impression do you send if a staff letter includes a grammatical error?

In some cases, oversights such as these speak louder on behalf of a school or district than any messages that its leader conveys.

Take time to think about what your school or district is really communicating to stakeholders and seek to improve not only your intentional communication but also your less-obvious ways of communicating, including your customer service.