How Automation Makes Your School Better And Saves You Time
This spring, when the coronavirus closures happened, it changed things for a lot of people, myself included. It seems like I’ve got more on my plate than ever before, and less help to make it happen!
I was already in the process of finishing out the school year, preparing to move, and taking the risk of leaving full-time principal work for full-time consulting.
It wasn’t the time to start new projects, let alone free projects, but I saw a good opportunity, and knew how automation could help me make it work, with limited time investment.
I wanted to help schools have good commencement experiences, so I created Guest Commencement Speeches, which was a way for schools to get guest speakers for their graduations.
We had a bunch of schools sign up and a bunch of people who were willing to donate their time to help people.
It was a great experience, and connecting speakers with schools and communicating between them turned out to be a TON of work.
But I had a secret weapon. I used automation to make lots of different things happen. Instead of writing a bunch of emails and spending time back and forth, I was able to make this 4 step process (described in the pictures to the right):
A person signs up
I Update the due date to 1 week from today
I move the card to the guest speaker that it will be matched to.
MAGIC! The automation makes it so that
the school gets an email
the speaker gets an email
the due dates are explained
the link to submit the video is given.
By using this automation system, I was able to connect over 2 dozen schools with speakers and spend only a couple minutes each day doing it.
Many things in our principal world take a lot of time, and we could be doing things much more simply.
In this post, I’ll show you how to set up some sweet automations to help take busywork off your plate.
I’ll show you how to send an automated email out to your families who take the survey and provide support to them regardless of what they’re choosing for their child.
“It is definitely helping!!!”
That was the response I got from a coaching client who was using a 20-mouse-click process to complete a task that she actually didn’t even need to do.
Every day, she was spending at least an hour (not counting the interruptions and getting back on track) to do these simple tasks that she should not even have been doing in the first place!
She doesn’t have time for that. Neither do you.
Like many other principals, you’re probably sending out forms and trying to get people to tell you what they want for school this year. Maybe you’ve already done that, but there is more work to be done.
What if you could respond personally to every single person who fills out the survey?
Here’s how to do it:
After that Facebook Live, Matthew asked if we could use this to send an automated birthday email to parents, when a child has a birthday. Here’s how you do that.
I put together this resource with the 5 Automation Recipes Every Principal Needs to save you time.
