By Aurora Meyer, APR, Account Director

I left the 2026 National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) National Seminar in New Orleans with a notebook full of ideas, a renewed sense of purpose and one overarching takeaway: In an increasingly complicated communication landscape, trust is still the most valuable asset.

The annual July conference brought together school communicators, superintendents and education leaders from across the country for four days of professional development, networking and conversations about the unique challenges of communicating in and for public education. While sessions covered everything from AI and analytics to crisis communication and content creation, many returned to a more fundamental question: How do we build and maintain trust with the people we're trying to reach?

That question was front and center during keynote speaker Mariana Atencio's presentation, Building Trust in an Unreal World. Her message focused on authenticity and the importance of maintaining the human touch as AI and technology continue to transform how organizations communicate and audiences receive those messages. 

Many of the sessions, regardless of topic, challenged attendees to think beyond simply getting information out in the community. Ultimately, good communication is about more than just delivering messages. Good communication is about creating an experience that builds confidence in the organization behind it.

One of the sessions specifically explored the connection between everyday customer experiences and organizational trust. Presenters encouraged communicators to identify recurring frustrations, determine where the "friction" occurs and bring the right people together to address it. 

That distinction is important. Public Relations and Communications doesn't own every problem, but it is often uniquely positioned to see the patterns and bring the right people together to find a solution.

I also had the opportunity to present one of my favorite sessions, "Fear-Free Content Calendars: A Practical, Flexible Approach," sharing strategies for creating content systems that support organizational goals without becoming another source of stress.

The session focused on a challenge familiar to communicators everywhere: The best-laid content plan rarely survives contact with reality.

Whether you're a large communications team or a team of one, effective content planning is not about filling every square on a calendar, rather it is finding ways to create enough structure to stay strategic and leaving room for the unexpected.

We explored how to align content with goals, distinguish between urgent and important communication, identify predictable opportunities throughout the year, repurpose existing content and use a variety of tools to make content creation more efficient.

NSPRA's program similarly emphasized practical, immediately usable strategies, including new Micro Labs featuring five-minute demonstrations and one of my favorite sessions, the Gold Mine Roundtables built around small-group conversations and actionable takeaways. 

The sessions and handouts are where a lot of the learning happens, but I often learn just as much, if not more, from the serendipitous conversations. The ones that happen when you ask to share a table at breakfast and end up talking for an hour. The ones that start in an elevator and spill into an open room. Or one of my favorite ones, learning that someone is planning to pursue their APR.

It was in these moments that attendees shared ideas, solved problems, traded resources and celebrated each other's wins. That willingness to share is one of the things that makes the NSPRA community so special.

And it reinforced something I see in our work at Slide Nine, too: The strongest communication plans and strategies are rarely created in isolation. They come from listening closely to clients, audiences, colleagues and communities, identifying what people actually need and using what we learn to make communication more useful, more human and more strategic.

I came home from NSPRA 2026 with plenty of new ideas and resources. More importantly, I came back inspired and reminded that even as technology changes how we communicate, the fundamentals have not changed: know your audience, listen carefully, communicate with intention and earn trust one interaction at a time.