About

When it comes to information-gathering and analysis in our emerging industry many organizations have been forced to “do without,” “make do,” or "do-it-yourself.” This is particularly true of the challenge of finding ready, willing and able buyers of school improvement products and services.

Researchers and policy advocates make an effort to collect and assess information on the forces shaping the school improvement market more than one step removed from sales. But, not much of their information or analysis is circulated widely or regularly; it is written for an academic or political audience; and only it addresses k-12 business and operations issues tangentially.

The traditional k-12 education media are locked into a pre-NCLB editorial view - which barely recognizes and looks askance at private sector involvement in the teaching and learning activities of public education.

K-12 trade publications tend to be oriented towards information of interest only to the buyers of the products and services they carry as advertising.

Government regulators lack significant capacity and experience in the emerging role of business in improving k-12 teaching and learning. They rely a great deal on the above sources themselves.

The state of information in our industry is like no other American market the private sector works in today. However, the process of gathering and making sense of information is becoming easier to do yourself over the internet.

Still, assess the true cost to "do it yourself."

EXAMPLE: School Improvement Markets Report. To get a sense, consider only the cost of duplicating School Improvement Markets Report, our weekly review of federal, state, district and international RFPs for school improvement grants and contracts.

Leave out of your calculations the fact that this work must start no earlier than Friday afternoon to be sure that the Monday publication has not missed any RFP. Also leave out the all too "real world" of headquarters’ operations in most organizations, where events will conspire against a regular on-time in-house publication that marketing and sales staff can rely on Monday morning.

Start by considering the cost of building the initial list of relevant web sites. Something comparable to School Improvement Markets Report would take at least three-man months to build. Done in-house with staff in the range of a $60,000 annual "fully loaded" cost (salary, benefits, taxes, overhead) to the organization, the start up cost would be some $20,000.

Given this database of RFP-issuing agencies and direct links to school-level performance, accountability and finance data, reproducing School Improvement Markets Report requires someone to review each of our 450 websites with an eye towards the programs and services of interest to your organization. Our experience is that this basic work averages about 2 minutes per site for an experienced reviewer, and a review of the hundreds of sites in our database takes about 16 hours each week.

If this information is also going to be distributed to others in the organization, another 2 hours are required to check hotlinks and otherwise create a useable document so the information can be shared. To maintain the research capacity, add another 2 hours per week to update the list of existing websites, manage glitches in the system, respond to staff questions, and research and add new websites to the list.

At a fully-loaded cost of $60,000 per year, a staff member's time is worth roughly $29.00 per hour. The cost of a do-it-yourself P12 Markets Report is $580.00 per week – some $30,000 per year – plus the $20,000 investment required to create the initial list of websites.

A School Improvement Markets Report site license is $1200 per year, about $25.00 a week, and, leaving aside the initial cost of creating the list to monitor, under 5% of the weekly production cost in-house.

Finally, consider the "opportunity costs" of doing it yourself.

The 20 hours spent doing what School Improvement Markets Report can do is time not spent by staff on activities that can and should only be done in-house - like responding to RFPs, directing marketing and sales operations, developing marketing and sales strategy, and closing deals.

Worse still are the costs of sending sales representatives to locations where demand is speculative, while RFPs that your organization is well-positioned to win are simply unknown. Just one such sale justifies the cost of School Improvement Markets Report many times over.

And without School Improvement Markets Report, if you have a question or problem related to your RFP research, consider the lost opportunity to ask help from people who do this for a living.

School Improvement Markets Report offers a clear example of how to value our web-enabled publications. The weekly price of a site license to our flagship publication, School Improvement Industry Weekly, is comparable. And if purchased as a Combined Site License, the additional cost of SII Weekly is under $2.00 a week - not per person, but in total for your entire staff.

The answer is clear - buy, don’t make.

What about buying somewhere else?

Make or Buy?