Upgrading your School Newsletter: Time Management

Phone calls, fire drills, disruptive kids, oh my! Time is not a commodity educators can spare; so, creating a school newsletter good enough to be read by hundreds or thousands of parents and faculty can be daunting.

Let’s recap on what goes into creating a school newsletter: setting goals, choosing visuals, retrieving and organizing information across different sources, curating chosen content, formatting a layout, and creating a distribution plan. Keeping in mind that, throughout this process, principals, teachers, and admins experience all types of disruptions, from a lengthy phone call from an unhappy parent to a food fight in the cafeteria.

So, whichever method of communication you choose to use, creating a “welcome letter to parents” newsletter, for example, should be as efficient and easy to do as possible.

Here are 3 tips to help you save time:

• End of day roundup: At the end of each day, drop all of the content you receive for your school newsletter into one separate document or email folder for future easy access.
• Templating: Make a school newsletter template for each repetitive type of communication, such as “Weekly School Update”
• Taking notes: Take school newsletter template tips from other educators; either by speaking with industry colleagues or a simple online search

Educators have repeatedly told us how much time they’ve gained in their day since using Smore as their school newsletter tool. One principal went on to mention that thanks to Smore’s easy-to-use interface, he is “...able to focus more on the day-to-day runnings of the school and the great content that goes into the newsletters, such as school-wide programs and initiatives...[he] can contribute to it throughout the week instead of needing to sit on the weekend and spend hours on it.”

Here are 3 Smore features that will help you quickly create a beautiful newsletter:

Easy-to-Use Editor

Simplicity is one of Smore’s core values. We want to make sure that your newsletter creation experience is quick and easy. Our editor’s 12 essential widgets, as well as its background, font, and color design options are available at a simple ‘point and click’. You won’t need to figure out how to embed a website, create a “button”, or upload a video, it is all effortlessly self-explanatory.

Furthermore, once you are done editing” the sharing and mailing options are just as simple and flexible. With so many choices, including direct emailing, “copy and pasting“ the link, social media sharing, and integrations with companies such as Blackboard and Remind, sharing your school newsletter will be quick and easy.

Make time for a school newsletter template  

The Educator Hive

The Hive (for short) is Smore’s school newsletter template center. It houses hundreds of school newsletters created by real Smore users and by Smore’s own in-house educator and former school principal, Kara Stern. This is where many Smore users begin their newsletter creation process. You can easily search the subject of your intended newsletter; for example, “back to school flyer”, and then either duplicate your favorite school newsletter template from the many options or get inspired to make your own.

This is an easy way to see how other educators are designing their school communications materials!

Newsletter Template Duplication

Template duplication is one of the most indispensable features Smore has to offer, and there are so many ways and reasons to use it. It essentially means that you never have to start from scratch; you can choose from your own past newsletters, from a school-branded template created by admins, or from other educator-created templates in Smore’s school newsletter template center.

If your school communication strategy is to be consistent and deliver an identically formatted, weekly school newsletter, you can achieve that by creating one template and duplicating said template week-by-week while just switching out the content. If you are creating a newsletter for each big announcement or event, such as “Black History Month”, you can use it by first searching for the relevant topic in the Educator Hive, and duplicating your favorite template. If you are a principal hoping to create a more uniform look with your school-related material, you can create a school-branded template and ask your faculty and staff to always start by duplicating the template you’ve created when building up their own.

We encourage you to use some of the time-saving tips and tricks we’ve mentioned above and time yourself when you create your next newsletter. Spending hours on a school newsletter? Ain’t nobody got time for that!