School and Teacher Data Changes Fast: Are You Keeping Up?

As anyone who has ever tried to farm eggs on an industrial scale will tell you; the more chickens you have the more eggs...

Author

Jackie O'Shea

Published: 9^th September 2013

As anyone who has ever tried to farm eggs on an industrial scale will tell you; the more chickens you have the more eggs you’ll be able to produce, but you’ll also have to spend a heck of a lot more time cleaning out the coop!

Now, you might call me crazy for drawing a parallel between egg farming and our digital marketing services but stay with me. With the Database of UK schools and teachers" continuing to expand (18,228 teachers added in the last 30 days, taking the total number of teachers to 216,208), Sprint are now having to invest more and more time and money to ensure the data is constantly cleansed and kept up to date.

In fact, Sprint are now investing over £200,000 every year in the expansion and maintenance of the Education Database (and no, not all of that goes into paying my wages!).

And with the new school year now upon us, our in-house research team have been busier than a swarm of mosquitoes at a nudist colony making sure the database reflects the personnel changes that have been taking place during the summer holidays.

In the last 30 days alone we’ve made a whopping 22,936 updates to the Education Database (take a look – we publish our updates live on our website). All of which just goes to show that, unless it’s constantly cleansed, any list of schools and teachers will go out of date faster than government education policy!

That’s why we supply our clients with online access to the same portal that our research team use so that they can benefit from every update that we make to the database. This means that if you lease data from us you will find that at the end of the lease period your data is as accurate as it was on the day you purchased it (plus you’ll have access to far more teachers that we won’t charge you for).

It’s hard to think now that the Education Database began its life as a humble Excel spreadsheet built by Sprint co-founders Ben and Guy. It’s now a colossal MYSQL database with PHP front end and undoubtedly the most powerful schools marketing tool in the UK. From tiny acorns and all that!

So if you’re serious about marketing to schools you need to be serious about the data you are using. Who owns the data? How often is it updated and by whom? These are the questions you need to be asking your education data supplier.

Please feel free to give us a call on 01684 297374 and we’d be only too happy to discuss the methods we use for gathering and cleansing data. Or you’re more than welcome to come and visit us if you’d like. Just give us a call beforehand and let us know how many sugars you like in your tea and what filling you like inside your donuts!