Is the Education Market one of your target markets?  If you are planning on selling marketing solutions to the Education Market then you need to have a good understanding of the key challenges for this market.  At Caslon we analyzed the PODi case studies in the Education vertical to identify the leading challenges and winning solutions.  Below is an excerpt from the Caslon white paper: Fundraising Solutions for the Education Market.

There are 5 key marketing challenges in the Education market:

Let's take a closer look at the issue of fundraising and how it can be tackled with solutions that involve digital printing. Universities today are facing three major fundraising challenges:

One of the key concerns for any institution, whether it is a private K-12 school or a university, is increasing the number of alumni who are actively making donations. According to Target Analytics during the past decade there has been a decline in the alumni participation rate. Public institutions dropped from 9% to to 8% overall participation and privates were down from 24% to 20% (2009 compared to 2010).

Alumni participation is a special problem among younger graduates, according to Target Analytics. "Younger graduates increasingly view their education as a financial transaction, not a transformational experience as their parents and grandparents did. This trend poses a significant threat to higher education annual giving programs."

Ideas that Work: Engage alumni to build a relationship

In reviewing successful campaigns in PODi's database, it is clear that one of the keys to improving alumni participation in fundraising campaigns is to first build a strong connection – even before asking for any monetary donations.

This is exactly what Rosemont College did when they sought to grow their relationship with young alumni. The college felt it was important to establish a connection to this group now, with the hope of encouraging them to become supporting donors in the future.

Rosemont hired Pacesetter Enterprises Inc (Allentown PA) and Digital Innovations Group (Richmond VA) to develop a multi-phase, cross-media campaign. The first phase focused on reconnecting with the alumni in order to cleanse the existing database and add new email addresses and profile information in preparation for future communication initiatives. An email and a direct mail piece were sent simultaneously, encouraging recipients to visit their personalized landing page and share with Rosemont what they had been doing since graduation. The communications were personalized with the recipient's: