Webinar Replay: Social Storytelling for K-12 School Education

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah Loyd: Good afternoon or good morning if you are on the West Coast. Welcome to today’s webinar, Social Storytelling Strategies for Higher Education.

Thanks so much for taking the time to join us during what’s undoubtedly a busy time of year. They’re all busy times of year, right? Let me also wish you guys a happy school principal’s month. Be sure you’re recognizing your district and your school leaders.

But today we’re going to talk about our social tell, social storytelling strategies for K-12 education. How you can identify your institution’s unique story. We’re going to look at a few unique content ideas and also discuss how to implement your storytelling strategy. If you have questions as we go through today, please drop those into the questions box and time permitting, we will answer those at the end.

Before we jump right in just a little bit about Social News Desk. We are the only social media management software that’s purpose built for important business. We were founded in 2010 and since then we’ve proudly supported America’s largest news companies, cities, Government agencies, school districts, universities, and businesses who require powerful, always on social media tools.

Social News Desk helps organizations save time with a one stop shop for social media publishing, take control of their entire social footprint in a single, easy to use dashboard, Stay informed and engage with the community around them with social listening tools, demonstrate value to stakeholders with powerful reporting, and gain peace of mind with our always ready U.S. based human support team.

I’m Sarah Lloyd, the head of product success and evangelism here at Social News Desk. I’ve been with the team for 10 years and prior to joining SND, I managed social media and worked in several newsrooms. And I was actually a Social News Desk customer before I ever joined the team.

So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. The address is there on the screen. And I’m also pleased today to welcome Andrea Smiley, the Communications and Media Coordinator for Genesee Intermediate School District. We’re going to do a Q&A with Andrea a little bit later But for now, let’s jump right in.

So first of all, why is storytelling so important on social media? Many school districts can talk about what’s happening in the classroom, upcoming events, sports, or their alumni when they’re trying to connect with families and their community on social media. But taking the time to tell a story can make a huge difference.

Screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee told the Harvard Business Review, there are two ways to persuade people. The first is using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process. And in the business world, it usually consists of a PowerPoint slide presentation in which you say, here’s our company’s biggest challenge, and here’s what we need to do to prosper.

And you build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. But there are two problems with rhetoric. First, the people you’re talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. And while you’re trying to persuade them, they’re arguing with you in their heads.

Second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough because people are not inspired to act by reason alone. And he continues, the other way to persuade people and ultimately a much more powerful way is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story.

In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling, but you also arouse your listeners emotions and energy. Uniting an idea with an emotion, I love that. And that is where storytelling has its power. Stories do so much more than just convey information. They capture our audience’s attention, which is so important in a crowded social media landscape.

The emotions that stories evoke help audiences develop empathy for the characters, which promotes greater understanding of other people. And stories can be more persuasive by connecting with your audience on a deeper emotional level, which makes the information you’re trying to convey more memorable.

When deciding how to tell your school story, consider your goals and what you want audiences to take away. Your district’s marketing might include any or all of these goals. Increasing or maintaining enrollment numbers, which is becoming more important not just for private schools and charters, but for public schools as well.

Keeping your students’ families informed about what’s going on and what’s coming up at the school. Engaging the wider community with what’s happening in your district. Proving performance, whether it’s showcasing individual student successes, sharing campus achievements, or celebrating district wide wins, and providing timely updates in managing the district’s reputation during times of crisis.

Social media story narratives can be centered around a number of things. Sharing information or building awareness about a program or feature of your school or district. Promoting an event or initiative where the goal is for your audience to take action. Spotlighting a student, faculty, or staff member, or a club or organization.

Recapping an event such as a pep rally, sporting event, field trip, or other big days at school. And stories that we tell just for the fun of it. And each goal has a variety of audiences that might include students, parents, alumni, both recent and long term sports fans, the local community in which your school is located and even job seekers looking for employment with your school or district.

And each audience tends to gravitate to different social media platforms. So it’s important to consider the content types that perform best on each network and match that format to the story you’re trying to tell and the audience you want to reach. Now let’s get into crafting stories for your schools and your district and how we can tell them effectively.

Think about what makes your schools unique. Do you have student clubs and organizations that are a little out of the ordinary? Does your campus offer an unusual class or sports that can’t be found anywhere else? You can also tap into your school’s history to showcase where you’ve been in order to plot where you’re going.

You can share what your alumni are up to, especially if they come back to visit their alma mater. Your campus also likely has some interesting features like a garden started by students or unique architecture, and of course, sharing student and alumni traditions are also great ways to connect the community to the past and to the future.

The next step is identifying and defining the parts of your story. These are the five C’s of storytelling. First, decide who your characters are. Is it a student, members of a department, your sports team, or alumni? Next, set up the context, the scene for the story. Set up the stakes. What is your audience, why, why does your audience care about this character and their journey?

Third, build conflict and tension in your story. This could be a challenge or it could be an opportunity. At the climax of the story, reveal how the tension is resolved. And finally, give the audience closure. What’s the takeaway of the story? What do you want audiences to remember the most? Let’s explore these five C’s in a little bit more detail with an example of a story.

First, choose a character or group of characters to be the centerpiece of your story. This gives your story the human element that makes it so relatable to your audience. Your institution will have a unique cast of characters that you can choose from. You can showcase students who are thriving in their daily campus life and excelling in or out of the classroom.

Your faculty and staff also have unique stories and challenges to share. Sports, of course, is tailor made for storytelling, whether it’s overcoming obstacles or winning a championship. Your alumni, whether they’re well known or not, can help you tell stories of their successes after graduation and how your school helped shape their career trajectory.

You can also spotlight families who are being served by your school or district. And for today, let’s imagine our story involves a group of elementary school students participating in a reading challenge. Next, we’ll establish the context of the story. Consider the hook you’ll use to start things off.

Why should the audience care about the story? Once you’ve identified the story you want to tell, you can consider how you’re going to get the viewer or reader interested. You might start with a surprising fact, hook a reader with a challenge, ask a compelling question, or pique the viewer’s curiosity. You can also use a pertinent statistic to get your viewer’s attention.

Use a narrative intro or quote to get your story started. Look ahead to the future, or begin with a call to action to get the reader involved right from the start. In our sample story today, we might start with a statistic about the importance of reading for younger students, or maybe a quote from one of the students who’s excited to begin the challenge.

Consider the main conflict of a story. The conflict should establish the main problem or tension in the story, and it could be a negative conflict, such as a problem for the character or characters to solve, or a positive conflict, like an opportunity the character can take advantage of. It could even be both, depending on the situation.

Stories tell us about the challenges people face and help your audience relate to the characters. Even if the situation isn’t something your audience hasn’t encountered yet or something they haven’t encountered in a very long time, the emotion of the characters dealing with the story’s conflict will make your characters more relatable.

For our story, the conflict might be some of the students racing against time to fill in their reading challenge chart. The climax is the high point of the story. This is the moment where your character has made it through the conflict or challenge and successfully emerged on the other side. The climax of your story gives your audience a sense of hope or optimism.

Our story’s climax might show the students organizing reading groups to help their peers meet their goals. Finally, wrap your story up to give the audience a feeling of closure. This might be a lesson, an answer to a question, or the completion of the journey, and ultimately the message you want the audience to take away.

We see our students complete the challenge and celebrate with a party, highlighting the importance of encouragement and teamwork in meeting goals. In our story, we established our characters, gave the story an emotional context, raised the stakes a little bit with a conflict, solved the problem and gave the audience a feeling of closure.

This is just a simple example, but following the five C’s will help give any story some structure and help you build emotion and tension before giving your audience a satisfying takeaway. Now let’s talk about the ways you might tell your story on different platforms. Remember, consider your audience.

Who should be watching, reading, or interacting with this story? And where are your audience most likely to see your story? All of these audiences tend to have different social media habits, so consider the platform where these audiences are most likely to see and engage with your content. The platforms you choose for your audience will influence the type of content that you’re producing.

Videos, particularly videos that are a few minutes long or longer, will be more often encountered on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Vertical video shows up in several places, including Facebook and Instagram Reels and Stories, TikTok videos, and YouTube Shorts. It’s a great video format to get comfortable with since it can play on so many platforms.

Photo carousels or galleries are also great for Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. TikTok also supports photo galleries now. And single photos can also do well on Instagram and Facebook, as well as X and LinkedIn. You may consider telling the same story in a few different formats, such as a longer version of your video for Facebook and YouTube, and a one minute vertical version for Reels and Stories.

The more formats you can use to tell the same story, the more likely it will be that your story can reach a greater share of your audience who interacts with different types of media. So it’s hard to be the only person on campus in charge of telling stories. So you should get your faculty, staff, and student body involved in content creation.

They can help identify opportunities to tell a story and even capture video or images of key moments. That you can use to build your stories. Later on, you can use a social media management platform like social news desk to set up some of your key content creators with ways they can create posts directly.

Then you can go in and approve and schedule the post after making any necessary edits. Letting students and staff share their unique voices on social media will give your content a greater sense of authenticity. Gathering content can be a challenge as well. You may consider an online form, which can be as simple as using platforms such as Google Forms or JotForm.

You can also use QR codes around campus to remind students, faculty, and staff of how they can send you content or story ideas. A dedicated email address that points to a distribution list for your marketing department can also be useful for gathering media content. There are also SMS services that allow you to collect media and don’t forget about social media comments.

Just asking people to share their pictures can lead to even more stories to tell. Encourage your community to share their stories and media with you so that you have plenty of content to choose from. You might suggest a few content ideas like photos of a student working on a project in a lab or studio, or a behind the scenes video of what goes into an athlete’s training.

Don’t forget to share stories of what your faculty and staff are up to in and out of the classroom as well. Gathering content organically also gives your stories that feeling of greater authenticity. Every story doesn’t have to be overly produced. Now let’s take a look at a few examples of stories from schools on social media.

Dalton Public Schools in Dalton, Georgia shared an Instagram reel that, despite having no dialogue, captures the story of their high energy pep rally from start to finish. The caption really sets the scene. It wouldn’t be a DHS Cats homecoming without a loud and highly competitive pep rally. We can’t wait to see which class will win the spirit stick tonight.

You can feel the energy of the cheerleaders, the band, and really the whole student body. St. Bernard School, a private school in Uncasville, Connecticut, shares the story of two students who volunteered at the Wall that Heals, a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A compelling caption and photos of the boys helping to set up and tear down the ceremony showcases their students’ attitude of service.

This story from Lake Hamilton School District in Percy, Arkansas, showcases students partnering with businesses to construct a tiny home, learning valuable life skills, and eventually auctioning off the home to fund future projects for their construction technology students. This is a great story that really shows off what might otherwise be an overlooked program at the school and centers the experiences of students.

I really love the caption for this slideshow on Instagram from Allentown Schools in Pennsylvania. It shares a quick story of how a student’s computer broke, but he took the initiative to open it up, clean it out, and fix the fan. And that ignited his passion for technology, which was celebrated at the opening of a new Science and Technology Academy in Allentown.

Sharing Matthew’s story really personalizes the school opening ceremony. Bellingham Schools in Washington recognized several of their faculty, staff, and volunteers with their Promise Award. They had several compelling profiles of the award recipients, sharing their stories of experience and leadership in the classroom.

The series is put together really well and showcases each of the people that were recognized. Genesee Intermediate School District in Flint, Michigan took a creative approach to recruiting bus drivers with a video story from Julie, one of their special needs bus drivers. She shares her experience with being a bus aide, being trained by the district, and the love she feels from the kids that she serves every day.

It’s a really great way to go beyond the average recruiting post. Now let’s talk about some practical ways that you can execute your storytelling plan on social media. Social media strategy expert Jack Appleby recently shared this tip on LinkedIn. If your content does well on one platform, it’s likely going to do well elsewhere as well.

So if you notice a video picking up steam on TikTok or Instagram, and you haven’t shared it on Facebook Reels or YouTube Shorts, what better way to tell a story than with stories? You can use the stories format on Instagram and Facebook to change up your storytelling. You can use shorter stories, tease a longer story on your full profile, or break up a larger story into smaller chunks to make it more interactive.

Schedule your stories in advance using a tool like Social News Desk to make sequencing easy. Share the entire story in a post on social media rather than relying on external links for people to get the full story. An NPR study found that audiences prefer to click on longer posts using the see more button rather than click on posts with external links to their websites or blogs.

It’s definitely okay to refer to external links for additional information, but your social media stories should be self contained. Use a captivating caption to give your story more context and set up the conflict. Whether you’re using a video or photo to tell your story, don’t discount the power of a compelling caption to draw your audience in.

Instagram collabs are also a great way to bring your story to even more people. Whether you’re collaborating with the subject of the video or one of your sub brand pages, The post will show up for followers of both the publishing account and the collaborating account. Tools like Social News Desk allow you to easily tag your Instagram collaborators when publishing and scheduling your content.

Consistency counts. Schedule a series of stories for the same time each week. to build a consistent audience. Publishing consistently, consistently also has benefits when it comes to the algorithm, as it makes your content more predictable. Use a tool like SND’s publishing calendar to plan out your schedule in advance.

So everyone on your team is on the same page. Use playlists on YouTube and highlights on Instagram to curate your stories into collections. It makes it easier for your audience to find related content if they’re interested in learning more. Alright, so now I would like to bring in Andrea Smiley, the Communications and Media Coordinator for Genesee Intermediate School District.

Thank you so much for being here, Andrea. Thank you, Sarah, for having me. Yeah, of course. First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your district?

Andrea Smiley: Sure. So I work for the Genesee Intermediate School District which serves all the communities in Genesee County, Michigan. We have, gosh, over 85,000 students in Genesee County and our efforts are to help and assist the local school districts as an ISD.

Sarah Loyd: All right, awesome. So for our first question, tell me about a couple of memorable stories you’ve shared at Genesee ISD. We saw the story of Julie the bus driver. I love that. It’s such a creative way to recruit bus drivers, but what are some other stories that you guys have shared?

Andrea Smiley: Yeah, so most recently we also launched a new website.

It’s for both college students and students after high school. It’s called Beyond Grad. And so we developed this website and it contains multiple resources for if you’re looking to plan for your career after high school whether it’s skilled trades or actually going to college and all the different things about FAFSA financing your college.

So anything that has to do with beyond graduation, it’s like a one stop shop for students and adults. Their parents can go to find information about that. So that was one of our recent things that we’re still telling that story. So we’ve developed different videos. One is more of a launch video.

So it’s kind of a hype video. And then we’ve gone into some other videos that actually call out the specific tabs of the website. So that’s one that’s ongoing. I’ve also done a story about our new Fire Training Center at our Career Institute. That’s a place that high school students can actually get their certifications and their first two years of becoming a firefighter while they’re still in high school.

So that’s a really good, compelling story and we’ve got lots of action videos of the students dressed up and in their gear and doing their coursework and everything. So I’m very proud of that as well.

Sarah Loyd: That’s super cool. I would love to go and see that. Stories like that just really lend themselves to being told when you have that great action video and things like that.

And I know there are a lot of you know, school communicators who probably have a background in news like I do, and want to go out and put on their reporter producer hat. And tell those stories the way you might tell a new story. So I love that. How does storytelling align with your strategic goals at the district?

Andrea Smiley: So storytelling helps us build awareness, of course. A lot of the community members and organizations still, even though we’ve been around for many, many years, still don’t really understand what we do at the ISD. So that really helps build awareness. Our main mission is leadership service and innovation.

So all of those different programs and services that we have we want to be able to speak to a variety of audiences. Our biggest thing is partnering with. businesses in the community, organizations in the community. So just any way that we can get that message out, the storytelling really helps us do that.

Sarah Loyd: Okay, great. Which audiences have you seen that are more receptive to storytelling?

Andrea Smiley: I think the biggest would be the adults, the parents. A lot of our programs speak to them more so, whether it’s early childhood or whether it’s the career tech for the older teens you know, it’s those parents that are like, Hey, Johnny this is what’s going on, or this is what you could do, or if it’s early childhood, they’re the ones that are enrolling their kids and getting them in To the different programs.

So just speaking to the parents and then any of the partners that we have to help spread that message. I think they are the most receptive.

Sarah Loyd: Okay. Very cool. And what is the biggest challenge that you guys face when you’re trying to tell stories on social media?

Andrea Smiley: I think the same challenge that everyone faces is stopping the scroll and really getting engagement You know really getting people to look at your content and see what it’s about and then you know whether it’s a click to more or Yeah, it’s there’s just so much out there and so many people now are on social media and using social media that you really It’s really challenging to stand out.

Sarah Loyd: Yeah, for sure. I was actually at a conference recently and they talked about how most people watch a video for an average of seven seconds. So just talk about short attention span theater. So we talked a lot about putting that hook in the first seven seconds to make sure that you’re grabbing people’s attention right off the bat.

So yeah, I’m sure that everyone is kind of facing those same challenges. And also fighting against the algorithm and making sure that they’re getting that content out. Trying to get it actually in front of people, yeah.

Andrea Smiley: We’ve even talked about moving, like if there’s a link in our post, in our content, we try to move that to like the first sentence.

So that you’re not losing them before they even have a chance to see that there’s a link to click on.

Sarah Loyd: So important to grab people’s attention right off the bat. So how do you adapt a long form story for other formats? Like if you have a longer video, how would you maybe break that up for reels or stories or even use that in, in places like an Instagram slideshow or something like that?

Andrea Smiley: So I have to say, honestly, I don’t do stories as much as I used to in previous assignments. In the educational warrior world, they’re very cautious of. Like I said about the BeyondGrad website launch, we did take a video and then kind of chunk it out. And so each smaller 15 second or 30 second video is about a specific tab on the website.

And then we have the ability to take those videos and post those on those other platforms that have even shorter attention spans and different audiences. So if we do have students that follow us you know, we can give them what they’re looking for, as well as the mom or the dad that are following on Facebook with the longer form.

So Stories is something that I’m still working on getting everybody to accept and understand as well as like live shots you know, just doing something off the cuff. Most of our stuff I have to say is post produced or we have to really like to get it vetted and everything before we can do it.

So there’s a lot of planning involved when it comes to education, but we are fortunate we do have a videographer in our department. So we’re able to kind of. You know, do different video formats.

Sarah Loyd: Awesome. That’s great. I know stories can be within that 24 hour time limit. It’s sometimes hard to want to put the work into just putting together a story, but I think repurposing you know, other, other videos, like you said, is just a really great way to adapt that. I’ve also heard of a lot of people using stories for those calls to action for things that are coming up like the next day.

So instead of spending a lot of time putting together a post that is going to go out and have a longer life. Using the advantage of that story format being so immediate to get the word out about events and things like that. Right. So are there any storytelling projects that you guys are working on for this school year, if you don’t mind sharing?

Yes.

Andrea Smiley: So we’ve got a big focus on special education right now. And we’re just looking for different ways to Spread that information. There’s a lot that we do in special ed. All starting with like our youngest learners all the way up to adults that are 18 to 26. We have a transition center and a project search site.

It’s national and we have a site here in Genesee County. We’re partnering with the Genesee County Parks Department. And so those students, those adult students, work on their work life balance and get acclimated into a work situation so that they can be employed as an adult with disabilities.

So we’ve got a lot that we’re doing with special ed. Like I said, it goes all the way from our youngest learners all the way up to adults of 26 years of age. But so there’ll be a lot of different campaigns coming out. Just building awareness and talking about the services and programs that we offer.

Sarah Loyd: That’s great. That’s a super cool program. So thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you for being here today. I really appreciate it. Yes. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. We love getting to partner with you. So we really appreciate it. So just a little bit more, if you’re having trouble wrangling multiple accounts over multiple platforms to tell your stories, Social News Desk is battle tested by thousands of communicators daily, just like Andrea in school districts, universities, municipalities, journalism, and meteorology.

Our consolidated social media tool allows for updating multiple channels at once, meaning you can plan and execute your storytelling campaigns across all platforms at one time. And since your social accounts are onboarded in advance, users already have access to the accounts they need to get the job done without sharing passwords and jeopardizing security.

This also helps to reduce errors and keeps users from accidentally publishing to personal accounts. Our easy to use tool allows for quick updates and gives you a comprehensive view of your performance across all social media accounts. So that is it for our slides today. I’m going to check and see if we have any questions.

While I’m doing that, I will mention if you’d like to learn more about Social News Desk, you can visit the website there on your screen, socialnewsdesk.com. Under customers, we do have a section all about our work with K-12 districts. And you can also email us at info at socialnewsdesk.com if you’d like more information.

All right. First question, which vertical video platforms does Social News Desk support? So we support Facebook and Instagram Reels, Instagram Stories, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok for vertical video. And beyond vertical video, we also support publishing to Threads, X, and LinkedIn, as well as next door agency accounts.

And you can certainly publish a vertical video in all of these places, but Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are really more geared toward that format. All right. How can I involve my staff or trusted students in publishing to social media without giving them direct access to our schools accounts?

That’s a great question. So in Social News Desk, you can set up users who only have access to submit posts for approval, and then you can go in as the communications lead and approve the posts and schedule those for when they should go out. And this really helps with generating more authentic content without giving up control over what’s going out on your social accounts. All right, those are great questions. I don’t see any other questions. If you do think of them later, I know I always think of questions after the webinar is over. Feel free to email us there at info@socialnewsdesk.com or you can find me on LinkedIn, Sarah with an H, Lloyd with one L.

Thank you guys so much for your time today. Have a great rest of your afternoon. Bye bye.