Increasing visits from

parents, teachers and children

(c) Tony Attwood 2006. Please direct enquiries concerning the right to reprint any
article on this web site to anne@hamilton-house.com

In summary – what this paper says:

One of the most effective ways of increasing visits by parents and children is through emphasising the educational benefits of each visit. Even if the educational benefits are obvious (for example, a visit to a Norman castle, for a child who is studying the Norman period of English history) there is a value in spelling out the educational benefits. Where the benefits are not so obvious (for example, in taking young children to a Thomas the Tank Engine show, or in encouraging teenagers to go on an action adventure course) there are always some educational benefits that can be derived – and these must be spelled out. We can usually find educational benefits in every visit and trip.

Teachers organise many school trips, and teachers are themselves easy to reach through a mailing to relevant schools. Parents however can be harder to reach – but increasingly companies and organisations are writing to parents via schools.

In both cases – selling the virtue of a school trip to the school, and selling the virtue of a parent/child visit to the parent – there are key factors which will influence the success or failure of the promotion. The most important factor is the way the leaflet is written. A small change in the style or choice of words can affect the result dramatically.

If you would like to discuss any matter in this report with the author, please do call us without obligation on 01536 399 000.

a) Reaching teachers

This is in many ways the easiest option – teachers are reached by sending direct mail to schools. It is of course possible to think of other media, but they tend to produce far poorer results for each £ spent. Most organisations wanting to reach teachers use direct mail. The mail goes to individual heads of department (“The Head of History”, “The Head of Sports”), to year heads (“The Head of Year 11”) and the recently designated “School Journeys Co-ordinator” who may be asked to pass information on.

Teachers organise many trips and journeys to events and locations. There are many specific points to note here – from the issue of risk assessment through to the issues of timings and costs, and Hamilton House can advise on how these will affect your promotion. However the most important element in the arrangement of visits for teachers is the educational benefit that will accrue to the students and pupils.

The most obvious educational benefits are the growth in awareness of factual information – as in seeing how a particular piece of machinery works, being inside a historic building, or looking at a range of pieces of art. But educational benefits also accrue from the experience of being in a particular place, group experiences, and the issues of leadership and group activity that can arise from a day out. Making education a multi-sensory experience is important, as is the fact of being with the teacher and other members of the class in totally different circumstances from the normal classroom and playground.

If you would like to discuss any aspect of the way in which teachers arrange school trips, please do call 01536 399 013. I’ll be pleased to answer any questions.

The key factor that determines how good a response rate you get from a direct mail shot to teachers is the text. It is not the case that a good offer will always get a good result – what affects the response rate is how you compose and design the text of your letter and/or leaflet. A small change in words can have a huge impact on the response rate.

To help you gain an insight into what makes a good text in a letter or leaflet Hamilton House operates a free leaflet review service. You can fax your leaflet to us (01536 399 012 – mark it “Tony Attwood, For Review” – and we will then call you back and talk through the leaflet. Often we are able to offer insights into ways of producing the leaflet or letter. We don’t say “you must do this” but rather say “here is an alternative, and this is why we think this is important”. This service is completely without obligation.

Alternatively you might want to come and visit us for a talk through of your approach. Again this is free – you can meet with one of our direct mail team who will explore all aspects of your campaign, including the writing and design of the leaflet. Call 01536 399 000 to make an appointment.

Once you have the text in order you will need to decide how to mail the schools. School mailing lists can be selected by age of pupil, funding of the school, postcode, county, specialism of the school and many other factors. You can buy the mailing list to undertake the mailing yourself, or you can ask a mailing house such as ourselves to do this. As a guide it will cost you around 35p per school – including the postage, packing, label and labour.

b) Promoting to pupils and parents

The operators of locations of all types – from concert halls to outdoor activity centres, from art galleries to football clubs – have been writing to schools for many years. What many have not done is attempt to write to the teachers in order to get the school to encourage parents to take their children on a visit or trip. However this can be done, and can be done very successfully.

Early approaches involved taking a general leaflet (of the type that might be found in other venues for example) and sending say 300 copies to the school with a covering letter asking the school to send it out to parents with their next mailing.

In this approach the venue pays for the production of the leaflet and on occasion offers to pay the school something for providing the service. The parent receiving the leaflet is given no extra information – there is no reason given to the parent as to why the school is providing this leaflet – and indeed nothing (other than the fact that the child brings the leaflet home) shows that the school is in any way involved.

Many schools reject this approach because there is no attempt to link the product to any educational values – and of course because there is nothing in it for them.

The second approach retains much of the first approach, but adds a letter from the venue saying to the school that for every ticket purchase made by a parent the school would get a modest sum – perhaps 50p. The attraction to the school is that there is no money-gathering to be done, since the sales themselves come straight from the supplier. But the school has no idea what it will get – and if sales are small, they will get very little.

Mostly the schools are left to write their own letter to parents encouraging them to buy the product and thus provide money for the school – and few schools are willing to go to this length. The main problem is, however, that unless the percentage payable to the school is fairly substantial, the school would be better off simply writing to the parent and asking for 50p. The reality is that in one school even if 100 parents buy tickets the income to the school will be £50 and this is really nothing to get excited about – certainly not enough to warrant writing the letter.

The improved way of encouraging parents to bring children.

Because traditional approaches had problems, Hamilton House developed an alternative approach. In essence it works like this:

You write to the schools and give the educational benefits of the venue or journey that you are promoting. The letter says to the schools that if the school will forward a second, enclosed letter to parents, you will give the school something of value to them. This “something” could be free educational resources based around the venue, or it could be free tickets that the teacher could use with his/her own children, or could give to others.

No proof is required that the school has actually sent the letter out, and no sales are needed to verify that the school has done its job. Simply if the school says it has done it, the school gets the freebies. We have no evidence that schools cheat and take their free offers without sending out the letters. It might happen, but the chances of this happening are small. If you are offering something that is educationally beneficial then the school wants you to communicate with parents, and so will help.

Educational resources in this context can be very modest. A historical venue could give 10 sheets of copiable materials (i.e. black and white A4 pages) which the school can photocopy and give to the pupils when dealing with a particular topic covered in the National Curriculum. The cost of production of such materials is very modest.

“But we are not educational”

We are often told that the venue or event being promoted is not in essence educational – it is fun. And yet it is rare indeed that we cannot translate a visit into something educational.

We have been asked to produce educational benefits for a visit to a theme park, an outdoor action adventure centre, a football ground, a railway engine show for young children and many more – including of course the more conventional museums, theatres and galleries, and it has not been a problem. We do not invent unlikely, unbelievable educational benefits, but seek out the genuine benefits that children get from such visits.

Before you think “this won’t work for us” please do give us a call and let us try to come up with an educational twist. Such an enquiry will cost you nothing – just call 01536 399 000 and ask for the Response Rates Team.

The effect of the second letter

When we undertake a project of this type for a client we ask the school to send the letter (that we provide) to parents, on the school’s headed paper. This has two important effects. Firstly it looks as if the school is endorsing the visit (even if the letter says it is not). Secondly it cuts the marketing cost dramatically since the advertiser’s postage and print costs are slashed. There is no case of sending out 200 leaflets to each school – in this third method the school is sent just a letter explaining the promotion, and a letter that the school should copy and send to parents. Indeed if you mail 1000 schools you can end up reaching 3000 parents.

Although it is once again the text of the letters that dictates whether the mailing is a success, there are some other extras that can help. One interesting addition is to make the letter to the parents available digitally, either by download from a site, or by sending in an email and asking for a copy. This means that schools can amend the letter and can get it to fit exactly on their headed paper. Another is that we can act as an information centre for parental phone calls and emails, if the location being visited is not geared up to daytime calls.

Once the school emails us to say that the mailing to parents has gone out – and tells us how many parents have been reached – the school gets its free items.

The results

In a solo mailing it is not unusual to get about 2% of schools taking up the offer. (Of course you might get much more, but it is important to recognise that no response rates are guaranteed.) This is not very exciting, until you start to work out what happens next….

When we have tried this with primary schools we have then found that the average school sends out the letters to around 150 parents. (The number could be higher, but our work is often related to issues of relevance to a certain age group of children and thus are not relevant to the whole school).

So assuming we mailed 1,000 schools, we might expect about 20 schools to reply. This can result in a letter reaching 3000 parents, for the cost of a promotion to 1,000 schools.

This is starting to sound good. But when one then looks at the sales that result, the figures can be remarkable. In one test we found that around 25% of the parents mailed by the school actually took up the offer that was in the letter – an astonishing result. We don’t promise this sort of take up at all – but we do say that this is an approach that is worth trying.

The “Worried Parent” Syndrome and pester power

There are many factors that can be brought to bear when writing to parents.

Parents want their children to get good grades. Tell the parents that the visit helps, and visitor numbers go up. Pester power is a big factor. If the children see their friends going to the venue, and it is attractive to them, they will want to make the visit too. Incorporate as many of these factors in the letter as possible and the sales will increase.

Hamilton House can help with all aspects of your promotion to parents. In addition to our free advice service we offer these paid-for services:

Writing of letters to schools and parents

Identifying schools and supplying lists of relevant schools

Provision of mailing services – supply and filling of envelopes, and mailing out

Operation of promotional campaign, operation of email response services, phone services etc.

Please call 01536 399 000 if you would like more information.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd

(c) Tony Attwood 2006. Please direct enquiries concerning the right to reprint any
article on this web site to anne@hamilton-house.com