Host:
- Laura Buckner
Guest:
- Steve Canavero
Laura Buckner:
Hi, I’m Laura Buckner from the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety, or CISELSS for short. In 2021, CISELSS facilitated a collaborative on alignment, coherence, and strategic communications serving 10 states. Through that collaborative, we developed a suite of guides, including Aligned and Coherent Communications to Serve the Whole Person: A Workbook for State Education Agencies.
Our most recent collaborative was the Transforming Kindergarten Collaborative, which served system leaders from 15 states. It was designed to support their work to ensure young children experience equitable and developmentally appropriate conditions for learning. As we cocreated the scope of the collaborative, state teams identified strategic communications as a key area of focus.
Collaborative participants were introduced to the Center’s Aligned and Coherent Communications Workbook, which walks users through a step-by-step process to set communications goals, define their audience, identify key messages and desired actions that they’d like their audiences to take, and develop tactics for effective communication.
It draws on guidance from a communications firm called Be Clear, which CISELSS partnered with in previous work with state education agencies. In one of our live sessions with participants from the Transforming Kindergarten Collaborative, I interviewed Steve Canavero, a former superintendent of public instruction in Nevada, who coauthored the CISELSS workbook.
This audiocast shares an edited version of that fireside chat in which Steve discusses his own experiences conducting strategic communications to achieve state-level education goals. We conclude with some practical advice for developing a strategic communications plan as well as key missteps to avoid.
First question that I have for you, Steve, is in your view, what’s the difference between communications and strategic communications? I’ll throw it to you.
Steve Canavero:
Before I get into this differentiation between strategic communication and communication, I’ll say that there’s plenty of folks who could speak on this topic at likely a much greater depth. And perhaps one of the reasons why it might be useful to hear from my perspective is I’m a very poor communicator and have been for quite some time. And when I became the state superintendent for Nevada, I had a crash course in what communications meant and the proper role of communications in trying to make change and trying to advance the work.
There’s lots of aspirations that I read that would certainly be animated by a communications strategy and specifically a strategic communications strategy. So, getting to that, and as you all may have read or will read it in the workbook, the strategic communication is both the engine for how you can accomplish your goals and also an outcome in and of itself. It could be a product of your effort.
Importantly, the way I think about how it might be different than communications—and I’d frame it a little bit more casually than we have written in the workbook, but I think we’re saying the same thing in the workbook that I’m saying here—that strategic communications is purposeful. It is absolutely purposeful, meaning that it advances a clear goal that you have and that goal is expressed in real-life results or outcomes.
So, it’s purposeful, it’s uncommonly targeted. And I frame it as uncommonly because that’s a critical component between strategic communications and general communications. [In] strategic communications, audience is everything. And then I’ve got two more, and I think the last two are likely the most sort of differentiator[s] than perhaps the idea that it’s purposeful and targeted.
And that is that strategic communication is designed to animate action, meaning that your audience, as you’re communicating the work and the road ahead and taking in feedback along the way, your audience can see themselves as part of the solution and, importantly, understands how to contribute.
So that’s the animating action component. It’s not general communications which is kind of one way. And then finally, in addition to those three—and this is perhaps for me as a reminder—but for those that aren’t naturally gifted communicators, it’s practice, and it needs to be practiced. So, it is in and of itself a skill that should be practiced.
We all know some folks who this work comes easily to them. That was not me, and I literally had to practice to develop new muscle. I’ll just give you one example as to what that looked like in practice and then I’ll turn it back over to you, Laura. As a functional matter, when I was at the department, we did have a communications director, great communications director, responsible for all sorts of communication things: press releases, press inquiries, op-eds, tweeting, social media stuff, et cetera.
But as I sort of learned in the seat about the need for strategic communications and how different it was from general communications, I began to take responsibility for this development of strategic communications work while he took all responsibility for the general communication.
And then, frankly, he also served as an audience when I would role-play, learning the skill, getting to the practice component. He would literally—it sounds dreadful, I understand, for both parties, right? —me pretending and him pretending the audience is trying to work this out. But he would help me work through the strategic communications bit to make sure that it would connect, that the tactics and the messaging would resonate, and that it was clear. So, hopefully that gives you a good understanding of how those two things differ.
Laura Buckner:
Yeah. Thank you, Steve, for making that distinction between broad communications and strategic communications. When I think about the broad communications, we don’t always have the ability to know what people are doing with the information, and you’re targeting it with[a] strategic component, you’re really moving people towards action, and so you can see the outcome and measure in that way. My next question is, you kind of touched on this a bit, but given your experience, why is a strategic communications approach really critical to just about anything that you might want to get done on the state education policy level?
Steve Canavero:
I want to make sure that I’m not characterizing strategic communications as something that the superintendent or the commissioner’s responsible for. In fact, you could make a very clear argument, and one that I think we learned in the initial cohorts around alignment and coherence, which you had mentioned at the beginning of this, which really created that workbook.
The experience that we had with state teams, folks with their sleeves up doing the work and the real role and purposeful role that strategic communication has across the agency . . . the reason why we’re having this conversation is because it really fits well here. So, even if I have some examples or some ideas about why I think it’s critical to just about anything that we do, my examples are from a different seat than others might have.
So, the reason why I think strategic communications is critical to just about anything that you want to get done—and it becomes more critical to the complexity as the complexity of what you want to accomplish gets higher—is that it really acts as a bit of a glue, an aggregator of a vision. So, it can hold various pieces together that aren’t evident to everyone how they actually are situated.
And by that I mean initiatives or categorical funding or federal funding or a new grant. They can be seen as one thing in and of themselves, and that work can sit and be accomplished in a, let’s call it a silo or a cylinder of excellence, however you want to refer to those things. So, a strategic communications campaign can help people see what you see and can help you see what they see, as it’s bidirectional as well. And I call this the talk-it-into-reality phase of strategic communications.
It helps folks understand and see a full picture of the work as they work together. It also is the fuel that keeps the work moving forward because it creates a way for folks to appreciate their particular role and responsibility within a context that matters, within a vision or a goal that matters. And that goal can be fairly big, or big in the sense of wide, or it could be fairly big in its sense of its power being very narrow.
And some of the examples that we give in the workbook are just common language shared within an agency. We all need to be saying . . . referring to this stuff in the same way, and let’s get agreement on a collective set of terms. But the one thing I want to double click a little bit on is the approach, because I think based on our experience through the initial community of practice and working around strategic communications and its role and alignment and coherence, I want to share how you can get into this work.
And I’ll share too, one is sort of an emergent example, and another example is a little bit more planned. Really, it’s a function of time, but where you can actually get into and, let’s say, launch a strategic communication. The emergent approach is shared because sometimes the best thing that you can do is just simply make sense of a situation, something that’s already working, already moving ahead.
A critical role for strategic communications there is just to make sense of it and to transform that sense-making into an opportunity for progress. And strategic communications can really do that. An example that we had in our state—[the] governor created a school safety task force. This was a few years ago. A number of recommendations came in, and an opportunity presented itself to frame safety within the context of a framework around prevention, response, and recovery.
And suddenly I realized, whoa, this is actually a fantastic strategic communications framework for communicating and a very strategic way to connect the existing whole child work—and at that time, it was under the banner of safe and respectful learning environments—[and] to integrate that into the school safety conversation and connect the audience with that vision and how their contribution [makes] schools a safe place.
In that particular example, the goal was really around strategically communicating how all of these pieces fit together and how the various actors could align their work. And really the audience there tended to be policymakers or others across the system. So that’s entering into a situation and then trying to bring out a strategic . . . recognizing opportunity and bringing a strategic communications plan to bear on an existing [plan].
Other times, you’ll have an opportunity to build the communications at the same time you’re designing that work. A number of opportunities present themselves across the way. At the ESSA plan, y’all can remember back then when the big title is working on ESSA plans. But we had time to develop a suite of strategic communication assets to engage, align, activate, and importantly, learn from in those bidirectional communication strategies how we could utilize a strengths-based approach, et cetera.
I do want to say that there are opportunities to nest these plans. So, a strategic communication effort might begin broad, like the goal of communicating a picture of align[ed] school safety, but then within that broader strategic communications, there are nested strategies that depending upon the audience can take one aspect of that big picture and then build a strategic communications plan from there.
The workbook gives you an example that looks at it from a very specific goal and then works it up to a broader strategic communications goal, which is alignment to if you’ve got a goal within your ECE office, then you can work it up to align with the state’s vision or perhaps its mission. So, a lot there about why I think it’s important, but I do think it’s a critical component to any effort that you really want to move forward.
Laura Buckner:
Yeah. Thanks. And I think now’s a good time to kind of talk a little bit about the components of the guide. To start with, the guide asks you to consider this overarching question in order to accomplish your goals: who needs to know, understand, and believe what? And within that question, you hear a little bit about the goal, you hear a little bit about the audience, and you hear a little bit about the key messages. And it’s just sort of to start getting those wheels turning.
And then the guide asks you to come up with your goal—and, of course, as Steve mentioned, specific, actionable, stated in plain language as much as possible. And then the next step is your audience. And this is probably the most difficult, and it’s maybe the most important step because it does need to get really specific. And it’s OK to have multiple audiences.
And again, it might just be a single person that you really need to focus your strategic communications efforts on. And then, from audience, what do we want people to understand, believe, and then move them to know what they should do? And again, as Steve mentioned, [to] really see themselves in the work. And then finally, tactics.
So how will you reach these people? Which avenues and formats are available to you? What amplifiers, which are other people who could get in touch with those folks or help shift their thinking? Who might they be, and what other opportunities exist? And so the last thing that I wanted to ask as folks are walking through these steps, what are some things to be mindful of?
Steve Canavero:
So, the first thing is the tactic trap. What we saw, and I think it’s just in our nature, I think primarily as educators [is] to jump to solutions. Really spend a lot of time defining your audience before you even start to think about jumping to tactics to reach them.
And then with the audience, it’s not just, “Oh, we want to reach kindergarten educators or early childhood educators.” You need to be a lot more specific. Are they teachers? Are they administrators? Are they in private settings? Really, who are you talking about? And it’s always easier to take it from very small to a little bit larger groups of people than it is to start with the larger group of folks and then realize, “Oops, there’s actually three different audiences here, and I’m only resonating one message and one action at this time.”
The other is to stick with it. I learned this one the hard way. Just about the time you get bored of hearing yourself talk about something is about the time that it might be working. Even if it’s boring to you and it’s the same thing that you’re saying day in, day out, it’s critically important that you stay and stick with it. I think this is also a lesson that we learned. We tend to speak in acronyms and speak in a language that’s not generally accessible by most folks.
So, be accessible, not only just in a language that you’re using to make sure folks can understand, put it at the kitchen table and see if it would resonate with various components of your audience in their kitchens at night, but also be accessible to receiving feedback. That’s part of the bidirectional component, not just in your language, in your words, but also in your approach.
Laura Buckner:
Thank you for listening to this AudioCast. You can find the resource Aligned and Coherent Communications to Serve the Whole Person: A Workbook for State Education Agencies on WestEd.org. This recording was prepared by the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education under grant S424B180004. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the funder, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. government.