Schools are some of the biggest benefactors to fundraising across the UK, so it’s understandable that as a charity you’d want to look at the optimum methods for encouraging schools, teachers, and pupils to raise money for you.

Having designed and completed hundreds of fundraising campaigns to the education sector we know what will work for you.

That is what this report is all about, helping you to delve into the belly of the beast of marketing to schools, so you can make a huge difference to your fundraising totals.

Insight #1: Who should you contact?

The contacts in schools that you need to target will vary depending on your type of charity and the specific requirements of your fundraising campaign.

We work with over 100 charities, helping with their fundraising in schools projects, so we’ve seen all manner of teacher types contacted for charitable purposes. However, when it comes to general school fundraising contacting all teachers possible is the most powerful means of success.

There are over 450,000 teachers within UK educational establishments of which we have over 400,000 named staff/teachers across 31,000 UK establishments within our Education Database ready to be contacted by email, post, or telephone.

Insight #2: Time your campaign to perfection

The school calendar is chock-a-block with charity awareness days, celebrations and memorials. Schools love using these events to increase their pupils’ awareness of the world around them, and forge closer links with the local community. So, if you’ve got a fun activity or competitions that can help teachers grow their pupils’ awareness of your charity in a fun and engaging way then you’re onto a winner!

Use the power of direct emails to get teachers to request fundraising and resource packs which you can post to them. This will reduce your costs massively by ensuring you are only posting packs (which can be costly to produce) to those schools that want one.

Campus users will also benefit from our Education Insights Calendar to plan their marketing from one place.

We’ve collated all of the events relevant to schools and education businesses in the UK into one super calendar, with 12 separate categories of events. As you become more familiar with each category and the cycle of the (highly predictable) school year, you’ll learn how to drop the kind of targetted communications into teachers’ inboxes that will have them wondering if someone overheard their thoughts.

Insight #3: You have the power to inspire

Most of you are working for your charity because you are passionate about what you do and want to support and educate as many children as you can. Your enthusiasm for your job is infectious.

Remind yourself that you are your charity’s greatest marketing asset. Your love of what you do is going to be what engages teachers, so you (and your face) need to be at the heart of every fundraising campaign.

Make sure your email has the human touch by making it clear that it’s coming from you. Set your email’s ‘from name’ as you, from your charity; use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ or the name of your charity to build a personal connection; and, if it’s practical, include your own work contact details instead of a generic ‘info@...’ email address so teachers know exactly who they can turn to for more information.

The relationship you strike up in your correspondence with teachers is what will make your campaign triumphant. Oh, and a smiley photo of you with a hand-written signature in your email sign off will never do any harm.

Insight #4: Highlight links to the curriculum

You’re offering schools the opportunity to get involved in a fun activity or event, and support a worthy cause in the process... what teacher wouldn’t want to be part of that?

There’s just one final piece of the puzzle missing. You need to show them how the activity is going to benefit their pupils’ education; what parts of the curriculum is it going to help them bring to life?

Keep in mind that not every type of school has to follow the national curriculum (such as Academies, who can set their own curriculum as long as it’s broad and balanced).

But all schools are interested in offering more opportunities to engage with the curriculum outside of the classroom.

If you can offer fun and excitement, and aid learning at the same time, then it’s going to be a no-brainer for most teachers!

Insight #5: Teachers love a video!

Charity and fundraising campaigns get some of the best response rates we see when marketing to schools. That’s often due to the fact that you guys are great at coming up with exciting competitions, dressing up days, and activities, that schools can’t wait to get involved in.

It’s just these types of fun, engaging campaigns that lend themselves to a short video showing teachers and children taking part and having a great time.

We’ve seen email click-through rates increase by up to 96% by including a linked screengrab of your video, while including a video on your landing page can help to increase conversions by up to 86%!

It can also be hard to grab the attention of time-crunched teachers, particularly if your event takes a bit of explaining. But just one minute of video is worth a mind-blowing 1.8 million words in terms of engagement and recall! So instead of wearing out your keyboard crafting a long email, record a super-engaging, super-short video, and pop it in an email with a bullet-point summary. You’ll be asking far less of teachers, yet will get much more out of them.

Insight #6: Utilise social sharing buttons

In our experience, including social sharing buttons on your landing page will improve your average click-through rate from 2.4% to 6.2%. That’s an increase of 158%!

This has the power to be especially potent for you. The chances are that if a teacher loves what you are doing and wants to support it, they are also going to be eager to share it with their friends and colleagues; meaning your message takes on a life of its own.

It’s not often you get something for nothing in this world so make the most of this opportunity!

Insight #7: Nurture your fundraising leads

10 Insights Into Encouraging Schools to Fundraise for Your Charity Many charities utilise a sign-up form on their website where teachers and schools can register for the competition or activity that they are promoting. That’s great, but are you capturing the details of those teachers that express an interest but don’t quite get round to signing up?

At Sprint, we can capture the details of every teacher who shows an interest in your email by either downloading an image or clicking on a link within your email. We call this a Database of Qualified Leads.

Campus users also have the ability to set up their own custom forms to embed onto their landing page. Every time a teacher fills in the form, their details are automatically sent straight into the sales funnel in your account. You can set up an automatic lead generation method that collects data for you 24/7!

This information is going to be invaluable to you; not only allowing you to extend your current campaign, but also giving you the data that will enable you to fire subsequent campaigns to success.

Insight #8: Promote your values on social media

While teachers primarily log on to social media to be entertained and stay in the loop, it’s not all dog memes and family gossip. Over 75% of consumers consult social media channels before buying from a company, and social profiles can often be in the first few search engine results for company names.

There are 800,000 UK teachers active on social media, and while it’s not as effective as email marketing both in terms of cost and results, free marketing platforms aren’t to be sniffed at.

Sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook allow you to quickly upload and share photos, images, and videos that represent your charity’s values and the work you do. You can communicate your activities and precisely what your charity does to teachers in a visually engaging way.

The collaborative nature of social platforms also provides another way for teachers to interact with you. Perhaps post a video of a school taking part in one of your exciting challenges, and encourage teachers to tag their colleagues and dare them to give it a go. You’ll be building organic engagement to support your social media presence, and those tagged teachers may go on to sign up to your latest fundraising event!

Insight #9: Competition is fierce

At Sprint Education, we’ve designed successful strategies for charities of all shapes and sizes; all doing brilliant work and all desperate to reach more teachers and children right across the UK!

So it will come as no surprise to you that charities are one of the top 2 most popular organisation types that contact schools regularly. This means you need to really work hard to stand out from the crowd.

So to do our bit to help charities...

Insight #10: Sprint Education give charities a 10% discount

10 Insights Into Encouraging Schools to Fundraise for Your Charity If you’re a registered charity, Sprint Education will give you a 10% discount on your email campaign to schools and teachers to help maximise your fundraising efforts.

We’ve designed emails for some of the UK’s biggest charities so we know how to get your campaign humming! Give us a call, and we’ll be happy to share our expertise with you and identify the best strategy to aid your fundraising campaigns.

Please remember to quote “CHARITY10%” to receive your discount.

What next?

Get in touch and ask us about what we can do for you!

Our number is 01684 297374, or you can email info@sprint-education.co.uk.

That way, we can talk specifically about your offer and see how we can boost your marketing effort to schools quickly and effectively.

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Education Marketing How to Sell to Schools How to Sell to Teachers Marketing to Education Selling to Schools Selling to Teachers

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