Dr Craig Kissock is the Director of EducatorsAbroad
Since 1978, a global network of professional educators at EducatorsAbroad have provided professional development for pre and in-service educators in over 1,650 national and international English medium schools in 95 countries.
Why international schools matter to EducatorsAbroad
The foundation of EducatorsAbroad goes back to the mid 1960s with the start of the Student Teaching Abroad program in the USA, whose director developed a network of American and British international schools through which to arrange school placements.
EducatorsAbroad colleagues have built on this network which continues to be the core market for all of our programmes, that now includes any school that offers instruction in English as outlined in our company vision and mission.
Data and intelligence to understand audience needs
When we began, there was an annual booklet listing international schools in the then ECIS network. With changes in technology and the advent of ISC Research, we now have access to nearly all schools we could imagine working with, allowing us to serve teachers in all corners of the world – which we have done and continue to do.
ISC Research reports, where focused on provision of services, provide a way to verify, correct and expand on perspectives from our experience on the nature of our market, for example the concerns of teachers and school leaders and the characteristics of the students they serve.
This information, coupled with knowledge of dynamics of education and teacher education in the UK and USA, continually informs our decision making including the services we might provide and target audiences and geographic locations to focus on.
A personalised outreach strategy
Creating email marketing campaigns targeted to our different audiences is the primary ISC Outreach tool that has made possible our work with educators on all continents. We know that some recipients become participants through these campaigns, but more importantly they often tell others about EducatorsAbroad services who then participate.
Clearly there is a treasure trove of information about potential contacts in the ISC Research database. The feature we find most useful in the ISC Outreach data portal is the ability to download data and refine it in Excel. For example, removing duplicate addresses prior to sending messages to a broad audience.
We are developing our own system that links ISC Research data with leads from each email campaign and the EducatorsAbroad database to more accurately follow up with individuals who may become – or already are – customers.
The ISC Outreach map data is a wonderful addition. We have used it in national and international conference presentations, are starting to use it to arrange travel for on-site visits to participants and will use it to arrange visits to nearby schools that might become involved.
