The Best and Highest Use of School Communications

So much direct, actionable goodness below - Part II of the People Talking interview with Jan Abernathy, CCO of the Browning School

Apr 12, 2024

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The Best and Highest Use of School Communications

Part Two of the People Talking interview with Jan Abernathy

This is Part Two of our interview - Part One on elevating the advancement/communications partnership to broaden engagement is here.

Jan is the Chief Communications Officer at The Browning School, a K-12 boys' school in New York City, and presents regularly at conferences sponsored by regional, national and international independent school associations. She is president of New York City Independent Schools Communications Professionals, and the co-founder of Black Advancement Networking Group, which works to gain further representation and greater professional growth of Black professionals in advancement roles in independent schools. She is a member of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Commission on Communications and Marketing, and on the faculty of the CASE Academy, providing professional development to emerging and mid-career advancement professionals. She is also a CASE Laureate, a honor bestowed on the organization's most senior volunteers.

A Northwestern University graduate, Jan is a trustee at Grace Church School in New York City, and Tessa International School in Hoboken, NJ. She was formerly board chair at Stevens Cooperative School in Hudson County, NJ. Her consulting firm, Jan Abernathy Strategic Communications, provides communications and DEI counsel for educational institutions and non-profits. Jan and her husband Jerome are parents of a daughter, Noe, and a son, Sam, both independent school graduates. She can be reached here.

Julie Faulstich

I’d love to hear your advice for heads of school, both new and experienced, about the best and highest use of the communications function in a school.

Jan Abernathy

The best and highest use of the communications function is really very strategic. One of the things that I always say in the times that I have worked with both new heads and extraordinarily experienced heads is that I'm an honest broker that's going to come into your office. I’ll tell you the truth and I’m not looking for anything. I'm not trying to advance to headship. That is generally true of people who do this job. I'm not coming in simply to advocate for something that I want. I'm coming in and saying, "here's what the streets are saying. Here's a way in which I think that we need to communicate this thing that's really unpleasant." Use me!

Also, typically, people in our roles are a vault. We are pressure tested against people wanting to get information in a way that other people are not. People are always asking us if we have any inside information. That happens to us as comms directors all the time. So if you have a comms director that you can trust, we can be a repository for a lot of things that a head is trying to work out. Let’s say the school is thinking about changing how they teach Latin. As a head, you might be worried about how that's going to play with traditional families who are worried about a "woke" assault on the classics, and you could start to overthink this. If you talk to your division head, let's say, or your director of curriculum, they're going to give you feedback that’s student focused. And that's exactly what it should be. What the comms person will give you is the adult focus.

A good comms person will give you the adult focus from the perspective of the parent and the alumni. The great comms person will also give you the perspective of the faculty that you may not have thought about. Because in some ways, as a Head you might be too close to them. You might even have come from that same faculty. As a head of school, your director of communications will rarely have come from faculty, especially now. But they might have come from media or they might have come from corporate or they might have come from other places that are really interesting and have a different perspective. Comms should be one of the first calls when you need advice. I love it when a head says, "I just have something I want to talk through with you."

All the production shop work that comms people also do, whether it's a magazine, a newsletter, photography, Instagram, all of that is great. And people should have a skill set in either doing that or managing the people that do that.

But the single best thing that the comms person can do is give you advice that is not in some way compromised by some other thing in their role. All they're trying to do is help you and the school get ahead and maintain a great reputation.

A great communications person is going to help a head get that next job because they're going to make them look terrific. They're going to help craft your message if you're a head. They're going to be thinking about how to position your school. And when it's time for you to make the next move, people are going to be able to look at that school and go like, wow, look at what this candidate said in this blog and look at what this magazine was like. Look at how they did their advertising. All those things are very important for a head now.

I agree 100% with everything you said. And I know there are many people who agree with us. And yet I am still surprised to hear that there is a little bit of suspicion around the use of a communications function, that if you are an excellent school, you shouldn't need to “position” yourself.

We are in the position now of having to promote something that was much more of a country club product, for better or for worse. These schools did not start out to say, let us get the best and brightest children from the town we're in and bring them in here and give them great scholarships or if they can pay, great. It was: here's a certain kind of education that a certain kind of person can afford to pay for, right? So, of course, you wouldn't advertise a country club, right? A country club is not advertising their golf course and saying, this is the best golf course. It's all very private and you have to be recommended by someone and you've got to pay this entrance fee and all these kinds of things.

So we're now taking modern methods of communications and marketing and using them for something that was supposed to be exclusive. And that's what people don't like. And what's interesting is some of the people that don't like it can even be people who work at the school, who, on the reverse side, complain about the elitism of the students and families.

Demographics are not on our side. In many markets, there's a lot of schools, frankly, saying that it lives its values. It's a school that teaches great citizens. It's a school that is holistic, et cetera, et cetera. None of this is much of a distinguisher.

So the marketing and the advertising and the communications gets the very best, mission- appropriate students to your school. It makes sure families know about your school so that you can at least be in their decision set. Some schools are stuck on the idea that the entrance to their school is a velvet rope rather than a welcome mat. Well, you're foolish if you think that your school can survive on being a velvet rope school long term. It's just not going to work.

Recently, our New York City communicators organization held a panel discussion where three heads talked about communications. And the communications folks throughout the city loved it because they were saying, you guys are the engine of so much good stuff, and you don't get thanked nearly enough, and your role is not seen as nearly as high as it is. And that's the thing - these schools cannot survive without people promoting them. Families don't see the difference between School A and School B.

You have to show them what the difference is. When you try to differentiate based on social markers or legacies, there just aren't enough individuals who will have that kind of connection to a school. Schools need to be large enough to survive and have some economies of scale.

It used to be that faculty might have had a negative reaction to folks who are not educators also being in their school. And so then comms is the slick salesperson or whatever. But it's an old fashioned idea that the comms person is not valuable because everyone in the school realizes that we're helpful. We can help them position things in a way that's going to make their lives easier.

I think it can be hard for people today to accept this basic underlying elitism factor as we see ourselves as kid-centered, purpose driven places, but just by the very fact there’s a significant admission and financial aid process for our schools defines us as elite. It was also interesting when we redid the very minimal signage at Westover, the architecture firm who won the job explained that for years there was very little signage on the Yale campus because the theory was, if you're here, you know where you are. And if you don't know where you are, you don’t belong here. And I think schools are slow to understand the sense of clubby elitism is not the selling point it used to be with many families.

I also think heads need to fully appreciate the tool that branding and promotion and marketing can be to help them focus how the school is going to invest resources based on what is getting traction and what's attracting people to the school, because I think that’s an underappreciated lever.

Absolutely. We had branding that was done here right before I came here in 2019. I'm the first chief communications officer here. And they were looking for something to be done with it. They had brand refreshes before that were mainly about the logo, but if you don't do anything with it, then you just spent a whole lot of money on an updated logo. Branding is about having everything that at Browning look like Browning. It's having certain things that we say about our school. We say we are a relational school, and everyone knows that. Most people can name our four core values because it's just what we focus on. If you keep communicating some very basic things about who you are and what you stand for, that's going to shine through. But you have to be really intentional about it and you have to work to keep doing it over and over and over again. And a good communications person can help you focus on that over and over again.

So what advice would you give for communication directors in this time of volatility? There are more communication channels than ever. Their meaning keeps shifting. It can be confusing. And yet we have communication offices which are often still staffed by people who were not hired for their strategic outlook, who love the school and who do have a strong skill set, but can’t be expected to be able to do every communications function a school needs.

For a school that has limited resources and a limited communication office, what advice would you give for being prepared for the unexpected? How do you approach that and not want to hide under the desk? If you really love writing and editing and the magazine is your favorite thing but then you also have to deal with a social media post that goes viral in a bad way?

If you're in a place where you've got limited resources, there's a couple of things that you can do to be ready. If you're really talking about the unexpected, like a crisis, you should always know at what point you would call in a crisis communications firm. If God forbid, I have a teacher that had boundary violations with a student, even as a very experienced communications director, I'm calling in a crisis firm because I have to think about all the angles. There's a huge part of this that's legal. It may well get out into the press. I cannot possibly manage it. One of the things that a small shop needs to know is whether their insurance policy covers a crisis communicator in certain instances. Know which firms are covered by your insurance before a crisis strikes. I also would have a Zoom meeting with those firms so you can have some kind of idea of who would be a good fit with your school.

And if it doesn't reach that level, every communications officer should have a kitchen cabinet. I mean, ideally, you have something like what we have here in New York, which is a really robust organization of fellow comms professionals. I'm actually trying to see right now if there is something we can do where we join organizations from other cities together. It would be great for us to join together and be able to then draw on everyone’s expertise. Israel and Hamas is a good example of a situation where it would have been good to talk to people in other parts of the country.

You also should be making friends with comms directors at peer or competitor schools. This is an outward looking, outward facing job where you need to talk to other people that are similarly situated, and it'll help you for everything. We had President Biden in town last week. I didn't even know until somebody put it on our comms listserv and said, are you sending something to your parents about buses? Great! We just took that, sent it to our parents.

Tabletop exercises used to be something you heard more about back before COVID. Like, let's tabletop a crisis. Let's get everybody in a room. I don't think you hear about that as much anymore. But if I reported to the head of school, I would definitely talk to them about the last crisis. If I'm new, tell me exactly how the last crisis worked here or the last crisis you dealt with at your old job, if the head is new. Ask them how they'd think about crisis comms work at your school. So it's more about getting ready for it, because that is the shock of what is happening that is the scary part about a crisis. And I suspect if you don't like crisis response, you're never going to like it, but you can at least build your tolerance for it.

I like it, but I come from journalism, so of course I like crises. They are exciting. And I also know what to do and exactly what questions to ask. I know who to call. In this day and age, you don't have to wait very long before there's a crisis. I would be surprised if people are getting through Year One without a crisis. And I would say to my colleagues without this skill set that you don't want to be locked out of that room in the first crisis because you're never going to get back in. You're never going to really be able to elevate your role because they'll think you can't do it. You're never going to be more valuable to your head than when you help that person weather a crisis period. That is your time to shine. And so I think you can't be scared of it. You have to lean into it. You have to know that your school is going to get through it, and you really have to think about asking the right questions.

I remember during COVID that people were writing tons of templates. Templates and flowcharts so that they would know when to use the templates. The time you spend doing templates might be better spent deepening your knowledge about how you might deal with local press or how you're going to manage a crisis communications firm. These firms are more useful when you know how to manage them. A crisis firm will still cover you if you don't know how to manage them, but if you do know how to manage them, it's going to be so much more productive.

I've never had a crisis that didn't start with a phone call or an email that said, “I need to talk to you.” I started here in July 2019 and over that Thanksgiving weekend, I got a call from my head, and that is never good. And sure enough it wasn't, but that's part of the job. And I'd tell any colleague that it's a large enough part of the job that you have got to at least be able to do it somewhat competently. If you really cannot handle it, this actually isn't the job for you. You need to be in publications someplace or doing publications at a large school, but you can't be a lead in communications if you can't do this part of the job competently.

It’s just the environment we’re in that crises are more routine than they were years ago. I was lucky to have proactive and collaborative legal counsel and I think the comms director needs to be aware of what the role your legal counsel can and will play.

And in terms of your point of an internal comms director being able to manage an outside pr firm during a crisis, they often don't understand the culture of schools. Because sometimes advice from a place like that can actually make things worse because they don’t understand the nuances and sensitivities of your community.

Exactly right. We tend to over-index a lot of times with families that will say,” we're going to sue you” or” we're going to launch legal action.” Boards don't always have the best view of what will become a crisis and what will not. With their corporate hat on, they think this lawsuit will make all the papers. Well, it won’t if it's a little tricky to understand. The things that end up making the media are things that are really easy for everyone to understand and that are salacious. Otherwise media isn't so concerned with a sector that really tiny compared to public schools.

One other point: some schools feel that you only need to work with a law firm, and that they can craft your statement for you. Huge mistake! Because it's legalistic. It is often the legal equivalent of no comment, which is just deadly. And you're going to sound like you're lawyered up, and lawyers can make it sound like you're hiding something because they aren't going to want to expose you to risk. So that person at that small shop may also have to convince their head of school that a lawyer is not a communicator.

There's the institutional representation, there's the attorney, and there's an outside PR firm, and they all have different roles. But really it's up to the communication person and the head to be directing this and deciding what your constituency needs and what's going to help and what's not going to escalate because the lawyer and actually even a big PR firm, they can't fully explain to you what is going to blow up with your constituency. That's where you are the expert.

That's exactly right. And the trick is not to be intimidated by some of these large firms. Your school may have hired a global firm like Fleishman, Hillard or Edelman or Rubenstein. Suddenly you might be on the zoom with a bunch of guys. And you can't be so intimidated by that advice that you don't do what's right for your school.

You need to be able to say, “We don't want to come off like that.” That's what a school needs to be looking at you for. Otherwise you may miss an opportunity to actually turn that crisis into a positive moment of transparency and healing. Letting the firm control the messaging doesn't get you there because they just don't know your community. About 1% of the American population goes to our schools so you're going to be sitting across from a bunch of people that probably have no experience of any of these independent schools as a student or as a parent.

Thank you to Jan for offering such great advice!

See you next week!

Julie

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