In January you will come back from ExCeL with names from a great many scanned badges. A few names will be ready to buy. Most will be people who liked what they saw and are nowhere near a decision. A good number of them will be teachers with no budget at all.
You probably aren’t short of things to send them. Case studies, a brochure, an invitation to a demo. But almost all of it is likely to have been written for somebody who is already close to buying.
Schools do most of their planning for the following year between January and the summer. So the people who had their badge scanned will go on deciding, or influencing whoever decides, for months after Bett. Staying in useful contact with them is a job in itself.
What we build
A thought leadership project.
We ask 1,000 teachers questions that their world is already arguing about, put them into field, and write up what comes back to a standard the education press recognises.
We commission enough research that our partners give us a rate you would not get going to them directly. That saving is passed on to you.
An example project, from start to finish
Ofsted said schools were narrowing what they taught at Key Stage 3, pushing children towards GCSE syllabuses from Year 7. The sector argued about it for years. Nobody had asked the teachers.
GL Assessment, one of the biggest assessment suppliers in the country, wanted a place in that argument. So we asked YouGov to put the questions to teachers and parents on our behalf.
Three-quarters of teachers (76%) said schools were offering a more restricted curriculum, and 60% of parents agreed. The cause, for 92% of teachers, was the pressure to deliver good exam results.
The answer led the front page of The Times, took a page lead in the Daily Mail and ran in Tes. We went back to Tes with a second angle and got a further news story and an opinion piece out of the same research.
The results became two reports, one written for LA secondary schools and one for trusts, both behind a registration page. Then a six-week email campaign to heads of year and Key Stage 3 coordinators, PPC Facebook adverts, a whiteboard animation, and a live webchat with the most followed teacher on Twitter.
By the end of the campaign 978 secondary schools and trusts had downloaded a report. That is 23% of the secondaries in the country. Of those, 31% asked to be called back.
Three hundred schools, asking to be contacted.
What you get
The research, the report, and the press work that helps put you in front of the sector.
That is the core of every project, and for some clients it is the whole of it. Most also want the materials that support it too.
Four blogs
12 designed social posts
Copy for a sequenced email campaign
Landing page and gated content copy, so it captures names rather than just sitting on a website
It also gives you something to build your own activity around. Clients often run webinars, podcast episodes and roundtables off the back of the data and report we deliver.
What it costs
Thought leadership campaigns start at £20,000 + VAT.
Whether a project goes above that ‘core’ of work depends on how much activity is delivered by us off the back of the research. The question that decides it is not what you can afford. It is whether you have people who will do the work. If you have a content team and a marketing calendar, take our work and run the rest of it yourself. If your marketing 'team' is one person doing six jobs, a report nobody has time to promote is money wasted.
The timetable
Decide by the middle of October. Fieldwork runs in November while teachers are in school, writing and design take us to Christmas, and the launch is in February, when the people who had their badge scanned need something worth reading.
Who we are
We are Bett UK's PR and communications agency. Our work in the sector has won awards from the CIPR, PRmoment and The Drum, and our consultancy offer has been recognised by the Education Investor awards too. We work only in education, and only with the companies that sell into it. We have done this since 2014.
“GK & Partners write our flagship thought leadership content. They know the education sector inside out and their work gets read by the people we need to reach.”
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The ask
What would you ask 1,000 teachers?
Schools were told to go phone-free in June, and Ofsted now checks that they have. Nobody said anything about tablets, laptops or learning apps. But there are signs schools are quietly using less of those too, and nobody has measured whether that is true. There is a question in there. There is one in your territory too.
Tell us yours and we will sketch it out. The question, who to ask, and what the education press would do with the answer. No charge, and no obligation either way.