What This Post Explores

Communication is key to a successful survey effort, especially in a state that requires active consent. By developing a solid communication plan, you will have a roadmap that makes sense and keeps you on track to reach your goals. In this post, we’ll look at: 4 Steps of a Powerful Communication Plan

At this point in the process you should have already received buy-in from the school to do the survey and in this post we are working to recruit and inform parents through effective communication. The most effective communication plan is built on 4 steps known as RPIE: research, program, implementation, and evaluation.

Step 1: Do Your Research.

The first rule of communications is to identify, and more importantly, to know your target audience. What individuals or groups do you want to have supporting the survey effort? For example, if you want to communicate to parents of the Grade 6-8 students in your school, take the time to analyze demographics by answering questions such as:

What age range are the parents in this group?
What is the socioeconomic makeup of the typical household? Are they working parents/guardians? Is it typical to have a stay-at-home parent?
What is the student’s home life? Single-family household? Multi-family household? Single parent? Guardian? Grandparent? Divorced parents? Step-parents?
What education levels are represented in this group?
How do they most often receive information: internet, TV, radio, social media, mail, email, texts, neighborhood groups?
Where do they shop and gather?
What is the racial and cultural majority and minority of the parents and student body?

With answers to these and other questions in hand, you’ll be closer to understanding the type of messages to send, when to send the messages and through which channels/places the messages would be most likely to be seen and acted upon. Very often, your school district’s communications team would have this type of demographic information so you likely don’t have to do the research yourself. This is not an exhaustive list but can be a basic guide to how to think about your target demographic. In marketing, a common method to communicate with your target audience is to imagine the “perfect” customer. The idea is to envision and write down what the ideal customer would be including age, sex, race, income, employment, habits, and more to help the marketing team focus on a targeted individual instead of trying to market to everyone. This research step serves much of the same purpose, to identify the audience so that the message can be clear and targeted.

Step 2: Communication Plan Design.

Now that you know who you want to communicate with, it’s time to build your goals and objectives for reaching out to your target audience(s). Consider what you want to achieve, such as: increasing the number of parents who will return the active consent form; improving community awareness; encouraging volunteer engagement; or enhancing donor relationships. Typically, your goal will be an overarching purpose to your effort and the objectives will be the more defined methods for reaching the goals.

Example:
Goal 1. To receive a 75% survey participation rate among students in Grades 9-12.
Objective 1: By the first week in September, distribute information to all parents of students in Grades 9-12.
Objective 2: By the mid-September, conduct outreach to all parents encouraging them to return the permission form by the end of the month.
Objective 3: Throughout the survey window, communicate progress of the survey administration and other survey news.

Each objective will eventually include the tactics you’ll employ (Step 3: Implementation) and a specific timeline with key milestones and deadlines to keep the project on track.

Step 3: Communication Plan Implementation.

In this step, you’ll develop the tools and identify the channels of the outreach efforts to reach your goal. This is the nuts and bolts of your communication plan and includes:

Key Messages. Craft messages that resonate with your target audience. Since your research has given you some background about who you want to reach, you’ll have a better understanding of what type of message will be heard and more likely acted upon. For your communication plan Remember the 7 Cs of good communications; effective messages will be: clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete and courteous. During message development, you may want to take an extra step to test your messages on a small group of parents and students. Let this group review your messages to make sure your communication intent is well-understood and convincingly guides your audience to take the action you want to achieve.

Determine Communication Channels. Based on your research, choose the most effective communication channels to engage your audience. Options may include social media platforms, newsletters, community events, local media, your website, community or shopping center kiosks and email/letter distributions.

Choose Your Content. Develop a plan that outlines the types of content you’ll create for each channel. Consider the format, tone, and style that will best engage your community and align with your objectives. Remember to use language that’s best suited to your audience, avoid language that will alienate your audience, and keep to the 7 Cs of communication as you develop the content.

Step 4: Evaluate and Adjust

Regularly assess the effectiveness of your communication plan strategy. Gather feedback from your audience, analyze the impact of your efforts, and be prepared to adjust to stay aligned with your goals. Be sure to seek opinions from parents and students not only during the plan development but in these evaluation steps as well.

Three Tactics to Win Over the Skeptics

As you build your communication plan’s key messages and content, consider using all or some of these three tactics to convey the importance of the survey and earn the support of even the most difficult skeptic.

Demonstrate Success with Past Survey Data – Stay Positive!

Show positive data and not just negative data. Show improvements and brag about them. Everybody wants to be on the winning side. Frame the data as accomplishments and areas that could use improvement and attention.
Talk about how the info-graphics or data are important to making real-world decisions. Your report from ISA Data will come with a few info-graphics. Yet, for specific data you may want to highlight, you can build charts, tables or other graphics that are easy-to-read and/or visual interpretations that make the data clear. For these situations, keep your data points to a minimum — maybe three, or less. Avoid drowning your audience in too much data or you’ll quickly lose their attention.

Example: In your remarks to your audience or in outreach materials, discuss just one of the substances measured on the survey. It could be that your data show that teen alcohol use has been reduced by 25 percent over the past five years and that can be correlated to better academic outcomes or graduation rates. That’s one single data point and easy to digest. This positive message shows progress in issues of great interest to the person or group you’re addressing.

Testimonials to Demonstrate How Data Made a Difference

Think broadly. The survey touches many people and if you can secure testimony from people at all levels, you’ll make a larger impact. Consider everyone from school superintendent to principal to schoolteacher to survey administrator, to parents and their students/children. Ask them to give you 3-4 sentences about how the survey benefited students, the school, and the community. Don’t be afraid to give them examples of reviews. It can help prompt them into giving you well structured and detailed quotes.
The more the merrier. Think about product reviews. When you are looking at products online you want to see a lot of positive reviews before you buy something. The same holds true for recruiting support for the survey effort. Show how support has been given in the past. Gather testimonials and reviews. Post them on your website. Print them out and hand them to the reluctant participants to show them just how much support you have. Incorporate the testimonial in any other print materials. In fact, adding testimonials to the letter requesting active or passive parent consent will help boost response rates.

Coalition Support

If your survey effort is a project of your local coalition on drug prevention, be sure to provide information on what groups support your coalition and what groups you have as partners. Let your audience know what type of influence you have with these groups and how their support demonstrates the importance of the survey. Collect statements of support from all your coalition groups as well, all of this effort WILL pay off.

Wrap-Up
Building and implementing the steps to a successful communication plan may seem like a lot of work. Truth be told, it is a lot work. You have to pull together information, you have to answer difficult questions, you have to build relationships between administrators and parents, and you have to genuinely believe that a data collection project can help make a difference in your school. With a solid belief in the benefits of the survey as the foundation and a set of goals and objectives as your bricks and mortar, you will be on the right path for delivering a successful survey effort to reach your end game: Valuable data reports that will target areas for improvement and strengthening, while also celebrating student successes.

In addition, if you follow these steps you will have taken a giant leap into improving relationships throughout your coalition and will have a trove of support and quotes that you can use for all sorts of positive gains for your coalition including fund raising, coalition building, and community relationship building.

In case you missed them:

Focus on Active Consent and How it Affects your Data Collection? (Part 1)
Five Active Consent Strategies to Gain Participation : Focus on Active Consent in Your State (Part 2)
Active Consent: Five Ways ISA Data Protects Student Data (Part 3)