Education Marketing

For year’s we’ve waited for this moment – the moment when we can see exactly how much each school is spending on all sorts of things.   Now at last we can.

We can see how much each school has raised through its own efforts, how much the state gives it, money spent on supply teachers, money spent on support staff, money spent on admin, money spent on catering, money spent on ICT, money spent on learning resources….

This all comes through the government’s new league tables through which we can see which schools put a high proportion of pupils in for the  traditional GCSE subjects such as geography and history, and which one’s have gone somewhere else.

We can also see which schools have got five grades of C or above in English, maths, science, a humanity and a foreign language for most of their pupils, and which not.

And we can see how much money they have to spend, and what they spend it on – plus how much money they raise internally per pupil, from the parents.

• The average spend per pupil across England is £5,547.13.

• Ryeish Green School in Wokingham spends the most per pupil in the country: £32,937.91. But since it only has 83 pupils that’s not really a very fair comparison.

• The top spending big school is Featherstone High School in Ealing – it spends £10,034.11 for each of its 1,466 pupils

• The lowest spending school is All Saints Catholic Centre for Learning in Knowsley, Liverpool – £1,529.81   One wonders what they are doing with their money.

• Also for the first time we have a better idea of how much money is spent on pupils and how much on teachers.  More gets spent on pupils than we thought…  Schools in England, on average, spend 56% of their budget on teachers

• Heworth Grange Comprehensive School puts 73% of its total spending into teacher costs – the highest in the country

Here’s a typical entry – I have chosen the school just round the corner from the Hamilton House offices:

With these figures just out, the analysis has hardly begun.  Obviously we will be able to sort out schools that raise a lot per pupil, and those that don’t, and in fact anything else – but it will take a little while to code the database this end.    So if you do want a list selected by self-generated income, self-generated income per pupil, grant funding,money spent on teachers, money spent on supply teachers, money spent on support staff, money spent on admin, money spent on catering, money spent on ICT, money spent on learning resources etc etc – yes it can now be done.  There will be an extra charge, and this only applies to LA/state schools in England, but the data is now available.   Tony Attwood   You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings You can also follow us on the Education news group.  Send an email to education-marketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com It is free and you can leave at any time.  And we don’t use your email address for anything else.   Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

That headline went up on Marketing Vox (an American web site) during the Christmas/New Year holiday period, and made me smile for a moment.  (Just for a moment, of course – I didn’t want my house guests to imagine I was actually having a good time doing all the washing up, clearing up the wrapping, unfreezing the drains etc).

What, I wondered, was the point of telling me about last week?  And you may well be wondering why am I telling you about what is now a couple of weeks ago.

There is however a good reason for bringing it up, for these reports on the busiest day for email marketing etc all seem to have within them the implication that if everyone else is doing some marketing on a certain day in a certain way, then it must be A GOOD THING.  And if it is A GOOD THING then the implication is that we ought to be doing it too.

In fact I believe the opposite is true most of the time.

Take education marketing.   If we look at last year, the most used form of marketing was generic email.   Which has the virtue of being cheap, but also has the problem with getting low, and ever declining, rates of return.   Yes, with clever well thought through copy it is possible to get some good sales, but even with the best copywriter in the country, it is still getting tougher by the day.

However everyone is doing it, so people do it.   The same is true with people who lead with

20% New Term Discount!!!

on the grounds that everyone else goes with discounts so it must be good.  And then they find it isn’t.  Which is odd.

But there is a further point here.   If people are pouring into one medium (in this case, the wrong medium) for their ads, it means that other media are now relatively empty.  And this is certainly the case with education marketing.

During last term Generic Email advertising continued to grow, as did personal and preference email advertising (the ones that go to the teacher’s own email address directory - personal - or which go to the school administrator but which reveal that they are not junk by having the name of the teacher in the subject line – preference.

What stayed much the same last term was subscription email (where the teacher has actually asked to be on the list, and receives a news feed as well as the once a week ad).   What went down was postal promotions.

In fact the decline in postal promotions to schools has been so dramatic that overall the average teacher now gets around 20% of what he or she was getting five years ago.   Hence the response rates have gone up.  And this applies both to solo postal mail and shared postal mail.

The reason for the decline is two fold: email is perceived to be the new thing which all the on-the-ball companies are using, and postal mail is perceived as being too expensive.   But both arguments are false.

Postal response rates are on the up, because the volume is down.  Generic email rates are going down because volume is going up.

Perversely a shared mailing by post normally costs a total of around 7p per teacher reached including printing (although it varies depending on whether you do one or two teachers per school and how much you spend on printing) – which is only a little more than a generic email.   While solo postal mail is more expensive at around 45p per letter, the response rate is so much higher this can still be a good deal.

And of course with a solo you can always do a trial of around 300 letters (cost around £130) to measure the response rate.   Assuming you are making £20 profit a sale, then nine sales from the 300 items mailed would make a modest profit.   £30 profit a sale and then six sales (2%) will start bringing the money in.

As for the best day to send promotional emails – it changes all the time.  What we do know is that this term the schools have money to spend and will be spending it for fear of getting it clawed back (especially money they were holding to cover costs resultant from BSF work.)  If there is a term to experiment with different media, and different messages then this is it.

Tony Attwood