Driving meaningful school community engagement is time-consuming practice, and as the saying goes, you really do get out what you put in when it comes to community building. Managing a large and passionate school community may seem ambitious if you’re part of a small team or even a team-of-one, but there are ways of working that can create efficiencies and help you achieve more every day. 

Admin is a huge part of the day-to-day in school development offices, and your ability to communicate in a relevant and timely manner hinges on the accuracy of your administrative practices, namely keeping database records updated with key demographic and engagement data about school community members. Smart school database software assists this process, by capturing information about community members when they engage with communications or content on your website, and updates the associated records accordingly. 

In smaller teams tasked with community engagement, it’s easy to end up investing energy in creating interesting and useful content for contacts, leaving little time leftover for promotion, or to direct particular segments of the community to benefit from it. Connecting community members around pertinent conversations can also take time and careful consideration, and this kind of account-management style practice can take up a lot of time. 

An integrated community website and comms system like ToucanTech frees up smaller teams to focus on adding the personal touch to community management, while automated forum activity summaries keep sub-communities active. Sharing website content is simple when using an all-in-one system with an email engine, allowing admins to easily select which articles and events to feature in community newsletters. 

Here are 5 ways that ToucanTech helps school development admins in small teams to get the job done: 

1. Automated birthday emails

Let your community members know you’re thinking of them on their special day by sending an automated birthday email. You can also segment and tailor these emails: for example, to send a special thank you to your donors, or to members reaching milestone birthdays! These will send automatically using your date-of-birth data.

2. Club roundup emails

Encourage your club members to log in and check out recent activity with automated club emails: simply set and schedule to send monthly, and members will receive a roundup of new discussion posts, events and articles from their club. 

3. Actions on activity tracker

Stay updated with the actions your alumni or prospective donors are taking on your website, and how they engage with your comms, content and event programmes without lifting a finger! The ToucanTech activity tracker logs community engagement automatically, 

4. Updating important information fields on records

Many schools have an alumni community dispersed across the world: when members fill out a form on your website, the system will automatically update their current country on their record. Alternatively, you can set up a welcome notification to encourage members to update their contact details when they log in.

5. Newsletters automatically pull up content from website

Save yourself time and create beautiful email newsletters by using the ‘drag and drop’ feature to pull in the most recent news articles from your website into your email template. This allows you to pull in the title, cover image and subtitle to your newsletter, so that you can encourage online and offline members to register or sign in to read your new updates.