How We Maintain It
Effective list maintenance – the key to profitable response
Each year, Education Direct invests over £200,000 researching and maintaining the Education List. How does this money get spent? Our programme is split into three distinct processes:
Daily Field Updates
Over 400 school and college field sales executives access the Education List on a daily basis. On average, these people visit 300 schools each per annum.
This equates to a massive 120,000 school visits per year. Outcomes from each of these visits are fed directly into the Education List via our Spirit sales management system. This unique source of data feeds upwards of 400,000 updates and verifications into the Education List each year.
Education Direct provides a number of vital managed services and projects for education suppliers. These include sales order processing, help desk provision and call centre services. Every year we make and receive literally hundreds of thousands calls from schools and colleges on behalf of our clients. Each of these calls provides us with important information that allows us verify our core database.
Continual Proactive Research
We add on average 750,000 pieces of information to the Education List each year. The sources of this data include government publications (e.g. school league table results), paper questionnaires and telephone research. Our proactive research programme is continuously reviewed on the basis of feedback from our customers; our research team analyses the database weekly to identify and fix data weaknesses.
Annual Data Cleansing
Once a year we telephone all schools on the Education List to verify that our staff details are up to date. During this process we seek to determine whether the members of staff on our list still work at the school. We don’t, however, ask for details of replacements during the review process as our research has shown that this reduces the likelihood of school secretaries allowing us to verify the entire list. This policy is constantly under review, but at present we are convinced this is the most effective approach. We believe that ‘no data is better than bad data’