Journey into Social Media

•  SSSQ had recently upgraded the website but traffic was limited

•  No social media presence of any kind

•  A diverse parent community that was not engaged

•  We wanted to encourage our community to use social media and the web for school information and become engaged

When we started this journey…..

We had a big mountain to climb

Goal: To use social media to engage our community and show the benefits of a Schechter education ; clarifying our value proposition

– SSSQ is in the same league as other private schools with the added benefit of providing children with a Jewish education -

We launched our Facebook page in November

We surveyed our community (parents, staff and members of the board) to determine what type of information they wanted to see and how they wanted it delivered

•  Delivery using Facebook rated #1 requirement

•  Of interest to our constituents (1) Student activities, (2) school events and (3) happenings around the school

•  Photos and videos ranked highest in delivery media method

Successes •  Pictures and videos very well received (most popular post received over 980 views)

•  Parents and alumni shared and commented on the posts

•  Posting 3x per week achieves the best balance of providing information and engaging our community

•  Teaching staff actively seeks to have their activities posted

•  Our diverse community felt comfortable sharing comments on Facebook (in Hebrew, Russian and English)

Learning Opportunities

•  Postings that lacked pictures and that were very wordy didn’t capture our audiences attention.

Best Practices

•  Keep an editorial calendar of posting ideas and try to integrate it with school events, holidays or celebrations.

•  Keep track of the activity each posting receives and evaluate what has works and doesn’t work – We use an excel sheet and have a column “What have we learned”

•  Respond to comments and be careful in how you respond to negative comments

•  Our ambassadors are a great asset, they help spread the message (for our social media project we have identified 4 active parents that are helping to drive our campaign ( amongst the 3 groups that make up our community). We can also cound on them to be amongst the first to like, comment or share our posts.

Editorial Calander Postings

Next Steps

We’ve learned a great deal and this has been an incredible experience

This is an iterative process where we will always exam what we have done to continually improve

Continue to build our community and following within Facebook and website

Planning to expand our reach by incorporating Twitter

Questions??