Now that the majority of independent school registrars have made their offers for positions in September 2010, and have a good idea of the numbers of pupils likely to enrol this year, there is an excellent opportunity to carry out school research of parents who decided to go elsewhere.
Alongside our parental surveys, non-buyer interviews (also known as decliner interviews) are one of the most popular forms of research for schools that mtmconsulting carries out. Using our expert, dedicated in-house research team we carry out qualitative, in-depth telephone interviews with parents or families who either visited your school or requested a prospectus, but never went on to arrive.
mtm’s non-buyer interviews provide independent school marketing teams with a fantastic understanding of the reasons parents decide to go elsewhere, how their school’s marketing and admissions process might be enhanced, and the strengths and weaknesses of competitor schools that parents may have visited.
Typical areas explored include:
- How parents first heard about your school, often through school PR, word-of-mouth or school advertising
- What other schools parents visited
- Parents’ perceptions of your school’s website and prospectus
- What experience parents had of visiting your school and meeting pupils and staff
- The reasons parents decided not to enroll
- Perceptions of your school against your competitors.
Starting with a list of families that requested a prospectus or visited your school, but did not go on to arrive, our non-buyer interviews follow this process:
- mtm provides our client school with a letter to send to all non-buying families, offering them the chance to opt-out of being contacted
- mtm designs, alongside our client school, a loose questionnaire to structure telephone interviews around
- Foll0wing a two-week opt-out period, mtm’s expert, dedicated in-house educational research team begins to contact participants via telephone
- Telephone interviews are often carried out in the late afternoon or early evening to achieve a greater level of success
- Participating parents are assured that their feedback will not be attributed directly to them when we feed back to the school
- Once telephone interviews are completed, mtm produces a full report with our observations and findings, and supported by stats, charts, tables and verbatim quotes where appropriate
mtm’s Schools Consultant, Joe Faulkner, said “we often get a lot of schools requesting non-buyer interviews at this time of year. It is a very good opportunity to understand why parents have not registered at a school. The spring or early summer term is an excellent time to undertake this when the experience of visiting schools or colleges is still fresh in parents’ minds.”
“No other schools consultancy has an in-house, dedicated research team with the experience of carrying out this work that mtm does. Furthermore, we are confident that our independent schools research offers the best value for money available.”
For details of costs and how non-buyer interviews may help your school, please get in touch with mtm here.
