THE POWER OF being connected resonates no matter the size of the school district or the resources available. As the leader of a K-8 district with about 765 students in a community that is only three miles wide, I wanted to make sure when we began social media use that it was helpful and meaningful to our stakeholders.

We started slowly in 2013 by creating a district Twitter account, which few staff knew how to use. During that introductory phase, we helped staff learn how to tweet by participating in chats with fellow educators.

But I was disappointed when Twitter wasn’t reaching our community as I had hoped. When posting about an upcoming event or sharing a student success story, the only “likes” we received were from each other and perhaps a few passionate educators following us.

We put a lot of work into those 140-character tweets, yet when we realized most of our parents were more comfortable using Facebook and most of our students were more likely to be on Instagram, it was time to change our plan.

Practical Measures
Below are some practical considerations we used when we added Facebook and Instagram to our district’s communications strategy. Our questions included:

» What are our goals for using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram?
We wanted to connect with our audiences and provide information to students (Instagram), parents (Facebook) and fellow educators (Twitter); improve our brand; and strengthen our positive climate and culture.

» Who would monitor and maintain information posted on our social media sites?
We assigned one administrator and one teacher from each school to have full administrative access to monitor and post content on our newer social media sites.

» What existing board policies covered technology and social media?
In our review, we confirmed we already had policies to cover increasing social media use, including policies related to network access, e-mail, internet and use of district equipment.

» What could we learn from other school districts?
We reached out to districts to research their process, board policies and use of social media. We also identified the work to be completed to secure the district’s sites. (One caution: It’s easy to confuse district and personal accounts when toggling between the two. Posting political thoughts on the district site when you think you’re posting on your personal site will cause a lot of extra work and headaches.)

» How could we promote the use of social media?
We used recommendations from Campus Suite for planning, creating and managing social media. (See https://content.campussuite.com/social-media-guide-for-schools for free materials.) We promoted our social media presence through links on our website and posters displayed in our buildings inviting our community to follow and like our pages.

Supplemental Duties
Creating a social media presence required our staff to wear multiple hats and take on additional responsibilities that might be primary duties for administrative staff in larger districts. We don’t have a public information officer, a transportation director or a curriculum director. (Many smaller districts in our region don’t have a full-time superintendent.)

All of the practical considerations from our research were put into place by district and school leaders who already were short on time and who certainly were not social media or public information experts.

It was worth it. Social media enables us to flood our followers with positive school culture and pride. No matter the platform, we’re finding social media opens communication with all of our stakeholders. We’re still learning and hope to improve our use to connect our educators and inform our parents, students and community about the great things happening in our northwest Montana district.

Readers can follow us at @Evergreensd50 (Twitter), Evergreen School District 50 (Facebook) and @Evergreensd50 (Instagram).