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WHY BUY?
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What About the Competition?
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Why not consider our competition? Every potential buyer presents every seller with at least three competitors – “doing without,” “doing it yourself,” and “making do” with something else. "Doing without" and "doing it yourself" are discussed elswhere on this website, but even if a firm has no direct competition for their product or service, buyers generally can get all or most of what they want by working with other providers. School Improvement Industry publications are no different. Potential clients can do something else with a mix of substitute products and services. EXAMPLE: School Improvement Markets Report. Those interested in government grant and contract RFPs can purchase a subscription to an online services, and in many cases be notified when RFPs in pre-designated categories are posted. Like much of the school improvement industry, the business of referring RFPs is highly fragmented. There are several online services of varying size, seach with its’ own unique list of government agencies, doing business many names including: Onvia/Demandstar, bid.com, govbids.com, BidNet, AMS Vendor, Novus Vendor, eProcurement, eBidboard, Web BidPro, eRFPSchoolWatch, and QED, among others. For these commercial organizations, the money in tracking RFPs is made referring bids to firms supplying commodities and in construction. Consequently, these services can rely on software to identify bid information and refer bids to online customers. RFPs connected to teaching and learning are a very small side show. Each service must be subscribed to separately. Their information is intermittent and you must pull it together for prioritization and sharing. Even as a group, the online providers miss the majority of federal and state agencies and school districts that do not list their school improvement RFPs with any commercial service. Your own review of the education agency sites we cover will confirm that a small minority list their RFPs commercially. In addition, the online services do not cover the federal and state grants that are available 1) to schools to pay for school improvement products and services and 2) increasingly to both for-profit and nonprofit school improvement services directly or as written into a school or district application. These funds can be an important source of revenue for sales and, for the creative provider - research, product development and the ever-more important matter of scientifically-based evaluation. Comparison shopping will also reveal that the online services tend to be vague about the specific eduation agencies coverage and the price they will charge you. That's been enough to convice many of our clients. See some of our clients. We specialize in RFPs for school improvement products and services - activities directly relevant to teaching and learning activities. We also value transparency in the market. To support comparison shopping, we list our prices and the education agencies we monitor. We offer a sample issue. . Every education agency that lists its RFPs through an online service also lists on their own public website. What School Improvement Markets Report offers is the school improvement RFP information provided by each online service - plus the overwhelming number of education agencies that list with no service. Today, School Improvement Markets Report covers 450-plus federal, international, state and district agency offices listing grant and contract RFPs - and we try hard to add new agencies weekly. School Improvement Markets Report also provides direct access to performance, accountabiliuty and finicial data at the school level. Our list of federal and state offices covers all of the agencies with direct responsibility for public educaton and a growing number in related fields. The districts we cover educate over one-third of America's public school students. School districts are listed by size to aid in prioritization. Starting Friday afternoon, an expert - not a computer program - reviews each agency website for relevant RFPs. School Improvement Markets Report provides these leads in a well-formatted hot-linked report, delivered by Monday morning to support informed management decisions about the week's marketing plans, and ready for redistribution to staff. Its the basis for an organized and strategic allocation of a firms precious marketing resources. P12 Markets Report is less expensive than most services and at $900.00 for a Site License, certainly less than all combined. And it covers more of the school improvement market. Our Other Publications. The story for School Improvement Industry Weekly is similar. Readers can comb Education Week, The New York Times, District Administrator, eSchool News, The Education Gadfly, Teachers College Record, newsletters on k-12 publishing, Title I and IDEA, and the hundred of other news sources we monitor. See our Table of Contents with sources. Some report the news from their own particular viewpoint and for their own corner of the market. Some link their members to stories tailored to that affinity group. Some pull the news from other sources together and mix it with their own unique perspective. Many are free or relatively inexpensive; online services like Google offer free or cheap means of collecting relevant articles from these publications and many more; the trade newsletters run a few hundred dollars each, most of the publications are priced by individual subscriptions. As far as we know, there is no service actively combing school improvement market websites, especially provider websites, but there are several press release distributors and many k-12 education publications track and list their advertisers. Each of the publications gives you a bit of the news with their own spin, they are not focused on the operation of an emerging market, the gems of value to the school improvement industry are often well-hidden, and many do not link you to the source of their insight. This mass of media is our competition. What School Improvement Industry Weekly offers is a review of the hundreds of relevant publications and websites doing important work, with the key points excerpted for our clients and linked to their source. The Weekly also reviews thousands of relevant sites readers don’t have time to visit. We sift, distill, cut and paste a chaotic pile of news into a format that gives clients a sense of how the parts fit into the big picture. Clients can skim, go straight to the Section covering that part of the market they focus on, or use the hotlinks to “get that report." We leave the spin for our editorial - focused squarely on our industry's challenges. Someday, there is bound to be an item some client might have read in one of their old publications that School Improvement Industry Weekly will miss. On the other hand, we guarantee that there will be hundreds of items of importance that clients would missed if they stayed with their old approach to information gathering. And frequent travelers will be satisfied with a news service that reaches them on schedule wherever they have access to email. The price of a Site License to School Improvement Industry Weekly is comparable in price to one for the specialized trade media services, and certainly less than all combined oir a clipping service. It is also comparable to the cost of providing individual subscriptions to any one of the publications to each member of your staff. And if purchased as Combined Site License for your entire firm along with P12 Markets Report, the incremental cost of $100.00 total for School Improvement Industry Weekly is very hard price to beat. In short, we provide the information you should be reading. If you only have time to read one publication for your job, you should be reading a School Improvement Industry publication. If you can only budget one report for your organization, it should be School Improvement Industry Weekly as part of a Combined Package with School Improvement Markets Report. School Improvement Industry faces competition and substitutes, but if you purchase any of our services and find a better value later, we'll refund your fee. Period. Ask our competitors to match this promise. |
