Our panel FAQs about the Schoolzone panel, comprising over 100,000 each of UK teachers, lecturers and international teachers.

Specialisms

 Is the panel GDPR compliant?

Yes, and not using the spurious ‘legitimate interest’ clause. Teachers and lecturers have been registering with us for over 20 years. We're registered with the DPA and fully compliant with all legislation, with MRS Code of Practice and with ISO 20252:2018.

 

Are email contacts active?

Our email system stops sending to any email addresses which result in a permanent bounce and when there have been three consecutive temporary bounces. We achieve 98% delivery rates. Recipients can unsubscribe from all our services with a single click via any email sent.

Not all our members take part in research activities frequently, but many do – incentivised to keep doing so via our generous incentives.

 

How thorough is profiling?

We know a great deal about recipients: they update their profiles with each survey completed and they tend to update their profiling to make sure they don’t miss any opportunities to take part in our research work. We know which establishments about 85% of our teachers and lecturers work in and we have all the publicly available data on all of them, so we can target our panel very precisely, which means they aren’t overworked or disgruntled by getting irrelevant emails: something we are very careful about.

 

What do you use the Schoolzone panel for?

We most frequently contact our teachers and lecturers to invite them to take part in research. Some of this is for clients and some our own, which we share the findings of with the panel. For example, before the 2019 general election we asked them about their views on the various manifesto promises for education. 1200 replied overnight and we shared the findings with both live data and a summary report. Another was to find out how schools were reacting to the climate change school strikes.

 

Our email marketing is always focused on education or professional issues, such as classroom resources or, say, financial services tailored to educationalists needs. We don’t advertise anything that’s not of specific interest to teachers and lecturers.

 

Why so cheap?

At less than 1p per email, reaching the Schoolzone panel is less expensive than other agencies for three main reasons:

• Other agencies get their contacts by searching school websites, which is a laborious and costly process.
• We have very low overheads and very responsive audience so don’t need to send so many repeat emails to get the same response.
• We don’t require a monthly sign up fee, but instead give good rates of discount for a sequence of emails, for charities and for fellow BESA members.

 

But is the quality of service the same as more expensive agencies?

We think it’s better, of course. We not only log opens (typically c.20%) and click-throughs (typically 2-3%) but because we know which schools and colleges our respondents work in, we profile them to an incredibly high degree. We really understand this data too, having all been teachers, lecturers and school leaders and having been working with school data in our research capacity for over 20 years. Please just tell us what you’re trying to achieve and we guarantee we’ll help. We offer a full money-back guarantee on all our work, though no-one has ever asked for it.

We can also offer data-capture pages, re-sends to non-opens (25% of the original cost) and follow-up emails to those who have shown an interest.

 

Do you offer a schools data service too?

To help you plan market segmentation strategies, we have all the public data on schools, not just gathered together, but analysed so that you can easily find target segments. For example, if you were wondering which schools had their EBacc or KS2 data being dragged down by a poor performance in maths, but who had healthy reserves and relatively high levels of income, you could find them easily. We know which data fields are the most significant and have analysed it into quartiles, deciles etc so you can easily work with it – no additional analysis needed. And it’s all in Excel to maximise accessibility and usability.

 

What about international schools?

Yes, we have a lot of them, too – about 80,000 in English speaking schools around the World. These are less well profiled than our UK contacts – they move around quite a lot – but we apply the same protocols for updating as for all our contacts – three bounces and they are removed. We’ve had some amazing results for research from these schools – they seem eager to take part as it helps them keep up to date.