"Teaching to the test" and other communications challenges in a hashtag world
Every day, seasoned public education leaders find themselves trying to communicate ever-more complicated information to an audience that now thinks that bite-size news may be just a bit too much to swallow all at once.
While the “readers” out there might find themselves on an endangered species list or on the side of a milk carton one day (“Have you seen me? I’m a reader. I am actually interested in what you have to say!”), the masses ingest their news and information in as little as 140 characters per dose.
Like the review process for a pile of resumes from job seekers, what you have to say is quickly shunted into the “yes” (I care) pile or the “no” (Moving on) group. There is no “maybe” (I’ll get back to this later) about it. News consumers decide in the blink of an eye whether or not they will process what you have to say.
Certainly, not everyone a school district is trying to reach gets his or her view of the world exclusively through a Twitter feed. But the popularity of this and other forms of news aggregation and dissemination provides a valuable reminder: Messages that are meaningful to the recipients, and that are easy to absorb, are the ones that are most likely to be remembered.
This is hardly a news flash, of course. “What’s in it for me?” has always played a role as target audience members sort through the news that’s served to them through various media. What’s changed is that those same individuals can look at your news – and, for that matter, you and your organization – through the prism of a hashtag.
Hashtags, of course, are those kitschy phrases in Twitter announcements that all begin with the # symbol. If you want to see what others are saying on the topic, you simply enter the hashtag and read the opinions of those near and far.
It is admittedly simplistic to say that all news delivery is dictated by hashtags. However, the idea of boiling down the discussion to a more basic word or phrase (such as would follow the # symbol on a hashtag) creates unique communications challenges.
Consider this phrase that we, at Patron Insight, see all the time in patron research projects we complete for school districts: “All they do is teach to the test” (or, spoken in “hashtag,” #teachingtothetest). You can probably add your own short, snappy phrases on subjects like funding, Common Core, class sizes, student safety and anything else that might be specific to your district to this list.
The genie is already out of the bottle, and you will never again get a consistent level of in-depth attention from your target audience members. As your information becomes more complicated, their attention spans grow shorter. How can you best deal with this reality?
- Simple is always better. If hashtags teach us anything, it’s the value of shrinking down what you have to share to something easily memorable. This doesn’t mean you abandon the details; that’s what your website is for. Just recognize that 80% of your audience wants the basic, why-should-I-care information.
- Use your language, not theirs. If you want to explain what role state-mandated testing plays in how classroom time is allocated, for example, by all means do not say, “How we teach for our students’ needs – and not to the test requirements” or anything close. Steer clear of refuting the claims of others, unless there is no other choice. Instead, seize the conversation on your terms.
- Repeat. A lot. And then repeat again. Twitter experts will tell you that it’s perfectly fine – and, in fact, encouraged in many cases – to send out the exact same message multiple times, because this media is very much a case of “drive-by” content. If you post it once and the individuals you are trying to reach don’t happen to be looking then, it might as well have not happened. Follow this mantra in whatever you communicate. If it’s important, you can’t say it often enough.