The Editorial Dashboard

How one San Diego-area school makes sure that everyone helps with email marketing

by The Marketing Team,  Constant Contact Customer Success Stories

San Diego French-American School
Location: La Jolla, San Diego, California
Website: http://www.sdfrenchschool.org/
Open Rate: 47.8%
Customer Since: March 2008

Planning for the year ahead can be remarkably easy. Add a milestone here, launch a new product there, and suddenly the calendar is full of clear, straightforward goals. It's the road to those goals that gets bumpy, especially when many small businesses and organizations are so focused on the holiday time that they don't have much time to plan beyond that.

San Diego French-American School knows this first-hand. The school's 2012 calendar is ambitious, to say the least. In fact, communications consultant Mim Britton says she and the communication committee have been busy preparing for many important meetings and events that for the month of January. The timing of the newsletters is important so that parents don't miss a beat. With a concert, re-enrollment, parent-teacher conferences, report cards, special meetings, a state of school address, and visits from dignitaries, the full calendar means planning for email newsflashes in addition to the regularly scheduled email newsletters. And, yes, that means that even a meeting to make the plans also needs to be planned and scheduled on the calendar.

Right on the heels of a busy January is February, when the school hosts a kid-friendly Mardi Gras, parading pre-schoolers who've donned their finest face paint and masks throughout the campus. In the same month, there's the talent show, where, last year, there were tiny ballerinas, rock stars, and a group of karate-chopping kids. In March there's a jog-a-thon and the annual school gala, and the schedule doesn't get any less hectic from there. All of these fun events take a lot of hard work, and they're taking place during a year that San Diego French-American School hopes to expand its campus.

Email marketing newsletters help keep parents informed of all the events, while Event Marketing helps keep the events organized. But, with so much to say and so much going on, it becomes impossible for just one person to write all that content. That's why San Diego French-American School includes a special kind of planning every month: an editorial dashboard for each newsletter... an e-calendar, if you will.

A New Schedule for a New Year

At the start of each school year, Mim readies a publication schedule that covers the entire school year, outlining 20 newsletters plus the education newsletter (123 Soleil), and all the invitations to events. From there, it becomes teamwork. The three other members of the communication committee (the headmaster, the communications officer and the development officer) get involved and the group works together on each newsletter and event invitation. Additionally, email newsflashes are sent out as needed, mostly as reminders or special event announcements. The school's communication rule is to "plan, prepare, and present the news."

"Once we have the schedule, we start making an editorial dashboard in Excel, with a tab for each publication date," Mim explains. The sheet itself is broken down into each section of the newsletter, including the main stories that appear in the body of the newsletter and the mini-stories in the left-hand column.

"The dashboard helps keep things in order. Each story in the spreadsheet has the article title, event description, an illustration, the authors, and the status of the article," says Mim.

Since the newsletter is published twice a month, the committee works on a three-week cycle. During the first week, the dashboard is shared with the extended communications committee and reviewed. On the second week, the team talks about any potential changes during the Monday committee meeting. "As with any organization, we have to send out quite a few reminder emails to make sure everything gets done on time," Mim admits.

So who does the actual writing of the newsletter? Just about everyone. The school's carefully planned dashboard has not only helped make sure that each newsletter is full of updates, upcoming events, and informative articles, the planning guarantees that no one on the staff is overburdened by creating the email and event communications. Teachers, the communications committee, and others (i.e., Parents Association, "Green" Committee, and Humanitarian Committee) all play a role in bringing each newsletter to life.

It's clear that the strategy has worked. The open rate for each newsletter is around 50%. The emails have been a way for the parents, and other friends or grandparents of the school, to stay involved and engaged with the school's events, fundraisers, and field trips. And a lot of the students' extended families are international -- the students at San Diego French-American School represent about 35 different nationalities.

The surest sign that San Diego French-American School's planning has worked out?

"We'll definitely hear from parents if they don't get the newsletter," says Virginia Berracasa, the school's communications and admissions officer. And if people are noticing that they don't get an email, then you know that you've hit a home run.

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