Building relationships via education - is it worth it and can you measure it?
publication date: Nov 1, 2006
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author/source: Martin Finn
The last five years has witnessed a huge growth in the number of organisations looking to build relationships with the education sector. As the level of activity increases, so does the diversity of the activity undertaken and indeed the reasons for getting involved. As a result of the growing sophistication of the market, there is also increasing debate and discussion about the return on investment that can be expected from creating a sustainable, mutually-beneficial relationship with education. What is the nature of that return and how do you maximise it?
Traditionally, organisations have become involved in education for three reasons: to educate young people around issues/build their skills (for example charity campaigns or government initiatives); to feed directly into their business (for example recruitment or educational sales); or to build relationships that enhance long-term brand equity (for example through CSR campaigns).
Measurement of success needs to take account of these very different objectives and provide appropriate measures. Most people agree that there are returns both to the business and education/society, although the relative weight of these may vary by project. To-date, most measurement of success has focused around two areas:- the impact on young people or the direct sales effect (where appropriate). However, whilst both of these measures are clearly valid, neither of them addresses what is the most commonly cited benefit of involvement in education - improved corporate reputation. The question is, how does involvement in education affect corporate reputation to maximum effect and how do you measure it?
In order to answer this, EdComs has been looking at how reputation is created and enhanced by working in education. By understanding the process of reputation gain, we can design smarter measures to quantify it and pinpoint opportunities to build on it.
At the heart of our proposition is the idea of advocacy. Working though education enables you to build meaningful relationships with stakeholders that go beyond satisfaction and create active ambassadors for brands and products. This is at its most important in three areas.
Firstly, and perhaps the area where there is most compelling evidence, is the idea of employee advocacy. Supporting education that involves or engages employees improves their view of their employer. This leads to greater job satisfaction, higher retention rates and, critically, greater productivity and customer engagement: if your employees are advocates for your company, they work harder and have better relationships with your customers.
Secondly is the idea of customer advocacy. Finding appropriate and meaningful ways to support education enables companies and brands to build relationships with customers on a different level – communicating with them beyond the product and sales experience. There is clear evidence that brands that take advantage of this opportunity to build broader, deeper relationships create customer advocates and this has a measurable impact on increased loyalty and the recruitment of other customers.
Finally, working in education offers a direct route to opinion leaders. If we can understand the emotional and professional drivers of key influences and tap into these, they become vital advocates for the company with far reaching effects.
Understanding this hierarchy of influence – from employees to customers to opinion leaders – will enable organisations to develop engagement programmes that feed into business growth in a more direct and measurable way than has previously been the case. And through identifying and measuring the outcomes, we can build even more powerful and sustainable programmes that bring benefits to the participants and to the bottom line.