MDR’s Market Research and Marketing teams proudly present The K-12 Education Landscape – a comprehensive look at the education market.
Written by Anne Wujcik, in her last few months at MDR, our report features a high-level overview of the K-12 education market.
We’ve analyzed both Public schools and Charter Schools, which offer unique advantages and disadvantages for education materials providers.
- It is critical that marketers and education product providers understand the districts they aim to serve.
- Large districts have the greatest money-making potential, with the greatest challenges.
- Small and medium sized districts have unique needs that may be the perfect fit for your product or service.
Demographic data throughout the United States.
- Individual schools within districts can vary widely in terms of size, demographics, academics, and needs.
- Vendors need to be prepared to provide examples of pilot schools that closely match the demographics of the potential customer in terms of size, student characteristics, and current level of achievement.
Highlights of federally-funded education programs
- Watch for developments in the school voucher arena.
- State and local economies are central to the fate of the education materials industry.
- Education materials providers who do a substantial amount of business in any given state or region must pay close attention to state economies, and be prepared to make adjustments to compensate for potential revenue losses in states that suddenly face budget shortfalls.
Information on school spending and purchasing cycles
- MDR gathers information directly from state departments of education about district spending for all instructional materials (AIM), which we highlight in this report.
- When a district or school really wants a product or service, they can almost always find a way to pay for it.
A discussion about the ways that schools engage in business
- Education marketers need to cast a large net, and sales are made by getting the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time.
- School districts are ruled by many of the same laws and regulations that govern other state agencies, including regulations related to contracts and purchasing.
The K-12 Education Landscape can serve as a primer for those new to the school market, helpful in gaining a baseline picture of its structure and dynamics. Others may use it as a reference tool, providing quick access to top-line data, federal grant priorities, annual spending, and more. Data tables supporting the statistics presented throughout the report can be found in the Appendix.
Over the next few weeks and months, we will share more highlights from the report, that will undoubtedly help you make critical business decisions in the education market, as schools look for solutions during their annual sales cycles.
