Bulletin Boards

I’m in the middle of redesigning and launching a new website at my school. But isn’t everyone? If you’re not, then it means you’ve probably just done so in the last 48 months. It’s incredibly time consuming and made even more so by the number of other voices that get to weigh in on the look, content, navigation, and photos. I could write about the perils of websites or viewbooks designed by committee but there’s not enough alcohol on this plane to get me through it.

Instead, I find myself putting school websites into the same category as bulletin boards (and, accordingly, dating myself). If you’re an admissions director reading this and are breaking out in a sweat over the haunting memory of bulletin boards, then you were watching “Friends” when each Thursday the show had a new episode, not now when you can see repeats ten times a day across three different channels. I remember a time in my career when “bulletin board memo to faculty” was on the checklist before every open house.

Bulletin boards—like websites—are great ideas…at first. Teachers, coaches, activity leaders all are excited about sharing what they are doing, bragging about the accomplishments of their students, and letting their not insignificant egos become manifest on cork. What background paper will go on the bulletin board and where’s a stapler when you need one once you’ve picked out your border? There’s label making and headings and titles to be printed out and put up.

Fast forward to June. The background paper is torn and full of staple holes, the pretty border is wilted and flopping down, and the only thing left on the board is what hasn’t miraculous fallen down since September. All the enthusiasm and plans and energy and joy around the bulletin board quickly fell to the side back in the fall as students returned to school and the year got under way. Then multiply this by how many bulletin boards your school had/has.

So, as we design this new website and as expected, I hear from those enthusiastic colleagues around campus who have great plans and want to make sure they get a “button” on the website and not one of those lousy, buried L4 buttons. Their program should link right off the homepage. What’s ironic is they don’t share my skepticism (and certainly not my righteous indignation) when I point out the fact that on our current website their section hasn’t been updated since October…October 2009!

So beware your website doesn’t become a 21st century bulletin board. And just like those Greeks and their gifts, beware teachers and coaches bearing enthusiasm and promises.

Facebook=Viewbook?

I admit it. I buckled under to peer pressure. About a year ago, I joined Facebook. Moving twice in less than a year can be unsettling and the need to feel connected surely drove my decision into the world of social media. Now I don’t go around collecting friends or posting my every move but I have been “found” by those from my past and I’ve made some wonderful reconnections since going online.

A downside, however, is that I’m actually less in touch with a few friends. I have a couple friends who now limit their communication with the world to posting on Facebook and responding to the comments therein. We don’t talk much anymore and we don’t exchange emails. I don’t like this one bit.

But this got me to thinking about how our offices use Facebook. It came to pass that traditional, stand-alone viewbooks were seen as obsolete. How can one medium convey all the targeted and differentiated messages we believe to be important? How can one book speak to both student and parent, to both Lower School and Upper School?

Have we gone and turned our viewbooks into Facebook accounts? Do we have just one Facebook account and expect that our posts (we call them posts, right?) will serve all the diverse needs of our prospective students and parents equally, speak to all their interests equally? The answer? As usual, I don’t know. Maybe our offices need one Facebook presence for parents and another for students.

But if we’re treating all our “friends” on Facebook the same by posting undifferentiated and untargeted content then doesn’t Facebook=Viewbook? Same mistake. Different medium.

Print versus Electronic

It’s not quite as contentious as diversity but print versus electronic is up there among professional hot topics for me. Being rather traditionalist, I sometimes worry that my own bias holds back my office’s full embracing of electronic marketing. But see what the Wall Street Journal wrote on the topic last year as it relates to getting catalogs in the mail. Interesting stuff.

In this article, I think the key line for me is, Catalogs, marketers say, drive sales at Web sites, making them more important than ever. (Of course, when I read “catalogs,” I see “viewbooks”! ) I think that’s the balance. Tease them with paper. Drive them to electronic. Wow them on the web. In leadership and management courses they teach us it is better to replace one thing for another than to simply pile onto the workforce more that needs to be done. In this case, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re there yet to replace paper with a screen so we must live with being piled on with more to do.

My favorite writer on all things related to education marketing, Andrea Jarrell (a link to whose blog, “School of Thought,” you will find in the right-hand column; feel free to suggest other blogs you like), weighs in on this here. She maddeningly provides no answers but plenty of food for thought. Making you think is among the things she does best. Enjoy her writing. She's stunning in many ways.

At the end of the day, I still think there’s a balance. After all, look at what we’ve learned about how the brain works in the last two decades and how that impacts classroom teaching and assessment and pedagogy. Doesn’t this extend to a diversity of ways in which families take in information and learn about schools? Why would we limit ourselves to a debate of print OR electronic? Doesn’t having a quality presence in both media give us greater market penetration?

From Canada, I wish you all a “Happy Civic Day” this coming Monday.