Push It or Post It
Push what families must act on. Post the rest where they already look. Part three of three.
Wednesday, 2:15. Denise is sending the field trip reminder for the third time.
Fourteen permission slips are still missing. The first email went out ten days ago. The second went Monday, and four parents replied asking her to send the link again.
She hits send and turns toward the principal’s open door. “Nobody reads anything.”
Across town, one of those parents is stuck in the Starbucks drive-thru line looking at her phone. For some reason she’s remembered that she needs to do something for that field trip. She remembers the zoo, and Friday, and a form. So she searches “field trip.”
Sixteen emails come back. Last spring’s trip. The chaperone sign-up. The PTO’s bus fundraiser. A teacher’s note about packing lunches. Monday’s reminder, which mentions the form but does not link it. Somewhere in there is the one she needs.
She has read most of them. The one that matters is buried among the rest.
And today the school added five more: the updated lunch menu, the spirit week themes, a change to Thursday’s practice time, the PTO’s fundraiser total, and Denise’s third reminder.
Every send makes the last one harder to find.
Push and pull
Push is anything the school sends. It lands in the inbox whether a family is ready for it or not.
Pull is anything a family goes and gets. A calendar, a page, a portal. It waits until they need it.
Think of tracking an online order. You get an email with a tracking number saying that your shipment has started. You then check the tracking page when you want to know where the package is. Nobody wants an email every time it reaches the next stop.
Most school email is push that should have been pull. The lunch menu, the spirit week themes, the fundraiser total. All of it is worth knowing. Almost none of it needs to interrupt a family’s Wednesday.
And every one of those emails costs something. Each one is another result the next time a family searches, burying the permission slip Denise needs back by Friday a little deeper.
The push-or-post test
Before anything goes to families, ask two questions.
Does a family have to do something? Sign, pay, bring, pick up, show up.
Will they miss it if they have to go looking? It is due before they would think to check, or it changes something they already planned.
Yes to both, push it. Send it once, with the action and the date in the subject line.
Anything else, post it.
Run Wednesday’s pile through the test. The permission slip passes: sign it, by Friday. The practice change passes, because families already planned Thursday’s pickup around the old time. The lunch menu, the spirit week themes and the fundraiser total all fail. They get posted.
Safety news, hard news and a personal note to one family always get pushed. The test is for everything else.
Use the portal you already have
Posting only works if families know where to look. A school that says “it’s on the website” and means six different pages has built a scavenger hunt.
Most schools already own the answer. Somewhere in your school is a family portal that handles tuition, grades, the calendar and the lunch account. Families already log into it.
Two things usually keep it from being the one place to look.
It is organized around the school instead of the family. Menus under food service, schedules under athletics, forms under the office. Organize it around what families come looking for: this week, the calendar, forms, payments, grades. Anything a parent needs should be three taps away on a phone, so they check one place instead of scrolling through sixteen search results.
It sends its own email. Many portals email families every time a grade posts or a calendar entry changes. That is the portal adding to the pile it was supposed to clear. Turn off every notification that fails the test.
Then send one email a week that points into it.
This is where many schools slip. They build a newsletter on a landing page or in a shared doc, then send an email that says “Here’s this week’s newsletter” with a link. That is one more place families have to go hunting.
The weekly email should work like a dashboard. A parent should be able to scan it in thirty seconds and know whether anything changed for her family.
One day. Monday morning, every week, never missed.
Same subject line every time. It is clear that this is the weekly dashboard.
Actions and links. At the top of the email, the two or three things families have to act on. Below that, links with descriptions into the portal for everything else.
Every line says what changed and who it is for. “Lunch schedule updated for the week of October 12.” “Middle school volleyball: Thursday practice moves to 4:00.” Each one links straight to that spot in the portal.
A parent reads it and thinks, none of this is mine, and closes it. Or she spots the lunch change, taps once, and sees it. Either way she knows in under a minute, and she knows where to look next time.
The portal stays the one source of truth. The email tells families what moved and where to find it.
That email is still push. It is the one push that teaches families where to pull.
“Nobody told us”
You might be bracing for the complaint every principal hears. A family misses something and says nobody told them.
Look at what usually sits behind it. The school did tell them, in an email buried under five others that week. Sending more is how the burying happened in the first place.
The portal gives that conversation a better answer. “It’s in the portal under this week. Here’s where.” Said kindly, once or twice, that sentence builds the habit. And because the inbox now carries only what needs action, the emails that remain get opened.
You will know it is working when one parent asks another where to find something, and the other parent can answer without emailing the office.
Teach new families where to look
One group does not know where to look.
New families need more push at first, because they do not know what to expect yet. So give them an email of their own, with “New families” in the subject line.
Before school starts, map out what a new family needs to know over the first six weeks. Then send them one piece each week. Week one might be pickup and a walk through the portal. Week two, the lunch account. Week three, what picture day involves. Every item points to where it lives in the portal.
By week six they are pulling on their own, and they move onto the same Monday email as everyone else.
Push is how you teach families to pull.
Start this week
Pull the last two weeks of email that went to families, from every sender.
Run each one through the two questions. Count how many should have been posted.
Rebuild the portal’s home screen around what families look for, and turn off the notifications that fail the test.
Tell families once: starting next Monday, one email a week, and everything else lives in the portal.
Push what families must act on. Post everything else in the portal, and point to it once a week. Then the first email is the one families can find.
This closes a three-part series on what lands in a family’s inbox. Part one covered the emails only the principal should send, and part two gave every sender a lane.
