Is Your School Community Silent? Addressing the 'Crickets' Phenomenon

There has never been a more important time to make sure you’re listening to every voice in your school community. 

But, in school communities large and small, it can be difficult to feel confident that you’re really hearing from everyone—and that what you are hearing really reflects the wants and needs of your entire community. 

Let’s Talk!, K12 Insight’s cloud-based customer experience solution, invites two-way conversations anytime, from anywhere—making it easy for community members to reach out whenever their schedules allow. 

To truly amplify voices across your community, you’ll need to do more than just introduce the tool. Like going to the gym, signing up isn’t enough. The attention and effort you put in determine your results. 

Here are 5 tips to increase community engagement using Let’s Talk!:

1. Increase accessibility

Make Let’s Talk! easy for your community to find and use! Buttons and pop-out tabs with clear, precise messaging is a good starting point for feedback coming in through your district website, along with swapping email addresses with Let’s Talk! links across your website. 

Your community members may not have reliable access to Wi-Fi or might always be on the go. Make reaching out even easier for them by introducing a Let’s Talk! phone or text number. Calls and texts to your district’s number will be automatically routed into Let’s Talk! where your team can collaborate on and respond to just like any other dialogue.

2. Send targeted campaigns via Let’s Talk! Campaign Manager

Feel like you’re hearing from some stakeholder groups and not others? Reach out to your entire school community—or segments of it—to share information and ask for feedback about timely, relevant topics. 

For example, if you’re not hearing much from your students, you might choose to send graduating seniors a campaign about graduation celebrations or the transcript request process. Or you might want to send a campaign to teachers and staff to check-in and remind them to take care of themselves while they navigate virtual instruction and work-life balance while at home.

Alternatively, you can target specific types of feedback. Many of the school leaders we partner with send out campaigns to request compliments on teachers or staff members who are going above and beyond so that they can recognize them for their good work.

3. Connect social media and other channels to Let’s Talk!

Your community is already talking to and about you via various channels. By bringing conversations from social media, emails, or even the news into Let’s Talk!, you can capture the complete picture of what your community cares about and ensure a positive customer experience.

4. Create new dialogues

Create new dialogues based on phone calls, in-person interactions, letters, and more. By adding dialogues on your own, you can capture the many daily conversations and in-person interactions that can otherwise be overlooked. It may also help to appoint a Let’s Talk! user to serve as a Recorder who can focus on documenting those types of interactions.

5. Enable multiple languages in Let’s Talk!

Capture a broader range of conversations and ensure you’re hearing from your entire school community by enabling multiple languages in Let’s Talk!. This empowers community members to submit dialogues in their chosen language while automatically translating them so that your internal team can respond. Designating an internal staff member as a Translator helps ensure incoming and outgoing translations are accurate so that every customer in every language has a positive experience.

Need help implementing any of these strategies? Reach out to your K12 Insight team! We’re happy to help.