In schools, every communication we send that isn't directly about the recipient or the recipient’s child is a small withdrawal from the finite attention we rely on from families.
I learned this early in my career, when a student suffered an injury serious enough to warrant community-wide communication.
Shortly after the injury occurred, the school sent a message to all internal constituents that told the story thoroughly yet artfully with a measured, thoughtful tone. The next day, a staff member who worked near my desk asked aloud to no one in particular about the injury, “Were they planning on telling us about this?”
I checked the data to make sure the person had received the email, which they had. But they never opened it, and it didn’t take too much sleuthing to determine that this person saw the school’s name in the “From” field of their inbox and ignored it.
After what I’m sure was a devastatingly pithy retort delivered under my breath so no one could hear it, a few colleagues and I realized that in the days leading up to the injury, the school had sent a flurry of emails about topics of varying importance.
The net result was that we trained this person, and others, to tune us out because our email onslaught was not valuable to them. Thus, when we had an urgent message, some people reflexively ignored us.
We cannot, of course, operate in permanent anticipation that something terrible is about to happen. But we can hold ourselves to a higher standard of consideration for our audience’s time and attention.
I like to ask a simple question to manage the volume of communication sent to a community: what would be the cost of sending this later, combining it with another message, or not sending this at all? An honest, audience-focused answer keeps us from overdrawing on the attention of our community.