4 Strategies to Involve Your Community in EdTech Purchases

At first thought, you might think that the broader community isn’t the end user or decision-maker for your EdTech purchase and because of that, you may not prioritize involving them in the purchasing process. However, your community can impact and influence the overall success of your product’s implementation. In this article, I will share four important reasons to involve your community during the purchasing cycle.

1. Understand your audience

As with any new initiative, it is super important to understand your audience's needs and pain points. When implementing a new EdTech tool or program in the school system, the community represents your end users.

When you understand your audience, you can outline comprehensive criteria for the selection process and identify the most important features and benefits to serve those needs.

This also allows you to overcome potential objections early in the buying process. Some EdTech purchases can be polarizing or politicized. When you understand your community, you can speak to those objections when presenting your offering.

Essentially, your community is helping you conduct research during the discovery process of the sale. This enables you to become a better partner to districts, schools, staff, students, and parents.

2. Tailor your message to their core values

When you understand what is important to your community, you can be sure you are speaking to and emphasizing their core values in your messaging. We all know the importance of segmenting and taking the research you’ve conducted and tailoring it accordingly can help strengthen your approach.

Community leaders can help point you in the right direction to the key players and decision-makers in schools and districts. they may know who the innovators are and provide suggestions for targeted outreach. Additionally, you may have conducted buyer persona research, but this in-depth community research can help you be even more targeted with your approach and the related messaging. You may be working with a community that prefers to refer to social-emotional learning (SEL) as character development or a state that aligns with specific state standards rather than the common core. Knowing this can help you speak a similar language and can help you establish yourself early on as an aligned partner.

3. Identify funding opportunities

Sometimes community funding investments can be tapped into to purchase new products. For example, community foundations may have a mission that aligns with your product offering and therefore would consider funding a new purchase for a school or district. Depending on how your product is implemented, funding may be allocated for libraries, after-school programs, or adjacent community programs. As a start-up, when you are growing your customer base and sales team, grant-funded opportunities can be a great way to establish a footprint in a new geographical area.

Sometimes state or local funding opportunities are available for specific initiatives. While federal funds and operating budgets can be competitive because they are known entities, some non-traditional funds like state or local grant opportunities or community foundation dollars can be a great alternative to present if your school or district is interested but trying to determine how to fund an initiative. When you get to know your community, you know the key players who can point you in the right direction toward any potential hidden dollars. And, even more valuably, you can be a resource and partner to schools and districts.

This strategy is becoming increasingly important given the funding cliff we are approaching due to the end of ESSER funds.

4. Generate meaningful buy-in

If your community can understand and identify with the overall need your product implementation serves, they can help shepherd the implementation’s success. Ultimately, community buy-in better supports your product’s successful use when starting any new tool or program.  

The opposite can also be true. If the community does not understand why a new tool is being implemented, your decision-makers can experience significant pushback and can hinder successful launch plans.

During the sales process, it is critically important to surface these questions with key decision-makers. As a valued partner, you can help them think about how they intend to involve the community or share this new initiative during their onboarding process. This can look different depending on the initiative, but it might mean school-to-home support, implementation in after-school programs, or even training parents on this new tool to support their child’s at-home use. You might even suggest sharing success stories or data from the early days of implementation back with community leaders or parents via newsletters.

So, while the broader community isn’t necessarily the end-user or decision-maker for your EdTech purchase, you can easily see how involving your community can impact and influence an EdTech purchase or product implementation. Involving your community in EdTech purchases is becoming increasingly important given the fiscal cliff we are approaching due to the end of ESSER funds.

If you need support building your sales and marketing engine, consider partnering with me to offer fractional support in key areas. Visit my services page to learn more or schedule a consultation.

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