City of Morgan Hill Communications Assessment

The Morgan Hill USD Facebook Page has approximately 850 Likes/Fans and frequently posts Photos from school sites, announcements about school-related events, and congratulatory messages to high-performing staff members. The District has not experimented yet with advertising or Boosting Posts. Kimberly has Super User access to the District’s Blackboard Connect direct messaging system, which can send messages throughout the entire District. Individual schools can message just their own school database—the District does not actively monitor schools’ usage. To date, the District has approximately 5,300 subscribers who opt to receive updates via email in English and 575 who opt to receive email notifications in Spanish. The database also has approximately 10,000 unique phone numbers, though some households have multiple phone numbers listed. Anecdotally, Kimberly says that parents prefer to receive phone calls (robodial). Communications Observations General • The City is doing relatively well with its transparency efforts: it freely offers video recordings of important meetings via Granicus, and financial information such as employee compensation. • There is a growing concern about misinformation and rumors spreading rapidly online and the current/potential resources needed to address misinformation. • 30.3% of Morgan Hill, CA citizens are speakers of a non-English language and the most common non-English language is Spanish (Spanish or Spanish Creole - 19.3%). 26 Many safety and health messages are sent out to the community in both English and Spanish. Currently, there does not seem to be a formal policy or decision tree on when communications should be sent/published in a language other than English. • The City Manager and other Department leaders meet in a Weekly Leadership Huddle, with a set agenda. Maureen Tobin uses this time to extract information from teammates that could be used in City communications, but “Communications” is not a regular agenda item. Strategy & Policy • The City Manager has empowered a hybrid Communications model where each Department manages its own external communications (often with Maureen's guidance and input), supplemented by Maureen managing the City’s overall strategic communications. As of this writing, Maureen has begun taking steps to establish a “Communications Team.” • Currently, there are no formal policies or guidelines that define when it is appropriate to generate a “News Flash” post on the website, adjust the home page image ‘carousel,’ send a Constant Contact email, issue a Press Release or post to social media. Maureen manages all these tasks and uses her judgment.

26 https://datausa.io/profile/geo/morganhill-ca

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