Establishing Communications Infrastructure

Informational Web Site

Nobody is going to take your marketing efforts seriously if they don’t end up at reasonably professional web site. Your web site can substitute for fancy print materials and all the things it used to take to look legitimate. If you’re still pulling together your founding team and don’t even have a name yet, it’s fine not to have a web site, but if you’re starting to do any marketing and outreach, don’t bother without putting a web site in place first. It is where you will send people, collect leads, share events, and gather newsletter subscribers and social media followers. The basics all start here.

In the past, we offered new members a website template and hosting on a Multi-site platform we managed through Wordpress. That platform got too bloated and difficult to maintain with too many admins updating their own sites and sometimes causing issues on other sites. We've recently migrated all ALCs off this platform and many of them are finding Wordpress.com and Squarespace to be the easiest and most affordable options for getting a site up and running.

If you wait for everything to be just right, you'll never get there. Start the discipline of authentic sharing and transparency before you think you're ready.

We don’t want building a web site to occupy your team so long that it keeps them from doing important tasks to attract new people and build the rest of your infrastructure. If you join the ALC Network, you can jump on our Slack team and talk to other ALC coherence holders about their website-building process. You can borrow web copy from our network site and other ALCs, and access our shared Google Drive if you need some images for your site.

Lead Management

If you don’t have a way to keep track of leads/prospects/referrals to make sure you are meeting their needs, answering their questions, inviting them to events, and engaging them in appropriate ways then do NOT start any major marketing effort. It does no good to attract people if you’re just going to drop the ball when they show up. It undermines your credibility and professionalism.

Infrastructure for Local Community

Local Phone Number

Get a local phone number. You don’t want to have people calling the school and reaching somebody’s personal cell phone while they’re in a loud crowded restaurant (or whatever). You should be able to get a VOIP number from cheap to free. If you’re in the US or Canada, you can get a free phone number from Google Voice. You can have that number ring a bunch of peoples' cell phone and/or home phones and even have voicemail messages transcribed and sent as emails.

If you’re in another country or don’t want to use Google Voice there are lots of options for business VOIP providers. The ALC Network also has a VOIP PBX system that could be used to support schools that need Interactive Voice Menus or multiple extensions. If you’re a member, check in with us during online office hours if you want some support.

Printed Materials

Don’t waste a lot of money on printing stuff in this Internet-enabled era. That said, a few things can be useful since people tend to forget conversations very quickly. Having an object to put in their hand to remind them about it later is useful.

• Bookmarks that act a hybrid business card and pamphlet can carry more content than a card as well as provide basic contact info like a business card.

• Stickers are good for putting on laptops and other small mobile billboard devices.

• Business cards can be good if presenting at a conference or something like that, but can be unnecessary if you have the bookmarks and a place to write your name when you hand them to someone.

• T-Shirts can be fun if they’re catchy and founding team folks want to buy them and wear them, but don’t buy a large inventory of them.

• Flyers with tear-off phone/web info can be good posted in a Makerspace or similarly relevant place.

Online Newsletter

Don’t bother with postal mailing lists anymore. Now is the era of free email-based newsletters and communications. You can use a service like Mailchimp to manage your mailing list for free and send out prettily formatted newsletters.

A proper newsletter service like this allows you to track who has opened and read emails. It allows people to unsubscribe (a polite and responsible thing to do), and it automatically cleans out bad addresses that don’t reach an inbox (called bouncing).

You should keep a large newsletter list and encourage almost every prospect you encounter to sign up on this list to stay informed about school events. Then use this list on a monthly or quarterly basis to update people about your progress, events, big news, etc. This should be distinct for your mailing lists for working teams or parents/families.

Signage & Visibility

If you have a location for your school, you can attract some neighbors with a nice sign. Keep it clear and simple (like: Name, A school for self-directed learning, phone number, web address). Making yourself visible to your community helps build attention, awareness and juicy gossip. :)

Infrastructure for Online Community

Domain Name

Once you’ve figured out the name of your school, you’ll want to buy a domain name you’ll use for email, web site and your organization’s online digital identity. It’s easy to search for available domain names, but then you need to choose a registrar and order it. If you're using Squarespace to build your website, you can choose to purshcase your domain name directly through them, or buy it somehwere else and port it over.

Email & Mailing Lists

Email will probably be one of the main ways your founding team and workgroups collaborate and stay in touch with each other. As your team grows, you will probably want to have some mailing lists you manage to make it easy to reach everyone all at once, like [e-mail] or [e-mail] for your finance workgroup. As you start having students enroll, you may want [e-mail], [e-mail], or [e-mail]. You can set up mailing groups and forwarding addresses if you’re using Google Apps for Education as we described above. If not, there are other ways to set up mailing lists. Whoever is hosting your email can probably help you out.

Social Media

Social media is probably one of the most effective ways to reach both parents and kids. You will want to set up a Facebook page for your school. Probably a Twitter account too, A Google Plus page can be very helpful. If you’re convening a lot of events, or have a hot topic you could convene events for, you might want a Meetup group. Instagram can be a way to attract interest if you have events that can be photographed.

However, just because you build it, doesn’t mean anyone will come. It takes regular work to maintain a healthy social media presence. You have to post interesting and valuable content to Twitter and Facebook, organize Meetup events, post Instagram photos, etc. There are ways you can connect some of your social media accounts together so you can post to one and it re-posts to the others. Or there are tools you can use (like HootSuite) that will do the posting to multiple channels for you, let you schedule it for particular times, or time release posts.

It’s great if you can find people on your team who are already heavy social media users to manage some of your posts too. You have to keep posting to show up and have the word spread about what you’re doing.

Start a Blog (and then use it)

This is another tools we provide for ALC Network members, but there are also plenty of free blogging platforms out there if you’re not a member. In the spirit of the ALC learning cycle, which culminates in sharable value from your learning, it is a good practice to start keeping a blog and share your own learning path on the way to starting your school.

Most of us like to wait till we’ve gotten all our ducks in a row before we announce it to the world, but the funny thing about ducks is that they just keep wandering out of line. If you wait for everything to be just right, you’ll never get there. Start the discipline of authentic sharing and transparency before you think you’re ready. In fact, the real way to build the muscle of sharing from vulnerability is to do it before you feel ready.

Showing the human side of trying, and sometimes failing, can actually build greater trust in new prospects than if you only present polished, shiny, marketing-ready material. In the end, parents are trusting their children to the PEOPLE running the school. If you can establish a human connection and rapport with them before you even meet because they’ve gotten to see you share you soft underbelly, then you’re ahead of the game when it comes time to talk about enrolling their child in the school.

Videos / Podcasts

If writing blog posts isn’t your thing (or even if it is, you can still do this), it isn’t hard to point your smartphone at your face, press “record,” and tell a story. That part is easy. Getting comfortable with how you look and sound is another step. Then you can develop your “look/feel/act natural while being filmed” skills.

It’s easy to create a YouTube channel, and it’s also easy to create YouTube playlists of videos that are yours or other people’s to steer people to for learning more about these alternative approaches to education. This may sound obvious, but make sure that you've watched 100% of the videos you endorse.