You know exactly who I’m talking about, right? They’re your biggest supporters!

Of course, if you have a family engagement data tracker, sorting by the highest total engagements is a great way to identify this list too.

The end of the year is a great time to show these families that you see them and appreciate how much effort they’ve put into supporting their kids and the school.

If you have the funds for gift cards or other small gift, that’s great! If not, even printing out a certificate for them or mentioning them in your end-of-year school newsletter shows them how much you care.

I’ve helped some of my clients build shared tracking sheets for their whole school to document how they’re engaging families.

With some quick sorting and filtering of their spreadsheet, they can see which teachers have gone above and beyond their minimum monthly outreach.

These staff members should be celebrated too!

Not only do they deserve a shout-out in a staff meeting or an award at your end-of-year staff party, but they should also be lifted up as leaders who can inspire and guide other staff who may struggle with engagement.

Those of you on attendance teams know that there is a lot of debate about only recognizing perfect attendance because it’s not always a realistic goal for all of our students and families.

With family engagement too, we know that not all parents or family members can attend every event, answer every phone call, or work with their kids at home each night.

That’s why it’s super important to recognize those who have improved over the course of the year.

In your spreadsheets, you can quickly add columns to add up the number of engagements for each quarter. You can also add one at the end that finds the difference between those quarterly totals.

Sort by that column to see which families or staff have the greatest positive difference from Quarter 1 to Quarter 4, and give them a shout-out, gift, or certificate, too!