In every school district communication audit conducted by NSPRA in the last two years, parents and district employees across the country have described how they feel they are being bombarded with information. We often hear comments in focus groups and on the SCOPE Survey such as, “It’s a full-time job to read emails from the school,” and “Sometimes I feel like there are so many emails from the school that I don’t know what to look at. It’s a lot to sort through and manage.”

A 2022 article in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Do Schools Send So Many Emails? They Don’t Have To,” focused on the topic, with the writer Julie Jargon opining, “My kids head back to the classroom in about two weeks. So far, I’ve received nine emails, five text messages and two newsletters from their schools, some of which directed me to other sites to fill out forms. I’ve received notifications of numerous Facebook posts but haven’t had the bandwidth to look at them. Schools deliver information in multiple ways in an effort to keep families informed…but do they need to do this much communication?”

Yet, when NSPRA added a SCOPE Survey question last spring to determine if parents are satisfied with the amount of information they receive, fewer than six percent said they wanted less information from their school district and fewer than three percent said they wanted less information from their child’s school. Similarly, fewer than 10 percent of district employees said they wanted less information from the district and fewer than eight percent said they wanted less information from their workplace. These results reflect responses from 5,000 parents and 2,000 district employees across 11 different school systems. (Data charts can be found in the gallery at the bottom of this article.)

Are NSPRA Members Making the Right Assumptions About How Much Information to Send?

The data on information overload from parents and employees were so definitive we wanted to find out if NSPRA members consider information overload in their communication planning and if they believe they are sending the amount of information that parents and employees want to receive. We conducted a flash survey at the NSPRA National Seminar in July and again via a member email in October, and the results aligned closely with what we heard from parents and employees.

More than 95 percent of the school communicators who responded to the survey consider the impact of information overload when planning their communications.

Among those 400 respondents, approximately 61 percent believe they are providing the right amount of information to parents, which aligns closely with the nearly 64 percent of parents who say they are receiving the right amount of information from their district. But only 49 percent of school communicators believe they are sending the right amount of information to staff, compared to more than 66 percent of staff who believe they are getting the right amount of information. Forty-three percent of school communicators believe they should be sending more information to staff, compared to 24 percent of staff who would like to receive more information (see chart below).

What are we to make of this seeming contradiction? Parents and staff say they are overwhelmed with information, yet when surveyed, most say they are getting the right amount. NSPRA’s Communication Audit Coordinator Susan Downing, APR, has reviewed dozens of communication audit reports, and she has a theory: It is not the amount of information, but the number of channels and frequency with which parents and employees receive information.

“The consistent complaint across nearly every district we audit is that people are overwhelmed with messaging coming in from every which direction, using too many platforms. They feel there is no consistency in processes and a lot of unnecessary duplication,” said Downing. 

Tips for Reducing Information Overload 

Consolidating information flow is a difficult challenge in school districts, where many people are communicating, often simultaneously, with overlapping news. It may not be that the district’s communications office is sending out too much information, but instead, it could be the cumulative effect of communication from teachers, principals, department heads, district administrators and the communications office.

A few practical tips can make a difference and reduce the risk of stakeholders tuning out communication and missing something important: 

• Define communication roles for employees. Make sure employees at all levels understand what they are responsible for communicating and, more importantly, what they are NOT responsible for communicating. 

• Create a map of the communication tools being used. Know what tools are being used when, for which purposes and who in the organization is using them. 

• Conduct a review of the tools being used. Be willing to let go of tools that are redundant or less impactful, so you can consolidate the number of information sources your stakeholders have to check and the number of communications they are receiving. 

• Increase cross-team collaboration. Make sure different administrators and departments are talking to each other and to the communications office about who is sending what to which audiences when the information has a wide impact. Be sure that any duplicative messaging is both intentional and minimal. 

• Provide training to employees on clear and concise writing. Respondents to NSPRA’s SCOPE Survey usually give high ratings to professional school communicators for sharing clear, easy-to-understand information, but many employees in a school district do not have a formal background in clear and concise writing.  

National data backs it up: The communications work you do every day is helping keep employees and students' families informed about their local schools. But with these tips and NSPRA's data (click images below to see charts enlarged), you can help your district team reduce the potential for information overload.