How Educator Turnover Affects Your Education Program

It’s true — people change jobs all the time for various reasons, and the education market is no different, and in some cases it’s even more extreme than in other industries.

We all remember that one teacher who seemed to teach the same subject in the same grade FOREVER, but those situations are actually quite rare. Now, it’s very common for educators and administrators to change schools, positions, and roles on a regular basis.

According to MDR’s recent report, The Risk of Dirty Data, education has a high turnover rate — 20% — which means the following happens on an annual basis:

• 1 million+ teachers are new to their school
• 800,000+ are no longer at the same school
• 1 million+ change job function
• 2,900 schools open or close

With this turnover happening every year, it’s important to remember that the database you worked so hard to acquire may not be relevant for the next school year. If your data on your potential customers is not accurate, it may affect your ability to market and sell your program or product to schools.

Here are a few key things to remember when it comes to high education turnover rates and how they relate to your data:

• Bad data costs money.

If you’re spending time and resources to reach out to educators who are no longer at the school or are in a different role, not only are you losing money, but you’re losing valuable time too. And we all know that reaching educators at the right time is essential to your success.

• Bad data gives a negative impression.

If you’re sending emails to inactive email addresses or to educators in roles that aren’t appropriate for your message, you’ll get higher bounce and unsubscribe rates, which both negatively affect your sender rating and Internet Protocol (IP) reputation, resulting potentially in your messages no longer making it through spam filters. You may even get blacklisted by the entire school district.

• Bad data creates bad leads.

Say you’re running a contest where the first 50 entrants are eligible for a great prize. You gather all the relevant information from each of the entrants to use as leads later on. As you’re looking through them, you notice that some entrants are English teachers, but you’re selling a science program. If you’re using old or unclean data, there is a good chance of this happening, resulting in a misuse of time and money.

Updating and maintaining your database to ensure it’s clean may seem like a daunting process. But keep in mind that the benefits of doing so greatly outweigh the cons. It’s an investment that requires constant attention and maintenance, but there are many great partners out there willing to help you along the way.

MMS Education can help you set up systems to keep your data healthy, despite the high rate of educator turnover. Call us today at 866–382–6116 or fill out this form to see how MMS Education can help you.