Somebody at the NSPRA seminar gave me a great idea, and I can’t remember who it was. Perhaps one of my MOSPRA buddies can post a comment to jog my memory, so I can give proper credit. We’ve all been implementing this idea this week in Missouri.
The idea is simple: Ask parents to submit first-day-of-school photos for you to post on your district Facebook page.
This was a huge hit on the Park Hill School District page – we received 78 photos and tons of interactions. Parents loved seeing their own kids and their neighbors’ kids, and they are even taking the time to look around at other content once they are on the page.
We posted the pictures throughout the day as they came in. Even though this got a little hectic with our already busy schedule on the first day, it generated excitement and motivated others to submit photos.
We continue to add photos to the album, even three days later, as parents see the page and decide to contribute.
We are doing this with our Tumblr account – parents and students can submit photos through the “submit” feature and then all we have to do is approve and publish! It also sends out to twitter, which is nice. We will definitely be posting photos on Facebook as well. The only schools in session now are the year-round and IB schools. We expect a flood of photos September 4th when the rest of the schools are back!
http://milwaukeemps.tumblr.com/
Very cool, Amy!
Nicole. Richie Escovado of Mansfield ISD blogged on the same topic recently at http://nextcommunications.blogspot.com/2012/08/back-to-schoolpr-tips-first-day-photos.html larry
I have been doing this ever since we had our Facebook page and we have found it to be a great way to get parents and others to visit us. I love hearing some of the other tools people are using.
We heard this tip at NSPRA too NIcole. Great response from our parents. Love our NSPRA friends and their great ideas!
Sounds like this is a widely used tactic – I’m glad I have NSPRA to catch me up!
Definitely going to try this one! Thanks.
Do you do any kind of parental release on this, or is it assumed that the parents are giving permission since they submit?
Since the parents were submitting the photos, we didn’t review our do-not-release list of students. However, some parents submitted photos of their students with friends, so we verified that the friends were not on our list.