Posts by the MDR Marketing Team
We’re the MDR Marketing Team and education marketing is our beat. We’ll help you stay up to speed with the latest news, trends, and opportunities as education reinvents itself, once again.
Mitigating learning loss. Declining enrollments. Ensuring student social and emotional health. Managing increased parental involvement. Providing a safe learning environment. These concerns are just the top of the laundry list of challenges that education leaders face in 2023. Plus, they face the looming September 2024 deadline to allocate Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund […]
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“Out with the old, in with the new” is a great attitude for starting the year! But it also applies to the data that you use for your successful marketing programs. An MDR report on the risks of dirty data revealed that cleaning up your database could boost your company’s revenue by up to 66 […]
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Content marketing is a mature and irreplaceable part of the marketing mix. Marketers appreciate its effectiveness for establishing thought leadership, promoting brand awareness, and keeping products top of the customers’ mind. Marketers needing to keep the pipeline filled with quality content are always looking for new sources, and user-generated content can be an option. User-generated […]
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U.S. education is in the midst of a resurgence of what has been dubbed the “Reading Wars.” For more than 40 years, there has been a conflict between proponents of explicit phonics instruction – structured literacy – and those who promote the whole-language approach. The heightened focus on this debate may have been ignited by […]
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Our country has nearly 50 million K-12 students enrolled in public schools. However, a lot has changed since the days of the traditional little red schoolhouse with desks all in a row, where kids studied reading, writing and arithmetic. Today a significant number of students are attending specialty K-12 schools, such as charters and magnets. […]
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It’s no surprise that the disruption of COVID-19 school closings had an impact on student learning, but assessments are now showing that the learning loss may be graver than anyone anticipated. And recent results of the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—dubbed the “Nation’s Report Card”—revealed that there has been no greater impact than […]
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As the year comes to a close, you are likely deep in the middle of marketing and sales planning for 2023 – plotting out your themes and campaigns as well as the conferences and events where you will meet with educators. We’ve all learned over the past few years that everything can change in a minute, […]
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In this series of blog posts, we are featuring the 36 new job titles we recently added to our database of school personnel. These titles reflect the ways that school districts are responding to our changing world with new positions that help them address today’s challenges and those they will face in the future. We’ve […]
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As the headlines are declaring, the U.S. is in the midst of a national teacher shortage. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) latest survey results on public school experiences with COVID-19 shows that, 53 percent of all public schools felt understaffed entering the 2022-2023 school year, and 69 percent reported too few […]
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In last month’s post, we introduced new “Facilities Management & School Safety” job titles and we also previously examined new “Health & Wellness” positions. Now let’s look at the important category of “Technology.” While K-12 schools have been making significant investments in technology for decades, the events of the past few years, including the unanticipated switch […]
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Each year MDR examines data on public school enrollment and offers a snapshot of the state of the country’s schools. This year’s results show interesting changes, likely resulting from the unanticipated events of the past few years. U.S. public school enrollment remained relatively stable over the past decade with 91 percent of all school age […]
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Our database of school personnel recently grew with the addition of 35 new job titles and 11 title changes at the district level, reflecting the current educational landscape. In last month’s blog post, we introduced new titles in the “Health & Wellness” category, representing an increased focus in schools on those important two areas. As […]
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As the 2022-2023 school year begins, it is a great time to review the six phases of the digital marketing funnel to help you successfully reach the perfect education prospects and convert them into customers this school year. Discovery: At the top of the funnel this is where your targeted audience finds out about your […]
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Things change. And over the past few years it seems like things have been changing at an accelerated pace, especially in education. At MDR, we knew this likely had an impact on the organizational structure of school districts and new positions may have been added to reflect emerging needs. To ensure that you can target […]
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The past two years, there’s been a lot of talk about the return to “normal” or, at the very least, what’s come to be referred to as the “new normal.” Well, when it comes to education conferences, we may be there! However, with the majority of education conferences back to being “live” events, companies are […]
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You may have heard of the federal Blue Ribbon Schools award program recognizing schools for academic excellence and closing the achievement gap, but did you know about the U.S. Department of Education’s Green Ribbon Schools awards? The goal of this program is to inspire schools to strive for 21st-century excellence by highlighting promising school sustainability […]
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Email marketing campaigns are a terrific way to reach prospects and secure qualified leads. However, we know the educators you want to reach receive hundreds of emails every day – even more during prime times in the academic calendar like back to school and the spring buying cycle. How can you be sure that your […]
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As schools continue to work to mitigate the learning loss resulting from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are offering summer learning programs that combine academics and enrichment. And because of the billions of dollars in ARP ESSER funds that have been distributed to states and districts, they have the resources to invest in […]
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Teacher Appreciation Week 2022 is May 1-7 It’s been a rough couple of years for all of us, especially our country’s teachers. They’ve had to learn how to teach remotely, help their students overcome unprecedented learning loss and support them as they face mental health challenges brought on by the isolation and uncertainty of the […]
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It’s hard to sell something if you don’t understand who you are trying to sell it to. Yet, marketers face the challenge of clearly defining who their target buyer really is, particularly in education. In many K-12 environments, decisions are made at the school district or even school board level, but often teachers, parents, and […]
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It may only be February, but the end of the 2021-2022 school year is as little as three or four months away. And with the end of the school year comes the scramble by districts, schools, and even individual teachers to spend down their budgets. Whether this “use it or lose it” scenario includes millions […]
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The U.S. Department of Education has approved the final state and territory plans for using their American Rescue Plan (ARP) Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds to support the safe and sustained return to in-person learning for U.S. K-12 students. Other states and territories had their ARP ESSER plans approved in 2021. All 52 […]
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It’s been quite a year for all of us in the education community, especially teachers. Earlier this year, we predicted what we thought might be the hot topics for education in 2021 and we were pretty close to accurate with topics such as learning loss, educational equity, and remote learning. But who knew that districts […]
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The U.S. Department of Education approved plans from 12 more states and Guam for use of the American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. Earlier this year, the department distributed two-thirds of the ARP ESSER funds, totaling $81 billion, to state departments of education. The remaining third of the funding is made […]
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At their annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 7th this year, Apple announced a new policy on email privacy. According to Apple, their Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) “hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when […]
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Every November, Merriam-Webster picks the “word of the year.” For 2020, it was “pandemic.” (Go figure!) While it is still a bit early for the 2021 word to be announced, it might well be “disruption.” And among the things that have been most disrupted over the past year or more is the way that we […]
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MDR Insights There are 95,938 public schools in America, serving over 47 million public school students. Let’s look at the different school district sizes and what types of businesses match their needs. At MDR, we consider a district large if it enrolls over 10,000 students. A medium district enrolls 2,500 to 9,999 students, and a […]
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We’re all familiar with Teacher Appreciation Week. Considering everything teachers are dealing with right now–return to in-person instruction, keeping kids safe, helping students catch up, and controversies about curriculum—we’d like to make a suggestion… Let’s make every day Teacher Appreciation Day. Here’s why: whatever expectations you may have in a typical year for teacher time? […]
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The U.S. Department of Education recently approved 21 state plans for use of their American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) funds. These states join 11 others and Washington, D.C. whose plans were approved earlier this year. The plans detail how each state is using and plans to use ARP ESSER funds […]
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Educators couldn’t miss the headlines about the additional $122 billion allocated for ESSER in the American Rescue Plan (ARP), signed into law in March. But there was another boon for education in the ARP that you may not have heard about: the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF). Administered through the Universal Service Administrative Company of the FCC, […]
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