The Pre-Budget Report announced that funding originally earmarked for the Primary Capital Programme (PCP) and three other capital programmes in 2010-11 is now available in 2009-10.

Overall schools capital spending has risen seven-fold in real terms over the last decade – up from under £700m in 1997 to £6.67billion this year. This announcement adds to the £7.02 billion capital investment already being pumped into schools next year.

All 150 local authorities in England are being asked to identify building and refurbishment spending which can be brought forward - with the funding being released from April 2009.

The vast bulk of the projects that can be brought forward will be small-scale modernisations and refurbishments – giving immediate cash injections to thousands of small and medium-sized businesses fitting out these new facilities.

The full details of the announcement are:

£800 million to be advanced 12 months from the 2010-11 allocations from the Primary Capital Programme; Local Authority Modernisation Grant; Locally Controlled Voluntarily Aided Programme and Targeted Capital Fund for 14-19, SEN and disabilities fund.

The specific programmes involved are:

Primary Capital Programme: 41 local authorities with approved strategies for the next two years could bring forward up to nationally £280 million from 2010-11. The DCSF announced earlier this month it is working with the other local authorities to bring their plans up to speed quickly.

Local Authority Modernisation Grant (capital grant): to improve the infrastructure of the school estate (other than voluntary-aided schools and academies) - up to £470 million could be brought forward;

Locally Controlled Voluntarily Aided Programme: to improve the infrastructure of the voluntary-aided school estate; to support the provision of new pupil places; and to facilitate physical access to schools - up to £220 million could be brought forward;

Targeted Capital Fund for 14-19; Special Educational Needs and Disabilities: to provide additional funding to areas not currently in the BSF programme to build facilities to deliver 14 to 19 reforms; diplomas; and to improve facilities for SEN and disabled pupils those local - up to £460 million could be brought forward.

Local authorities are being asked to identify by Christmas what is suitable expenditure to bring forward, depending on the readiness of locally managed projects – the Government will confirm by decisions by January 16 2009.

Building Schools for the Future

This announcement is in addition to ongoing measures taken to accelerate the Building Schools for the Future programme,

The Pre Budget Report sets out that the 41 local authorities able to bring forward 2010-11 Primary Capital Programme funding to next year: Barnet, Bracknell Forest, Bradford, Bromley, Camden, Cornwall, Coventry, Darlington, Devon, Doncaster, Dorset, Ealing, Essex, Gateshead, Gloucestershire, Greenwich, Hackney, Hampshire, Harrow, Hartlepool, Hertfordshire, Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston upon Thames, Kirklees, Lambeth, Leicester, Lewisham, Lincolnshire, Luton, Middlesbrough, Newham, Portsmouth, Redbridge, Redcar and Cleveland, Richmond upon Thames, Rutland, Tameside, Walsall, Warwickshire, Wolverhampton, Worcestershire

The full local authority funding breakdown and other background material on Primary Capital Programme is at: www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/resourcesfinanceandbuilding/pcp/

However last financial year was the year in which schools were able to run over as much of their money as they liked without losing it.  (This as a final much-delayed response to the chaos of 2003 when schools ended up making huge numbers of teachers redundant, only to re-employ them 6 months later when the funding came through).

So in the financial year 2007/8 schools were told to spend everything they had accumulated over previous years - and they did.  That rule hit in November 2007 and that put spending up dramatically in November and December last year.

This year there is no roll over, and no old funds to use.   So firstly, the extra money of last year is not there.  

And secondly, because the old roll-over rules don’t apply now, I think people are holding back just in case they need to buy something urgently in February.   That suggests that there should be a big load of sales in February - although you can’t sue me if there isn’t.

Thirdly, e-learning credits came to an end in August, which means that IT products are competing for real money once again - and that means that non-IT purchases are competing for a pot of money that is being squeezed over a wider range of products.

That I think is it.   They know about the budgets, they haven’t got last year’s bonus, they know they have to spend the money by April and are holding back to next term, and they ain’t got no e-learning credits.

Other than that it is business as usual.

If you would like to know more please do call me on 01536 399 000 or email Tony at schools.co.uk - or visit www.educationmarketing.org.uk 

Here’s a simple analysis: the companies that I see that generate the greatest profit from schools all do three things:

They vary their advertising message all the time

They work across the five different direct marketing media

They undertake trial mailings to ensure that each full-scale promotion works to the maximum effect.

Varying the message and using the different media are both vital, because different teachers respond in different ways.  A teacher who responds to a solo mailing might not opt in to an email list.   A school that forwards emails sent to the general school address might not do the same with shared mailing leaflets, and so on.  

And the same variance can be found with different types of message.  

Combine the five approaches (shared, solo, school email, opt in email, and subscriber email) with the fact that advertising messages can be endlessly changed and re-written, and you’ll see just how the marketing can be developed in order to keep the orders coming in.

In an ideal scenario this endless rotation of media and message will be combined with a continual regime of testing - so at any one time you might be sending out a promotion to 300 schools as a direct mail shot to measure the response on that, while running a different promotion on an generic email campaign that was tested earlier.  A couple of weeks later it might be a shared mailing that is going out, along with a test email mailing using the Subscribers email list.

Of course this is not easy - which is why many companies don’t follow this rigorous approach.   It is necessary to be thinking and planning weeks and months ahead in order to get the trial mailings out on time.  It may seem a bit complex, but the savings and additional sales will always make it worthwhile.  

To help make this approach of testing and varying both the message and the media work, Hamilton House has a service through which we work with our clients running and monitoring these promotions, tracking and analysing the response rates, and coming up with ideas as to what should happen next both in terms of the message and the media.  

If you would like to talk about any of these three topics (that is varying the message, varying the media, and testing before full promotions) please just give myself or my colleagues a call on 01536 399 000

Tony Attwood

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

In one week’s time Hamilton House will release around 100,000 email addresses of teachers.  It will be the first time it has been possible to email teachers directly on such a large scale in the UK.

The list (known as the opt-in list) is analysed by the main interest area as given by the teacher in question when they opted in.  Thus a specialist music teacher in a secondary school will put down “Music” – which the primary school teacher who obviously teaches the same class through the week will be more likely to put down “Key Stage 1” or “Key Stage 2” depending on their interest.

There’s nearly 100 selections to choose, from media studies to maths, from science to business studies.   The complete list of lists is available on line at http://www.yesmail.org.uk/email_optin_teachers.html

The lists are available at 14p an address, and the minimum order is £100.  Because we are only releasing these lists for the first time next week and because it is vital that teachers do not feel they are getting too many adverts via email as a result of signing up to our list, there are strict limits on the number of lists we are going to run.  If you are interested please do book in as early as possible.

This opt-in list is just one of three educational email lists that we offer.   These lists are

The subscribers list: lists selectable by subject area of teachers who subscribe to Education Management News.   These lists are smaller than the opt-in lists, but they have the highest response rates.

The opt-in list: that is the list described above.

The schools’ list.  This list includes every school, with the email directed to the administrator, not a specific teacher.  The normal approach with this list is to put the title of the teacher (e.g. Attn: The Head of Science) in the subject line.   This list reaches all the schools, but has the lowest response rate.

There are full details of all three lists on http://www.yesmail.org.uk/Schools.html

Prices include sending out the email and giving suggestions and advice on the way in which the content of the advert can be developed to maximise response rates.

If you would like to discuss how you can make the most of your email marketing to schools using these three lists please call myself or Stephen on 01536 399 000.

When you’ve mailed teachers several times and they still haven’t bought anything from you, a simple question arises: should one remove them from the database, or go on trying with further mailshots?

Mailing again can work - but only if you change the message radically.  On this page I explain why this is so, and how one might do it. 

What’s happening in this scenario is that the individual seeing the advert thinks, “oh its, XYZ Ltd, seen that before,” and within a second it is in the bin. 

The only way to get around this is to show the reader at once that this time you are writing about something utterly different.  It is not a case of changing the offer part way through the text – for the chances are that they are by this stage not reading anything at all.  You have to grab them by the throat from the very start.

Throughout, the key phrase is “go somewhere else”.  Quite often this means not writing about the product, but instead discussing something quite different.

What made me think of this was the text I wrote recently for the theatre company Perform.   They had previously written to schools many times about their projects and always gained a good response rate.  But they still had a significant number of schools that had never replied at all.  In my latest letter for them I only mentioned them at the end of the piece… In most of the letter I covered a totally different topic.  

Today I got an email from their MD, Will Barnett, saying that schools ”which have been ignoring us for years are suddenly picking up the phone…”

I am confident that it is possible to sell to those who have resisted in the past - but it takes a bit of lateral thinking.  If this is a problem you are facing send me a copy of a recent advert (just email Tony@hamilton-house.com) and give me your phone number and I will call you back to discuss the issue and give you a solution.

Tony Attwood 

PS: This approach applies both to direct mail and email campaigns.  We can now email teachers directly to their own email address, or if you prefer, email the school’s office and ask the administrator to pass the email on.

Three years ago hardly anyone emailed schools.  Now email is the fastest growing type of educational marketing.  But not everyone is getting acceptable response rates.

My aim here is to outline the different types of email services available, give an idea of the sort of response rates you can get, and set out how much email marketing will cost.

There are two main services available: emailing schools and emailing teachers.  Each has its own unique benefits.

If you email schools, you should be able to get a list of virtually every school.  The addresses will be of the school administrator for the most part, and so it is important to write Attn: The Head of Maths (or whoever you want to reach) in the subject line.  

A typical mailing (including guidance on how the email should be written, supply of the list and the transmission of the mailing) will cost around 5p per school.

The best response rate I’ve had in selling a product costing £20 via email to teachers is 1.2%.  But I would add here that we had to experiment several times in order to get this – the way the advert is written really does affect the response rate.

I have seen other people talk of higher response rates and lower costs, but generally these seem to me to be for different scenarios – for example on emails aimed direct at teachers or previous buyers (as opposed to all schools), or for free items. 

The two central problems with emails sent in this way are that school email addresses do change a lot and it is often the case that email addresses given on school web sites are (rather curiously) not always accurate.  (Call me if you’d like to know why).  However we are currently working on accuracy rates approaching 95% for our email lists, and this figure is edging upwards all the time.

Emailing teachers is a different matter.  When you email schools you get to almost every school, but you are dependent on the administrator passing the email on.  When you email teachers you only get to those teachers who have opted into the email service, which means you only reach a fraction of all possible teachers.  But because you reach them directly, and because they have opted in, the response rate can be much higher.  Selling the same £20 product as mentioned above we have had response rates of 3.5%, as opposed to the record 1.2% on the “email schools” promotion.

If you’ve not promoted your product before via email it is often a good idea to start by using the email teachers service, on the grounds that if you don’t get a good response rate there, you are very unlikely to get much of a result anywhere else.

After that, many companies find that they can make a good profit using both services.

There’s more on emailing teachers direct at www.yesmail.org.uk/emailteachersdirect.html

There’s a summary of prices for emailing schools at www.yesmail.org.uk/Schools.html

For more information, to talk about the ways of writing your email such that it will get the highest possible response rate, and to discuss the best way to write your email, please do call 01536 399 000.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Tony Attwood

PS: The issue that I haven’t dealt with is the relative merits of email vis a vis direct mail.   That’s for another day – but if you would like to know more now please do call on 01536 399 000.

What do blogs, web sites and newsgroups have to do with bringing in new customers and building relationships?

I started work on this a couple of years back, and earlier this year produced a report on finding thus far suggesting that blogs and the like can make a big difference.  There’s a link to that report below.

Since then HHM has continued its experiment, and has now managed to get one of its blogs read by over 65,000 different people a month, and now has the odd situation of companies contacting us to ask if they can advertise on the site!

We’ve also now started running a newsgroup for another company, and the number of calls we are getting on this seems to be rising.

So, is it possible to build customer relationships and enhance orders through the whole “web 2.0″ field?   The answer is yes, most certainly.  If you want to get more people to your web site, if you want to interact with customers and potential customers more, and overall if you want to find an interestingly low cost way of building sales, the new technology can do it.

The down side is that there’s a load of people out there who want to sell you solutions that don’t necessarily work - especially with that old favourite of “get you to the top of the google search list.”  

This can be done  - for example we’ve done it for the word “schools” which depending on where you are in the world and what time of day it is, will have our site www.schools.co.uk as first, second or third out of 32 million on a UK search and in the top three on page one out of 467 million worldwide.  

And just to show we are not just education - we did it for shawls as well, where our customer is now on page 1 of google for “baby shawls” out of 111,000.

Thus it can all be done - but it is time consuming, and not something you can fix up in a spare half hour.   The earlier article on the topic is below, or you can call me, tell me what you sell, and I’ll tell you what I know: 01536 399 013

http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/Blogs.pdf

Tony Attwood

In order to show you just how effective our shared mailings can be, Hamilton House Mailings plc can offer you a special low price on shared mailings.  The only qualifying clause is that you have not undertaken a shared mailing with us during the past 12 months.

Each week we put packs together containing leaflets from various companies, with each one directed to an individual teacher.   You can choose which type of schools you want to reach from a list of nine different options, and your leaflet is then mailed out within the pack.  (If you’ve never seen one of our packs, do call and we’ll put a sample in the post.)

The price is £249 to reach 5000 secondary schools.  For the 5000 largest primary schools the price is the same.  You can also reach the 10,000 largest primaries for £495, or all 23,000 primaries for £999.  For other options please do call.

And there’s a couple of bonuses.

First, most of our packs go out with a letter from the School of Educational Administration – the professional body of school administrators.   This letter contains the latest relevant information for administrators, and this encourages administrators to distribute the leaflets in the pack.

Second, there’s no weight charge so long as your leaflet weighs under 15g.  And third, if you’d want to, you can send me a copy of your proposed leaflet and I’ll call you back and let you know what I think – along with suggestions on how you might want to change it in order to increase your response rate.  There’s no charge.

There’s a limit to the number of companies that we can take as part of this offer, and places at these prices are sold on a first-come first-serve basis.  If you are interested please call on 01536 399 000 and we’ll be able to tell you exactly which dates we have available at these prices. 

Tony Attwood

In this scenario the teacher will have one question.  If you can answer that question to the teacher’s satisfaction then all will be fine.  If you can’t then the teacher is liable to drift away and buy elsewhere.

Which makes the question rather important.

In fact if you were to analyse the promotions to schools that have worked particularly well in the past few years you’ll find that most of them deal with this one simple question: why should I buy this product from you?

When that question is answered very clearly at the very start of a promotion it pushes the promotional material in a particular direction.  However it is a fact that many companies struggle to provide an answer to that question which speaks directly to the teacher’s needs rather than the features of their product or service. 

Fortunately there is a very simple way of finding out what sort of answer to this question will really impress teachers.

What you do is ask a few hundred teachers which product or service they use to teach a particular issue, or solve a particular problem.   As in, “what products are you currently using with KS2 children who have dyslexia?”

Then, as a follow up question you would ask, “Do you have any problems with this product?  Is there anything you feel that is missing, or which could be done better?  Or would you recommend it wholeheartedly?”

You then take the results of this survey, and look for two things.  One – search for ways in which your product is different from those highlighted by the teachers you questioned.  Two – look at the areas where teachers note that the competitor products fall down, but where you think your product scores.  For example if the respondents say, “the only problem is that after a few weeks the children tend to get a bit bored – there’s not enough variety” you can then stress the high level of variety offered by your product.

Put all that together, and you have an advertising campaign that can be at least twice as effective as a campaign built without such research.

The cost of such research is normally around £400 – a fee that includes not just undertaking the research, but also guidance on the questions to ask, a full analysis of the answers, and suggestions on how the results can be turned into sort of copy that will transform your next advertising campaign.

If you would like to take this idea further, please do give myself or my colleagues a call on 01536 399 000 – or you can email me at tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

The question in question (as it were) is delivered to teachers and is…

in two parts.

Part one says, “When you are teaching topic x what resources do you currently use?” Part two says, “Can you tell me briefly the major benefits and draw backs of this product?”

OK, you are saying to yourself (if you are the sort of person who says things to yourself), what is so magical about these questions?

The point is you get to ask a random sample of teachers to give their opinions on the rival products avaialble when teaching a particular topic or subject. They tell you the positive and negatives of using those products in the classroom.

Then…

You create adverts which focus on the failings of your competitors’ products and the way in which you overcome those issues. I am not saying you mention your competitors by name or denigrate what they do. Rather your knowledge of how your potential customers see the products in this area becomes the most important factor there is in creating successful advertisements.

There’s one final point. Sometimes I’ve heard people say, “we don’t have any competition – no one does it like us,” and I am sure that is true. But that’s not quite the point here. The key issue is not what you think – but what the teacher thinks – and that is often quite a different issue.

Tony Attwood

PS: We undertake research to find out what teachers think about products avaialble to schools. The average cost is around £450, which in terms of the marketing benefit you can derive is rather a tiny amount. Call me before I put the price up.