PrimarySite Case Study
PrimarySite works with schools and trusts to build websites and provide advice on brand and strategic comms. They asked Pedroza Comms to help them to build their profile with multi academy trusts (MATs).
Our strategy combined new research with listening to MAT leaders and working with stakeholders. It was designed build brand awareness and enable PrimarySite to make a useful contribution to discussions about MATs and forge new relationships.
Starting with the research, we spoke to MAT leaders and key influencers and identified that sustainable growth of a MAT was a key priority and focused the research on this topic.
Using our network, and PrimarySite’s contacts, we appointed a Steering Group of MAT leaders and experts. We undertook a literature review, interviews and a survey to gather insight and consulted regularly with the steering group on the findings and drafting of the report.
We launched the report in June 2020. We needed to reach a very targeted audience of MAT leaders and influencers so, as well as coverage in the Tes and Schools Week, we worked with the Association of School and College Leaders, the Institute of School Business Leaders, and the National Governance Association who shared the research findings in their member magazines and newsletters.
This secured a 1.74 million reach for the campaign. The report was downloaded more than 250 times in the first week and there was positive feedback from MAT leaders. Our work also resulted in PrimarySite building closer relationships with ISBL and ASCL, and further interviews and speaking opportunities about the research.
Rachel Panther, Managing Director, PrimarySite said:
Pedroza Comms has helped us to increase our profile with multi academy trust leaders by producing new research, building relationships with key stakeholders and securing editorial and speaking opportunities. We’ve valued their education expertise and network of senior contacts as well as their ability to contribute both strategically and tactically. We’d recommend them to any organisation wanting to strengthen their position in the education market.
Download the report here.
Read the launch press release here.
PrimarySite Research Report
COVID-19 PREDICTED TO SLOW THE EXPANSION OF MULTI ACADEMY TRUSTS New research exposes how multi-academy trusts are struggling to grow and Covid-19 adds to the challenges
Today we’re helping to launch new research, produced by PrimarySite the education branding and website company, which questions how easy it is for multi academy trusts (MATS) to grow and how Covid-19 has made expansion harder. Sustainable Growth in Multi Academy Trusts interviewed and surveyed MAT leaders and experts to get their insight on how MAT could grow.
The research identifies five important challenges: lack of available schools wanting to join MATs, a risk averse culture, competition from other MATs, a shortage of senior leaders with the right expertise, and limited access to funding to support growth. The research also found that managing immediate issues linked to the pandemic needed to take priority and would slow the growth of MATs plans for growth.
Rachel Panther, Managing Director, PrimarySite said: “The research shows that MAT leaders are keen to grow in a sustainable way but face numerous challenges which have now intensified due to Covid-19. We were prompted to undertake this research ahead of Covid-19 because there is very little advice for MAT leaders on the practicalities of growth. With the arrival of the pandemic I feel this is needed more than ever. Our report is packed with advice from MAT leaders, and I hope that in these challenging times this will be a useful resource for MATs that have an ambition to grow.”
The research found that smaller MATs felt under pressure to grow, but options for growth were limited. One approach is for smaller MATs to merge together, or join a larger MAT. However the research found that many respondents would not consider a growth strategy based on merging with other MATs.
Stephen Morales who was a member of the research steering group and is the CEO of the Institute of School Business Leadership said: “Covid-19 is a huge disruptive challenge for the leaders of MATs and growth plans are likely to slow down. In the medium term, mergers may well increase as smaller trusts cope with the longer term impact of the crisis. However, access to the right advice and help about growth is essential. This research asks important questions and I recommend that MAT leaders, and others involved in this area of education, read it.”
The research found that MAT leaders were also cautious about managing the outcomes of rapid growth and committed to ensuring that any school joining their MAT supported its values and ethos. Mark Lacey, also a member of the research steering group and CEO of the Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust said: “It’s essential to ensure that our growth is responsible and sustainable and that’s even more important now that we’re dealing with Covid-19 as well. In the early years some MATs did grow too quickly and this led to issues. I think the whole sector has learnt from this and is now, rightly, more cautious. What’s important is that MAT leaders have a clear vision and strategy for growth which is quite specific and avoids a scatter gun, reactive approach.”
To download the free report, visit here.
What the education comms community is talking about now
In the first few days of the lockdown, we decided to host our popular #CommsED meetups on Twitter. The aim was to offer a virtual space for education comms and marketing specialists to support each other, share ideas and discuss approaches.
It was a stressful time for everyone, with the lockdown so new, so coming together was a helpful antidote to the strangeness. There was a great response and lots of lively discussions, with the lockdown taking centre stage. We talked about positive comms strategies to adopt in the current climate, tips for hosting online events and meetings, ways to stay in touch with audiences plus the best memes and jokes we'd all seen! We thought we'd share a few things that we learned.
At a time like this, finding the right tone is crucial. We discussed how we felt about companies sending marketing and sales materials to schools in the last week or so before closure with @karen_ozjones describing this activity as “tone deaf”.
https://twitter.com/karen_ozjones/status/1242816706197827586?s=20
The importance of being responsive to the needs of schools was also raised.
https://twitter.com/EdFella/status/1242817745458278401?s=20
https://twitter.com/nowpressplay/status/1242817759337160704?s=20
Tilly from Now Press Play summed this up well:
https://twitter.com/nowpressplay/status/1242820964372688898?s=20
How can we cope with lockdown and school closures ourselves? How do we stay safe and still get the work done? This is especially challenging for people who are juggling childcare, getting to grips with new technology and navigating new comms challenges all at the same time. Tilly also shared a lovely way of coping.
https://twitter.com/nowpressplay/status/1242820077080231938?s=20
Remote working was discussed a lot. Some companies, like Pobble, already had experience as Anna Whiteley explained.
https://twitter.com/_AnnaWhiteley/status/1242820619827400706?s=20
Zoom came out as the video conferencing tool of choice but there were a lot of different experiences. It was also noted that broadcasters seemed to favour Skype.
https://twitter.com/AmyatEnjoy/status/1242818561401409536?s=20
Overall the message was to be adaptable.
https://twitter.com/EYFSF/status/1242816459157442561?s=20
We all agreed that it is important to accept that how and when you work might need to change. Spending some time researching the tools that work best for you is important.
Lots of people involved in the chat were also rethinking and developing their offers to schools. There were lots of examples of organisations working rapidly to develop new tools or features to meet the needs of existing customers.
https://twitter.com/nowpressplay/status/1242818941266923525
https://twitter.com/EYFSF/status/1242815536016379904
Incidentally, at Pedroza Comms, we’ve found that all our clients are rethinking and developing their offers to schools too. We’ve rethought numerous PR plans, developed lots of angles and targeted new audiences.
Our advice is; don’t be afraid to put current projects on hold and change your direction temporarily. Make some time to step back and identify ways that you can adapt and develop your offer.
Join our next CommsED chat
We hope that you find these insights useful. Our next CommsED chat will take place on Twitter at 2 pm on the 6th of May. To get involved, search #CommsED on Twitter. If you need any support during this time, we'd love to chat. You can email us or tweet Anna @PedrozaComms or Susan @EdCommsPR
To find out more about our CommsED meetups, click here.
Free insight: Ed Dorrell, Head of Content at the Tes tells us three things to remember
We recently interviewed Ed Dorrell, Head of Content from the Tes at a breakfast event we co-hosted with Roxhill Media, the organisation that provides us with our very useful media database.
Ed shared lots of essential insight and advice during the session and you can access all of it in our free briefing which you can download here. To get you started, here are three things we found out:
- News is online – Ed explained that virtually all news content is now handled online and, overall, about two-thirds of the Tes' editorial is digital.
- Tes International just launched – a new biannual publication aimed at both school and group leaders and individual teachers.
- Podcasts just keep getting bigger – the Tes hosts more than 10 podcasts and they are incredibly popular. The latest is the Tes Technology podcast, which launched in January this year. It joins podcasts covering news, pedagogy (Tes Podagogy), maths, English, FE, behaviour and more.
Click here to download the full briefing.
If you subscribe to our newsletter, you will already have received this briefing in full. For more tips on pitching to journalists, read our article 'Education PR: what journalists really want to know.
Good Luck to our brilliant Associate Director Susan Higgins
Susan Higgins has been Associate Director at Pedroza Comms for the past five years. During this time, Susan has been involved in a huge array of projects, helping to guide, promote and develop our clients’ public profiles. She has worked with the BBC, First News and Sparx and many others, and she has been instrumental in helping to establish Pedroza Comms as a leading specialist education consultancy.
Susan has now decided to take the next step in her career and will be going in-house as Head of Communications for the Edge Foundation, an education charity promoting the importance of a broad and balanced curriculum.
Although we are sad that we will no longer be working closely with Susan, we are delighted that she is taking on this exciting new challenge and we wish her the very best for the future!
Susan is also the co-founder of CommsED, our exclusive network for senior comms and marketing professionals in the education sector. We are very pleased that she is going to continue to lead CommsED with Anna and she will remain a valued part of our professional network. Good luck Susan!
CommsED Nov 2019
For those in comms and marketing, education is a challenging sector. It’s highly political, the workforce is fragmented and behaves more like a consumer market than a business one. Most importantly, the stakes are high – after all, we’re dealing with children’s futures.
So, although we love it, being an education comms and marketing professional can be tough.
CommsED is our way of making things easier. Everything we do is based on a belief that a problem shared is a problem halved. We run CommsED because we think it’s good to have a chat, a laugh and even a moan with people that do similar things to you.
We hosted our second CommsED event in November and it is clear that what we're doing is working. We have a growing waiting list, more people turned up than we could fit in and no-one wanted to leave. Clear signs of success!
Shelley Morgan, the driving force behind Bett 2020, described it as: “Small, intimate, and enough time to talk to people.” More than anything, people told us it made them feel special.
Andrew Carrick, comms strategy expert and fresh out of agency land, summed it up: “We’re a special niche with some lovely people who do comms AND care about their education world, so it’s nice to meet like-minded people with the same challenges who probably work on their own or in tiny teams.”
Finally, a shout out to Roxhill, the leading real-time media intelligence platform, who sponsor CommsED and kept us all hydrated. A couple of glasses of wine are always appreciated by the education comms crowd!
If you’d like to know more about CommsED, please get in touch with Anna or Susan:
anna@pedrozacommunications.co.uk or susan@pedrozacommunications.co.uk.
Why do we need PR in education marketing?
Selling to schools is a challenge. First, you need to capture your audience’s attention and once you have it, you then must convince them to act.
Motivating people to change something they do in the classroom, or across the whole school requires you to be persuasive, trustworthy and inspiring. As humans, we naturally like to stick to what we know. This is where PR can be incredibly effective. Why? PR is fundamentally different to marketing because it is not based on buying our attention; it is earned attention. PR is all about securing attention based on merit. When an impartial third party is doing the talking, it implicitly communicates to your audience that what you’re doing is important.
Getting teachers talking about you
The media gets us all talking; to our friends, colleagues and families. We share things with each other; tips, advice and opinions. Those in education are exactly the same, and that includes the half a million people who are teachers.
Coverage in the media gets teachers talking about you and what you do. It powers thousands of social media shares and posts every single day. It builds your credibility and engages your audience. Because however much you tell your audience what you do is amazing, they’re unlikely to believe it or act on it until they hear from a colleague or friend. It’s human nature.
PR vs. Marketing
Many of our clients ask us why they should invest in PR over marketing? At Pedroza Comms, we see how the strongest brands are built on what people are saying about them, rather than what they are saying about themselves.
Creating engaging marketing content is important but you need to build your foundations on trust. Trust is fundamental in driving your audience to support your brand and share your content. This is where you can leverage PR to demonstrate that the wider world is interested in your brand and what you are doing.
Coverage on a platform or in a publication is an implicit endorsement and a valuable way to build and establish trust with audiences and prospective investors too.
PR also strengthens your position as an expert in your field. If a platform or publication is citing your opinion, that further reinforces trust in your brand.
So why do we need PR in education marketing? Because a third-party endorsement is the most effective way to build trust with your audience, to raise your profile and to strengthen your brand.
Click here for tips on how to get the most value from your PR.
Education marketing and communications: Could coaching help you achieve more?
Many education organisations I work with will employ just one person to oversee their marketing and comms. And even in larger organisations, comms and marketing is regularly one of the smaller teams. I am always impressed with the breadth of work that marketing professionals do; spinning lots of plates to keep their organisations in the spotlight. If that's you - well done!
Marketing and comms is a challenging role that can be quite isolating. You’re typically not part of the senior leadership team, which can limit your input on wider strategy and of course there's always that pressure to deliver results.
My own experience in education marketing and comms has seen me working on both client and agency side, managing teams of staff and working alone. I know the pressures and challenges of marketing and comms roles all too well.
That’s why I’ve decided to offer specialist coaching support to education marketing and comms professionals who want to increase effectiveness. Here are just a few of the skills you can expect to gain from working with me:
- A marketing vision and strategy which is understood and supported by your senior team
- A refreshed proposition that engages your target market
- Greater insight into how to analyse data to understand existing and potential customers
- Increased confidence as an education marketing and comms expert
Here's some feedback from one of my coaching clients, James Bywood, Marketing Manager at Penstripe:
“Anna provides an excellent marketing sounding board. Not only helping me to create a rounded marketing strategy but supporting the implementation through her logical approach and experience of ‘what works’. I can now confidently communicate my vision for the marketing to peers and management and look forward to seeing this increased focus reflected in new leads and an increase in sales conversions."
Here are just a few of the skills that you can expect to gain through working with me:
- Ability to clearly communicate your marketing vision and strategy
- Ability to confidently set tangible new goals and measure them
- Ability to create a proposition that engages your target market
- Increased confidence as an education marketing and comms expert
- Develop a thriving marketing and comms function
- Ability to analyse data to help you understand existing and potential customers
- Increased engagement with new audiences
Whether you need a sounding board, a listening ear, (or simply a place to have a rant!) I’m here to help. If you're interested, please call 07813 938 020 or click here to book a free 30-minute consultation.
CommsED – a new star in the education comms world
In the education comms world, making connections is essential and at Pedroza Comms, our networks are incredibly important. They help us to spread the word about campaigns and activities, to build new partnerships and to provide our clients greater reach for their campaigns. We also try to help those in our network by promoting their campaigns, sharing content and helping with contacts and other advice.
Our new CommsED network is for those involved in education comms and marketing and aims to help us all to make new comms and marketing contacts across education. CommsED was launched on Wed 26 June at the RSA in London and refreshments were kindly supported by Roxhill, the topic-led media database.
The launch event brought together a mix of senior people from across the education sector. Participants were carefully selected to give a good balance from different areas of education. It wasn’t about the size of the crowd, instead the aim was to host an event where guests could make useful connections, share ideas and be inspired.
We’re pleased to say the first CommsED was a storming success with brilliant conversation, networking and new connections. Thanks to our founding CommsED posse: BAFTA, BBC, BEIS, Imperial College London, Lit Film Festival, NASEN, Pivotal, Place2Be, Pobble, Sparx, The Week Junior, Third Space Learning and Vision Teaching for helping to launch our CommsED star!
We’re planning our next event for the early autumn and we hope that CommsED can help everyone involved in education comms and marketing to grow their networks and build supportive links.
If you’d like to know more about CommsED do get in touch with Anna at anna@pedrozacommunications.co.uk or 07813 938 020
Practical PR tips for edtech to engage schools
The recent DfE edtech strategy highlights that schools and edtech need to communicate more effectively. PR is all about communication and putting things in plain language that can be understood by non-techie people. This makes it great for explaining new, and sometimes challenging, edtech products and services.
Here are 9 practical PR tips we regularly recommend to edtech companies to help them to communicate effectively with schools, to engage teachers (and others) and help to support their sales
1. Prove that you make a difference
Research that shows how your tech makes a difference in schools is a really valuable PR asset and can be used in press releases, opinion and comment. Services like Edtech Impact or BESA’s LendED can help edtech companies to engage directly with schools to gather valuable feedback, or work with other partners, such as universities.
2. Know your audience
The media that is consumed by your target audience is where you need to try and place coverage. It may be tempting to reach out to as many journalists as possible, but your time will be better invested if you target the media your audience will see.
3. Big education issues attract attention
A look through the national print and sector media will give you an idea of the issues that are newsworthy, for example, school funding, teacher workload, or teacher recruitment. The trick is to think about how the impact of your product or service links to prominent themes in the news. How does it make a difference? What have you discovered that could help schools and teachers?
4. Lose the tech
Don’t waste time trying to PR your latest technical development to education or mainstream media. The ‘tech’ in edtech is rarely a hook for an education journalist. Instead, reach out to edtech bloggers & influencers (more on these below) and invite them to try out the tech pre-launch. Ask them for reviews and help to promote any blog on news item on your website
5. Influencers
There are plenty of ways that you can work with influencers to spread the word of your product or service. An influencer doesn’t have to be someone with hundreds of thousands of followers. Instead, they need to be respected by your target audience. If you’d like to know more about how to find and work with influencers, download our step-by-step guide to influencer marketing.
6. Exploit coverage to the full
Make sure you squeeze maximum value from any PR to ensure your PR activity supports content marketing and SEO. Also, show coverage to your sales team so they can share it with existing customers and prospects.
7. Do it yourself
If you’re struggling to find ways to PR your edtech company why not create a new initiative or event? Events like Maths Week London, which has been developed by edtech company Sum Dog, or Lit Film Festival produced by A Tale Unfolds are both good examples of this approach.
8. Be opinionated
An issue that is repeatedly covered by the media is how tech will change the classroom. If you have strong opinions about the use of tech in schools, then there could be some great opportunities to comment on news stories. Set up Google alerts for keywords to monitor the media and when a story breaks, issue a comment to your target media. Click here for more advice on how to get a letter published in a national newspaper or online news site.
9. Finally, don’t forget parents & children
Mainstream media regularly reports on education from the perspective of its impact on children and young people. Parents are often asked to comment or may feature in case studies. Unlike the education sector media, they are less interested in the difference something might specifically make to teaching in the classroom. To appeal to mainstream media identify how your edtech product or services makes a difference to learners’ lives. Develop stories and angles that link to this and your news story is much more likely to appeal to mainstream media.
Good luck generating coverage for your edtech company. Please get in touch to tell us what you have found that works for you, or if you’d like to talk about the ways that we can help you to generate more effective PR.