Strategies for Delivering Effective Outreach Events
Plan and prepare. Planning an outreach event involves many
activities and decisions. The first step is to determine an agenda and
the resources that will be needed for the evening. Materials may need
to be purchased or ordered. Speakers, guests, or partners may need
to be invited to participate. Finally, publicizing the event with
invitations and announcements will help to ensure attendance by the
families you want to reach.
Welcome and orient participants. When the event arrives, welcome
families and congratulate them on their investment in their children’s
educations. Tell them about the planned activities and what they’ll
gain from the event.
Include examples and models. As you work with parents and
families, incorporate concrete examples to convey ideas and
information. A family literacy training event is one approach that you
can use to demonstrate the use of examples and models. This type of
event can include a short oral presentation about early literacy with
an emphasis on early language development. Equally important,
though, are demonstrations of effective practices that families can try
with their own children.
Incorporate guided practice opportunities. In addition to providing
models and examples, allow participants to practice new skills or
strategies with support, guidance, and encouragement. At the family
literacy training event, after the video and modeling, each family may
be handed a short picture book to allow adults to follow along with
their children as a staff member reads the book aloud. After she
reads, the staff member extends this experience by demonstrating
how to build new vocabulary through the text and pictures in the
book. She selects a few words from the book and gives child-friendly
definitions for the words. She also gives children an opportunity to
use these new vocabulary words themselves in simple sentences.
Finally, she gives family members time to practice what they have
just learned while staff members circulate to provide encouragement
and support.
Share connections with other resources and organizations.
Events for parents and families provide valuable opportunities to
make connections with additional resources, programs, and
organizations that can provide further support. Providing opportunities
for families to learn about early literacy and helpful resources creates
strong ongoing partnerships. These partnerships can increase the
communication within your community and help your team achieve
the goals of your data-informed plan for improving language and preliteracy instruction. For example, a greeting from a librarian at the
local library may be included in the family literacy training example.
The librarian might discuss services available at the library and help
families fill out forms to receive library cards.
Publicize future events and additional services or activities.
Each outreach event or activity provides a valuable opportunity to
promote additional services, resources, and future events. Not only
will you want to invite participants to join your future activities, but you
hope that they will reach out to their friends and families as well. At
the family literacy training, for example, before dismissing families for
the evening, a member of the leadership team might distribute
handouts that include a calendar of upcoming meetings, where to get
resources, and how to arrange visits to classrooms. Another handout
could include websites that provide information on developmental
milestones and early literacy development. You could also include
information about community resources, such as local public libraries,
and services that offer support in family literacy. The materials may
also be provided in both English and Spanish if those are the primary
languages of the families in your community.
Establish ongoing communication systems. Effective outreach
programs consist of more than a series of events or a calendar of
activities. As your team implements outreach plans, you will need to
decide how to provide ongoing and timely information to families and
partners. For some communities, blogs work well. For others, e-mails,
social networking sites, bulletin boards, and newsletters are effective
tools. Sending out a yearly calendar of events and a monthly
newsletter with literacy tips or websites can be helpful. You might
also include a weekly literacy tip on a social media site. Regardless,
remember that if you hold regularly scheduled parent conferences,
these meetings are not only an opportunity to update parents on the
development and progress of their children, but also to provide
suggestions and resources that families can use at home to increase
their children’s learning.
Maintain effective records. Creating an outreach program from
scratch takes place over many months and even years, one step at a
time. However, your leadership team won’t need to start over every
year if you maintain files with documentation of all your outreach
activities and resources. Include your calendar of events, copies of
agendas and handouts, attendance sheets, and other relevant
documents as part of this documentation. These materials will help
guide the future and will give leaders a valuable head start as they
continue to revise and develop their outreach programs and services.