Data & Research
What Your Email Open Rate is Telling You … and What it Isn’t!
Open rates have long been used by digital marketers as a metric to determine the success of an email campaign. You just take the number of opened emails divided by the number of delivered emails. The higher that percentage, the better the results, right? Unfortunately, not anymore. With recent changes in technology, spam checking, and […]
Read Now »5 Reasons to Keep a Clean Email List (and 5 Ways to Do It!)
In the fast-paced world of digital communication, the importance of a clean email list cannot be overstated. It has a far-reaching impact beyond just your engagement metrics and staying out of the dreaded spam box. 1. Enhancing Deliverability Clean email lists are critical for email deliverability. Internet service providers (ISPs) closely monitor the sending behavior […]
Read Now »The Advantages of Email Marketing are Only as Good as the Marketing Itself
Email marketing is one of our favorite tools for education marketers. It can be more cost effective than other forms of one-to-one communication, can be turned around quickly, and offers near-immediate response times. But, the advantages of email marketing are only as good as the marketing itself! To truly engage your audience, you need to craft and execute email marketing […]
Read Now »“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 […]
Read Now »New School District Job Titles: Human Resources and School Relations/PR
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 […]
Read Now »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 […]
Read Now »4 Reasons to Try Augmented Reality in Your Classroom
By Guest Contributor Patrick Merchant, Senior Digital Strategist, McGraw Hill School Much like voice recognition technology and even artificial intelligence, Augmented reality (AR) is increasingly making its way into PreK-12 classrooms. With the potential to make way for learning experiences that we couldn’t have even dreamed of a decade ago, the implications of this new […]
Read Now »Reframing Our Industry’s Relationship with “Personalized Learning”
By Guest Contributor Dylan Arena, VP, Learning Science, McGraw Hill School Personalized learning has long floated atop the fizzy pool of education buzzwords. Education researchers have been trying to personalize learning with “teaching machines” since Sidney Pressey introduced his “Automatic Teacher” in 1924. A century later, there are some ways in which it’s working remarkably […]
Read Now »New School District Job Titles: Health & Wellness
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 […]
Read Now »The Future of Education: Technology for Efficiency and Connection
An Interview with Katie McClarty, Chief Academic Officer, McGraw Hill School Dr. Katie McClarty, an innovative industry leader with deep expertise in psychology, assessment, and instruction, recently joined the team at McGraw Hill School Group as Chief Academic Officer. Get to know Katie and her vision for the future of education in the interview below. […]
Read Now »Motivation: The Key to Engagement in Online Learning
By Guest Contributor Steve Tardrew, VP of Assessment and Research, McGraw Hill School For the past two years, online technologies have allowed students to engage in learning tasks from home, often asynchronously and without direct teacher oversight. And although schools have predominantly reopened and returned to in-person instruction, online learning is likely to continue to […]
Read Now »By Guest Contributors Derek Fay, Josine Verhagen, Angelica Gonzalez, and Yuning Xu, Data Scientists at McGraw Hill A User Guide While data plays a critical role in the modern education system, data literacy is not a common component of teacher education programs. This can leave educators unprepared to evaluate data quality or know what […]
Read Now »Students Deserve an Answer When They Ask, “When Will I Ever Use This?” In Math Class
By Guest Contributor Margaret A. Bowman, Ph.D., Academic Designer at McGraw Hill Here’s How Technology Can Help Every math teacher has likely heard it before: “When am I ever going to use this?” While some students quickly pick up anything mathematical, others mumble through class about how they don’t like math, they aren’t good at […]
Read Now »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 […]
Read Now »You’ve likely heard some rumblings in the marketing world about the death of the third-party cookie. Dramatic language aside, some big changes are coming in how browsers handle user site visit information. Those changes will have an impact on how MDR’s digital display advertising works. So, we want to give you a heads up about […]
Read Now »New Federal Relief for Education in the American Rescue Plan
On March 11, 2021, President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, with another round of COVID-19 relief funding for education. The new law includes: $129 billion for K-12 state education agencies, including $800 million for children experiencing homelessness $40 billion for colleges and universities $2.75 billion to governors for use by private schools […]
Read Now »Direct Mail Is Alive and Well: 5 Tips for Success in 2021
We all—especially these days—spend countless hours behind our screens, communicating via email, private messaging, Zoom, and other online tools. But at the end of the day, who doesn’t still love going to their real-world mailbox and checking to see what surprises (other than bills) may have arrived that day? It might be a greeting card […]
Read Now »What’s moving the needle in sales and marketing these days? Complete, Accurate, and Fresh Data. The definition of data quality is changing, largely because today’s education sales and marketers are using data as high-octane fuel for sophisticated activation strategies, like: Personalization Account-Based Marketing Customer Data Platforms Programmatic Advertising Defining Buyer Personas Identifying Lookalike Audiences Marketing […]
Read Now »Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been keeping you up to date on its impact on states, schools, and spending. One area that we have been particularly focused on is the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) of which nearly $40 billion was allocated for K-12 and higher education. […]
Read Now »Stay on Top of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the headlines every day for most of this past year, it may seem that the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has taken a back seat. However, that is not the case: the CCPA’s regulations became final and effective as of August 14, 2020. Now that it has taken effect, […]
Read Now »School Supply Lists 2020-2021: Take Advantage of an Extended Buying Season
School supply lists are a lifeline for teachers and districts. Outfitting students and classrooms has become a collaborative effort with teachers, parents, fundraising appeals and districts all pitching in. This year, with so much uncertainty about how and where instruction will happen and heightened focus on health and hygiene, lists look a little different. With […]
Read Now »We’ve all been paying close attention to the news and our local school communities, following the opening plans. MDR data experts have been capturing when and how school will be in session and which learning models each school will follow. Although, some schools started a little later this year, as of this week, most schools […]
Read Now »As you may know, a significant portion of the federal economic relief bill—the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)—is allocated to government programs focused on educational institutions, families and children. This includes $30.5 billion in Education Stabilization Funds dedicated to K-12, Higher Education and a Governor’s Emergency Relief Fund for local K-12 […]
Read Now »While education is certainly facing unprecedented challenges in responding to stay-at-home orders, educators are rising to the challenge. A history of constant evolution in U.S. education – from Common Core to asynchronous learning – may have helped educators hone their skills as problem solvers. That’s one conclusion from a recent survey MDR conducted with educators […]
Read Now »Thanks to Mogul for publishing us in this great article. Here’s a sneak peak of the article written by our very own Linda Ingersoll. There are few certainties in life: death, taxes, and school fundraisers. If you have a student in your life, you’ve likely been shaken down by a 4-foot-tall, pig-tailed sales rep asking […]
Read Now »The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Takes Effect Bringing Sweeping Changes in Compliance
By Anne Goto, Data Products Manager, MDR Not long ago we communicated that the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018 was signed, with an effective date of January 1, 2020, on the horizon. Well, the time has come! CCPA took effect on January 1, bringing changes that affect both consumers and businesses, including education […]
Read Now »Hey Boomer! Want Gen Z Customers? Be Like Gen Z.
Thank you to Marketing Insider Group for referencing us in this great article. If you’ve read the news lately, you’ve come across Greta Thunberg’s name. Since skipping school to protest at Sweden’s parliament building in 2018, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist represents the teen-led climate strike movement.Thanks to Thunberg and the millions she’s inspired, it’s become clear […]
Read Now »Beyond Back-to-School Spending: Teachers Are Brand Loyal
School spending is big business. Teachers spend an estimated $1.75 billion per year on school supplies from classroom budgets and out-of-pocket expenditures. And marketers know teachers—and parents—spend a lot of their own money on school-related products and services. In a previous post, I talked about the trend of teacher out-of-pocket spending on school supplies for […]
Read Now »There’s a reason the hashtag #clearthelist—which asks people to buy items on teachers’ Amazon wish lists—took off this back-to-school season. Teachers are spending more and more of their own money on school supplies and materials for their classrooms. And many schools continue to push the AmazonSmile program which gives back to schools when friends and […]
Read Now »The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is Here
It’s time to start thinking about compliance. By Anne Goto – Data Products Manager, MDR Here at MDR our thoughts are always turning to…data. Okay, we talk about data a lot. You could say it’s our thing. So when there is an imminent data privacy regulation poised to impact all US businesses, including education marketers, […]
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