Outside-Inside Marketing - maximizing community involvement

School Administrator, August, 2001 by Susan Rovezzi Carroll, David Carroll

Addressing public perceptions using surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews

While many public schools are attempting to develop relationships with their communities, they tend to practice what is termed "inside-outside" marketing. This means the school district has prepared brochures, videotapes, newsletters, logos and Web sites to present what school leaders think the community either needs or wants to know.

Unfortunately, these items are created inside the schoolhouse without community input. More important, program and budget decisions that have great consequences for the community are often made in the isolation of the board room. Decision making remains an insular process, occasionally interrupted by poorly attended public hearings. Although decisions are well intended with the goal of developing relationships with the community, the approach is school-driven, not community-driven. It fails to place the outside community into the marketing equation.

Public schools need to begin to practice "outside-inside" marketing where strategic planning and then action comes from the marketplace--in this case the community--to the school. According to long-time marketing expert Philip Kotler, who coined the phrase, schools need to systematically study customers needs, wants, perceptions, preferences and satisfaction using marketing techniques such as surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviewing. Using such strategies builds long-lasting, meaningful relationships with the community and fosters a loyalty to the public school. Relationship building is the key to getting and keeping community support and to do this, public schools must start "outside" with their communities.

Three distinctive methods can bring the community inside the schoolhouse door. Surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews allow schools to listen intently to the community. However, the particular method should be considered secondary to what schools need to find out. In other words, the information needs must be specified first through brainstorming in strategic planning sessions. Then, the method that most appropriately, expeditiously and cost effectively meets those information needs can be matched to it.

Survey Research

The survey, an excellent market research method, depends on a questionnaire for data collection. Schools can use an already existing tool or custom design one to cover specific information. Either way it should clearly reflect the information needs developed in strategic planning sessions.

Survey research has several advantages. First, it is a highly quantitative method. Although there may be some open-ended (write-in) questions, most survey research generates numbers as responses. These data can be statistically computed and analyzed. Because results are numeric, they can stand up to public scrutiny and can present a reliable and valid picture of what stakeholders like and dislike about your school or district or what they value and expect.

Also, the data serve as a baseline for benchmarking. You might want to track community satisfaction with your school this year and compare it to last year and to the next year. A note of caution is in order. If internal or external expertise is available, use it. It might save you the embarrassment of making a statistical error or a research blunder at a school board meeting with the news media present.

When carried out by mail, surveys afford stakeholders the opportunity to respond at their convenience and in private. These surveys can be conducted with a host of community segments such as new parents, government officials, business groups, real estate agents and others.

One important segment to listen to are senior citizens, soon to be composed of well-educated Baby Boomers. As the latter group ages, most will not have children in your schools. Their priorities will be saving for retirement and repaying the college loans of their kids. Yet they will have time to vote on your budgets. Read their minds.

A particularly affluent Connecticut town with repeated budget rejections thought it would be wise to do exactly that.

The School Support Survey, which our organization conducted, asked seniors to give the school system a grade (from A to F) on 50 different items. Although most issued grades of B, pockets of discontent emerged in two areas: fiscal management and sharing of school facilities with seniors. Administrators expected the budgetary process to be misunderstood, but the sharing of the school facilities had not surfaced previously as important enough to discuss-a case of inside-outside marketing.

To remedy the problem, the business manager personally delivered several presentations to the senior center to explain the budget process, answer questions and showcase ways that the school saved taxpayers' money. School facilities were opened so the community could use the district's athletic facilities and check out books at the library. Seniors were invited to school concerts and encouraged to help in the classrooms. Tracking with the annually administered School Support Survey showed higher grades the following years among senior citizens.