How Oregon City School District Improves Community and Staff Engagement with Squarespace Enterprise
After switching to Squarespace:
+60-70% more website traffic
+8 new websites
+70 new email subscribers
+20 website contributors district-wide
When Oregon City School District (OCSD) needed to be nimbler in communicating with parents, teachers, and school board members, they chose Squarespace to manage their portfolio of 18 public and private websites. Now they can engage audiences on their own terms.
District communications coordinator Caitlin Bergstrom says she couldn’t be happier with the flexibility in her workflow after migrating 10 websites to Squarespace Enterprise almost one year ago and adding 8 more since then. Its accessible, no-code CMS allows qualified employees across the district to contribute content and maintain sites dedicated to each school under her supervision.
Working in concert to update stakeholders with time-sensitive information like school news, strategic priorities, and snow delays on the district’s own schedule was critical to improving their public support, Bergstrom says.
“Our previous website [provider] was hard to work with on changing designs and content,” she explains.
After migrating to Squarespace and publishing content in a timely manner, Bergstrom says site traffic increased by about 60-70 percent. She attributes much of the spike to the schools’ ability to publish classroom news and photos in real time.
“We had been getting requests from community members for more updates; they wanted to know what was happening, but our old website didn’t give us a way to easily share,” Bergstrom says. “Our new [format] got high praises—people love how easy it is to navigate and how clean it looks.”
Overseeing a collaborative engine across the school district
Bergstrom manages a flagship external site for the district that links to websites for each of its fourteen K-12 schools, along with another site dedicated to strategic priorities. The latter informs community members of OCSD’s mission and values along with any progress in current district initiatives. These include strategic planning committee meeting recaps, personnel changes, community survey results, and more. In the upcoming school year it will also serve as a platform for stakeholders to follow the reports on each of the priorities.
While it once felt impossible to launch and manage so many different website projects at once, Bergstrom says Squarespace features like Enterprise templates and saved sections now help her team publish content efficiently with a consistent, consumer-friendly appearance.
“I just built a template with the basic structure we needed, and then I shared it with the schools to copy and paste their information,” she says.
Bergstrom now taps the skills of 20 employees across the district to help contribute and manage site content relevant to their schools. These include principals and office administrators, to whom she assigns different contributor role permissions depending on the scope of their responsibilities.
Having power to design the collaboration process helps Bergstrom feel more confident in the security of her team’s workflow and the quality of its results. She says her former solution did not offer a user-friendly website creation workflow like Fluid Engine or a website management tool like the Squarespace Enterprise dashboard, where she can quickly access and review all content across school teams.
Winning website features and integrations for the school district
Along with its collection of public websites, OCSD also maintains a secure, private website just for staff members that provides access to HR resources and instructional materials. Bergstrom says employees can log on securely using the district’s Classlink single sign-on (SSO) technology to view internal communications and download employment forms.
“Having the Classlink [integration] is really nice because you need a specific key to log in,” Bergstrom says.
She adds that Squarespace’s ability to plug into OCSD’s existing tech stack not only improved internal resources, but it also simplified migrating external sites and strengthening community engagement. By using integrations that directly coordinate with their email campaign manager and make newsletters available on the website, the district increased their email list by 70 subscribers.
Announcement bars and pop-ups have also proven valuable for alerting parents and caregivers to snow delays, Bergstrom says. Creating announcements with delay details helps her inform the community of schedule changes without relying on outside news agencies.
“It’s front-and-center on the homepage, and people don’t have to look any further on the site for the information,” she explains.
Making policies more accessible through Squarespace Enterprise
Another resource Bergstrom maintains on OCSD’s behalf is an online handbook where school board members can view policies and procedures. Along with providing budget information and suggested reading material, it includes guidelines on how to run meetings, communicate with the public, and decode common education acronyms.
“Squarespace Enterprise is the best investment we could have made in [modernizing] our website and keeping up with our constant technology changes,” Bergstrom says.
While some colleagues were initially skeptical about the district-wide website overhaul, she knew OCSD’s future growth depended on the change—and stuck to her vision despite the pushback. Soon after seeing the improvements with Squarespace, Bergstrom says those skeptics quickly turned into enthusiastic supporters.
“School districts can be slow to make changes, but it’s important to adapt to the times,” she explains. “Squarespace has been great for our versatility in getting our messages out without having to go through a third party.”
