Chris Rosica on Crisis Comms & PR for Resilient School Districts

1. What are the most common communications mistakes districts make during reputational crises and how can they avoid them?

There are three primary things school districts can do to ensure better crisis communications outcomes. These include:

- Adopting an immediate response mindset, which entails being crisis prepared (i.e., assigning an internal crisis management team and developing a scenario-based crisis communications plan that reflects education’s ever-changing environment). It is also wise to utilize outside PR/crisis counsel for issues, which mitigates risk and de-escalates reputation-damaging circumstances.

- Ensuring legal counsel and PR/crisis counsel work seamlessly to protect your district. Legal crisis counsel does not focus on protecting your image/reputation but will, of course, protect your legal interests while PR firms are not experts on the laws that govern.

- Telling your good news proactively so when a crisis does occur, your reputation is intact. Storytelling and advocacy are indispensable in education today.

2. How do you tailor crisis communications for school districts, where stakeholders range from students and staff to media, unions, and community leaders?

This is an extremely informed question as tailoring messages for various stakeholders is critical – not only when dealing with issues, but also in proactive PR and communications. We develop a message matrix for each scenario with clear delineation for different stakeholders to ensure we are touching on things that are relevant to them. It’s a matter of identifying the pertinent communication points for each stakeholder group and emphasizing or leading with those, following up with facts and supporting messages.

3. What role does local SEO and online reputation management play in district competitiveness and how should districts get started?

Another smart question because historically districts have not utilized SEO and rarely focus on online reputation management (ORM). This is because, heretofore, public education has not experienced such intense competition. Public schools have to think more like businesses and SEO and ORM are examples of how they must plan and work differently. With school vouchers on the rise, our agency views SEO and proactive ORM as imperatives.

4. How can districts balance transparency with message control in today’s polarized and fast-moving media landscape?

We say, “Tell who needs to know what they need to know when they need to know it.” This means concise communications to key stakeholders with an emphasis on truthfulness and, when appropriate, contrition. It does not mean message overload and explaining every detail, ad nauseam.

We urge our clients never to be defensive, and to tell the entire story (i.e., their positive actions, when and where appropriate). They should always be advocating for themselves.

We’ve witnessed the best defense being a strong offense. We believe in this axiom because it is critical to regularly disseminate your good news, and make sure to consistently share it with your stakeholders so when something negative pops up, you’ve already created a solid foundation of positive storytelling.

The polarization issue is real and not going away anytime soon. Therefore, the words you use are of critical importance. Take the lead from a professional communicator, an agency or individual that understands these nuances.

5. What internal communication tools or strategies are most effective in multi-building, diverse districts?

We have found video to be the single most important communications tool for internal communications in multi-school districts. Via a monthly video shot on a high-quality smartphone (not overly produced), the superintendent can engender trust, build rapport, demonstrate transparency, bring levity, and rally the troops. Of course, if we did not live in an entertainment-based society, video would not be so important. But we do and it is.

6. In your view, what will define a “resilient” public school district over the next 5 years and how should they prepare?

Districts that: regularly refine their positioning and messaging; have a strong crisis communications plan in place; conduct consistent and proactive PR/storytelling and digital marketing (e.g., SEO); and build a strong advocacy network that encompasses not only the school community, but the greater community (policymakers, influencers, alumni, media, etc.).

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