At the Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago we are always looking for ways to enhance our process, we believe we have developed a system that is worth sharing. We have included below a description of our process and a screen shot of our planning worksheet on excel.
Each week we meet to plan out posts for the coming week for our Schechter community Facebook page and our alumni Facebook page, with the following goals in mind:
Goals:
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Building positive awareness of and connection to Solomon Schechter Day School among our various constituencies to further enrollment and development.
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Showcasing the exceptional education and enrichment programs and activities that are offered at Solomon Schechter Day School.
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Highlighting the achievements of students, parents, faculty and staff, and alumni in our Schechter community.
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Publicizing events at Schechter and in our broader Jewish community.
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Sharing relevant articles and information that relates to our mission and to our community.
- Conducting fundraising campaigns as developed by the Director of Annual Giving.
We begin by reviewing our school memo with upcoming events and by looking at the Jewish calendar.
When we see we have an upcoming special event, we emails the teachers involved and ask them to email us with pertinent info as well as pictures during or after the event. This has alleviated our need to be everywhere. The teachers are generally willing to help and appreciate this reminder email. There are some events that we make sure we are at, however if it’s a smaller event, we simply ask the teachers to take pictures. If we receive an image while the event is occurring, we try to post it in real time.
When there is an upcoming holiday, we try to share posts with relevant material such as recipes or ideas for celebration.
We started out the year mostly posting about upcoming events and posting pictures from past events. We also experimented with other types of posts to see what posts generate the most likes and shares. We have learned that our community really likes posts that celebrate individuals’ accomplishments — whether they are students, parents, faculty or alumni.
We also experimented with sharing posts on a wider variety of Jewish-related content, however it does not seem as if these posts generate as much interest or excitement. We made the decision to only share articles of interest if we can also relate them back to something that is happening within our school.
Once we decide on the content and the date that it will be posted, we determine who on our team will actually make that post. We aim to schedule between 2-4 posts per day, except for on Shabbat and holidays, with the idea that if we miss one occasionally, we have enough to make up for it.
Here is a screen shot of a partial week of a calendar worksheet:
When looking at some of the metrics on our insight page, we can see that our reach has increased over the year. While in September, our highest reach on a post was 875 people, our highest reach on a recent post was 2696 people. In addition, our likes have increased on the whole. While we still strive to increase the number of comments and shares, we see that there has been improvement in that area since September as well. Please see chart below.
The Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago has been a participant in the Jewish Day School Social Media Academy, an intensive program designed to help Jewish Day Schools advance their strategic use of social media in areas such as communication, marketing, community building, alumni relations and development. The 2013-14 nationwide cohort of 15 schools was generously supported by The AVI CHAI Foundation. Each of the schools will be sharing insights from their experience through blog posts here with the tag #jdsacademy
Complete the Social Media Self Assessment for your school at http://www.dayschoolacademy.org/assessment