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Super Specific Segmentation: enhancing teacher-student-parent communication
Presented By María Karen Norton
Session Details
How do you manage communications between YL students, their parents and their teachers? At British Council Porto we took the near-abandoned YL Student Guide and jazzed it up for 0809, customizing it to appeal to different groups of learners and teachers, creating a buzz around this resource. Come get some practical ideas on how to obtain buy-in from key stakeholders.
About María Karen Norton
Good teacher-student-parent communication is key to Young Learner (YL) success in the classroom. To test this hypothesis I surveyed a range of stakeholders' opinions about a communication tool common to numerous British Council Teaching Centres - the sometimes-named YL Student Guide.
Recent British Council global Customer Service Excellence training reminded us of key questions: "what are we doing to improve services? Are these improvements going to be appreciated by customers?" (White et al, 1998:215). To respond to these concerns, I found out what stakeholders really wanted from the YL Student Guide. The aim was to provide a more useful (and used!) communication tool, and thus, an enhanced service - an Extra Value-based Proposal (EVP - Gilligan & Wilson 2003) apparently unavailable amongst our competitors, in Portugal at least.
In this talk I shall reveal how the quantitative and qualitative data obtained from YL students, their parents and their teachers at Teaching Centres in Porto and Coimbra was used to inform an overhaul of our Student Guides for 0809. I will demonstrate the modifications made to include more customized content - often provided by a range of tailored inserts - which responded to the call for better segmentation. Other considerations included incorporating green agenda and diversity issues, as per British Council strategy.
The practical aspects of how this innovative tool was rolled out will be detailed, including teacher induction and other ways of courting buy-in; feedback on uptake over the school year will also be shared, along with future plans for an IT version.
Support Material
Dear Maria, I really
Dear Maria,
I really enjoyed your presentation and I believe it was a very good idea to improve the use of a resource already in use but not efficiently enough. Your segmentation according to your research to more homogeneous group seems to have worked very well and congratulations on your future plans of an IT version!
It is important to mention that in your case you have the advantage of 75 years of presence in the market and as we mentioned in our ELT Management Forum, this 'advertisement' helps with the recognition of the brand as well as the perception of a value added service (EVP).
Once again, congratulations!
Carla
Dear Carla, I'm glad my
Dear Carla,
I'm glad my presentation was of interest to you - I enjoyed delvering it at IATEFL and I'm so pleased that my work has reached you. I'd like to know where you work, out of interest. Can you tell me about your work context?
You know, I'll be starting up the whole process of obtaining stakeholder feedback once I get back to the office next week to feed into an even more improved student notebook for 2009-2010. I can keep you updated if you're interested.
Take care, Maria