Why Schools Need Market Research

Market Research can be hugely beneficial to schools by measuring parent satisfaction across a number of key areas – identifying strengths, weaknesses and future opportunities. At Rooster, it is proven that our Market Research for schools achieves excellent insights, resulting in a real, positive and immediate impact on schools.

It presents an opportunity to target your marketing budget in areas that will achieve results and achieve maximum return on investment.

Strong parent feedback can go a long way to ensuring continued success across all areas of your school, whilst delighting parents at the same time. By giving the parents a voice, they will feel more confident and involved in their child’s education. Every parent will appreciate the opportunity to contribute. Ultimately, this is an extremely effective way to increase parent satisfaction. We find parents are often receptive and appreciate the positive reasons for conducting research.

With independent school fee levels at an all-time high in relation to real earnings, the need for all your stakeholders to be satisfied with your school has never been greater.

Focusing on satisfaction ratings, prefered areas of investment, as well as general feedback, we can measure the most successful areas of your school, as well as potential areas for improvement or future investment. Market Research also presents a perfect opportunity to capture parent testimonials for brochures, prospectuses, websites, and future marketing campaigns.

Rooster Research Solution

Online surveys and telephone interviews, or a combination of both, are a great way to engage with school parents quickly and efficiently. We have found that parents prefer using these methods and will usually provide longer and more detailed answers.

Our online surveys are powerful research tools to investigate perceptions of parents, pupils, staff and other stakeholders and enable you to:

  • Gain insight into your school’s unique strengths and areas you should seek to improve
  • Understand how your parents really feel about your school, and how you meet their expectations
  • Inform your marketing and refine your message
  • Show your parents you are actively listening and responding
  • Establish a level against which to monitor future progress

Examples of possible questions include; school facility, student enjoyment and quality of communication satisfaction ratings. If any ratings are submitted with a ranking score lower than excellent, we will ask a follow up question asking how this area could be improved. It is also common to investigate potential future areas of investment.

Often parents will share highly important but totally unexpected insights that you may never have considered. If there is a particular area or initiative the school is currently focusing on or has planned for the future, we can ask parents for their opinion. We can assess differences in feedback at various ages, amongst boys and girls, or day / boarding pupils.

It is proven that respondents are more likely to be open and honest when dealing with an outside agency and response rates are dramatically increased when surveys are hosted by a third party. This helps people feel much more comfortable and therefore, they offer candid answers, giving you more valuable results. In turn, we would position our research as coming from Rooster Marketing on behalf of your school.

Our approach will ensure we capture the best possible parent insights for your school. We can follow up parent insights with telephone interviews if appropriate. We always approach our telephone research with professionalism, rigour and sensitivity.

Simple Steps

Rooster will create a list of draft survey questions and share these with you. We do not believe that one-size fits all and will work with you closely to prepare a fully tailored survey questionnaire. We provide template text for all your communications about the survey and manage the complete process for you.

As soon as the questions have been agreed, we will then proceed with the distribution of the live surveys. You would simply supply us with your chosen database of parents.

Survey links will be embedded into emails, specially designed by the Rooster Marketing team, designed to ensure maximum participation rates.

When all the data has been gathered we will prepare the final report. This report will include full results analysis, including our overall insights and recommendations.

Other School Research Services

Focus Groups

We can carry out in depth, open-forum focus groups with key stakeholders. This could include parents, staff, pupils, or alumni. These focus groups can be tailored to cover any areas of interest and are perfect for covering key aspects of your school in more depth than telephone or online surveys allow.

Focus groups are an excellent way to explore important perceptions of your school with key respondents. The informal and face-to-face nature of the groups encourages participants to be open and honest, resulting in comprehensive feedback.

Parents respond very well to school focus groups, understanding that you are listening to their feedback and showing willingness to take part. Meanwhile, the opportunity for staff, pupils and alumni to feedback on their experiences and ideas to an impartial and professional third party is always well received.

Mystery Shopping

Mystery shops present an excellent opportunity for schools to understand how prospective parents’ experiences of visiting them could be enhanced.

We objectively rate each element of your pupil recruitment process, from the first telephone enquiry to the handshake at the end of the school tour and follow up correspondence. We also assess your prospectus and website from the point of view of a prospective parent.

On the tour we assess the guide’s control of the interview and visit; friendliness, relationship building, empathy, personalisation, answering concerns, selling the school’s features, articulation of its benefits, enthusiasm and inspirational qualities. Your school will receive an overall score and more importantly, a detailed write-up of the experience and what could be done differently. We can also conduct similar evaluations for your competitors.

Why Use Mystery Shopping?

  • See your school as prospective parents see you
  • Gain insight into what you could improve in order to increase your appeal to parents
  • Recognise staff who perform well; and offer feedback and training for those where improvement is possible

Rooster Market Research adheres to the MRS code of conduct.

Take a look at this case study – we carried out market research for Saint Bede’s School, with immediate, positive results. See what parents think when we asked them What makes a good prospectus?