Black Friday Letter to an Educator

This is a letter I sent to an educator the day after Thanksgiving. I spoke with him briefly on the phone, told him that Innovation Ads is a full service lead generation firm, that offers a comprehensive enrollment management solution for not-for-profit public schools.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I got the impression that he seemed to think that education institutions shouldn't be bothered with dealing with for-profit advertising agencies.

This is the follow up letter.

Hello, X,

Thanks for taking the time to answer my call on "black Friday".

As a former NYC public school teacher, I find myself in a peculiar position trying to “market” education for an online lead generation company. I am here because Innovation Ads has recently shifted its focus from lead generation, to enrollment services for colleges.

As an educator, my first instinct was to find a way to serve educational institutions with the technological and human infrastructure that Innovation Ads has developed.

In doing this, I realized it is absolutely fundamental to identify the growing pains that educational institutions moving online have to deal with. It seems to me that most schools have many of the following problems:

A- Technological Resources

1. Do the schools have the IT bandwidth to handle growing numbers of online students?

2. Do students that have tech or computer-related problems contact the school or a technology subcontractor?

3. Do professors have a uniform method of distributing course content?

4. Do students have a uniform method of submitting work?

5. What types of technologies are being employed in order to ensure that students are attending classes (ie. monitoring student attendance by I.P address of machine)?

B- Human Resources

1. Do you have enough professors to handle increasing number of student enrollment?
2. Do you have an adequate HR department that will address the need to hire more professors?

C- Growth Resources

1. Do you have a plan to address the long-term growth that is expected in online education?
2. What type of consultant services exist that address all of the needs I have outlined here?

I am interested in finding out how educational institutions can best use the technological and human resources that Innovation Ads has to offer. Our services include everything from creating online, print and TV advertising materials, to handling the calls that our advertising campaigns stimulate. Each of these services boasts an up-to-the-minute Return On Investment monitoring tool, so our clients always know if the campaign is working. In addition, we bill on a performance basis: the pressure to perform falls on our shoulders, not yours.

Many not-for-profit educational institutions do not want to be associated with advertising agencies, and I can understand why. However, the thing to remember is: when it comes to marketing, we don’t tell educational institutions what to do, we just provide the means-to-an-end. Our goal is to be an “invisible service” We don’t want recognition, we want results.

In closing, is my opinion that public education entities will be able to attain a higher level of efficiency by hiring marketing agencies to address problems that fall outside of the skill-set of educational entities. In this letter I have tried to:

1) Describe the problems that educational institutions may be confronting when moving online.

2) Outline the services Innovation Ads offers

I think there is a way we can work together in order to achieve results.

Warmly,