The Communications team is here to help you raise visibility and awareness. Following are some key procedures that will help us respond to your service needs.
General Procedures
Please use the Service Request Form for:
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- Business card orders
- Website Updates
- Social media posts
- Flyer design requests
- Developing templates for your department
- Help publicizing a new or continuing initiative or campaign
For outreach campaigns and social media posts, be sure to answer What topics or budgets are connected to this post? This will help us provide accurate data reporting for grants
Please use our communications standards checklist for all communications.
Standard Roles & Responsibilities
We are here to offer our specialized skills and expertise to support your program’s success. Our goal is to support each department’s capacity so that outreach efforts can move forward as efficiently as possible. In general…
Communications will:
- Provide high quality, accessible, multi-lingual design services
- Produce a weekly newsletter of FCSN activities along with our quarterly Newsline newsletter, featuring more in-depth articles
- Make ourselves available to consult and strategize
- Automatically promote events listed in our FCSN calendar in Weekly Happenings
- Provide templates to help your team communicate more efficiently
- Collaborate with you to plan for new & complex projects
- Take the lead on agency-wide visibility efforts including website, agency brochure, Visions of Community, and Gala
Programs are responsible for:
- Taking the lead in anticipating needs, providing enough turnaround time
- Communicating all relevant details
- Adding events to the FCSN calendar
- Obtaining translations
- Sharing your own flyers and outreach graphics with all staff, so that staff know who to go to with follow-up questions
- Working with printers and providing final approvals to vendors for materials and marketing “swag”
- Working with Stephanie to make your materials accessible to other programs
- Bringing FCSN general brochures with you to outreach events (available in the copy room)
- Putting outreach materials away in their designated locations, following signage that is labeled in print and in braille.
Ingredients of a Campaign
Routine Activities (no special meetings are usually required)
Starting point: information is posted on the FCSN website – in the Events Calendar or on a specific post or page and/or you submit a communications request
- It is included Weekly Happenings 1-2 weeks before an event or for the next issue after the request was received
- At least one social media graphic is created – to increase likelihood information will be seen
- A (508 accessible) flyer can be created created for distribution by the program team
Ways to increase impact (roles/responsibilities will vary)
- Translate your information and ask all staff to share with their networks
- Pull or request a targeted outreach list from Quickbase to reach specific groups (language groups, based on child’s disability, types of professionals, etc.)
- If you have budget funds, we can “boost” posts to increase visibility for a relatively low cost ($100 range)
- We can support advertising via other media, develop videos, and more–with enough time and budgets permitting
- We can also support cross-program connections to recommend and connect with cultural brokers who can help spread the word in their local communities
Our Goals for Turnaround Times
We will do our best to respond as quickly as we can. Please reach out to us as early as possible when you anticipate the need for communications support. Involving us early will save time in the long run. Following are our goals for turnaround times:
- 1 Business day: Acknowledgement of your communications request and assignment to a member of the communications team
- 3-8 Business days: simple social media post, flyer, or website update that does not require multiple revisions and/or approvals
- 8-13 Business days: developing messaging for a new campaign and then creating outreach materials for it. More complex design requests.
Sharing Information from Outside Partners on Social Media
We are happy to share information on social media that will help families or contribute to our communities in some way. However, we need your help to share this in the right way.
- Please use the request form, as always
- Ideally, provide a social media link that we can re-share. This will make it clear who families should reach out to if they have further questions. It will also enable us to share the information relatively quickly.
- If this is something important to your program, it’s worth it to reach out to the partner and ask them if the information will be appearing soon on social media.
- If it is not posted on social media (happens a lot with state agencies), please provide a link on the partner’s website that speaks about the program.
- It is not ideal for us to post information about another agency’s event or initiative with no back-up of where people can learn more.
- If programs can do this work as part of your own partnership-building, you are freeing us up to respond to other requests in a more timely manner.
