For years, one of our jobs at the start of the summer holidays was to create our education calendar for the school year ahead. We’d pull together lists of schol holidays, important education dates, exams, and other useful things education suppliers might want on their radar, then design the calendar as a desktop background you could save to your computer.

(Sometimes we’d lay the calendar over a photo of one of the office dogs. We can’t claim that the dog improved anybody’s marketing to schools, but they certainly improved the desktop background.)

And our clients really liked those calendars. They were simple, useful, and gave you somewhere to glance when you were wondering what was coming up in schools over the next few weeks.

Over time, though, we kept finding more things we wanted the calendar to do. A desktop background can only show you so many dates before it gets too cluttered, and there wasn’t the space to explain why that date might matter to your marketing, or what schools are likely to be dealing with at the time.

So, for the new school year, our education calendar has grown up a bit…

The all-new interactive online calendar

We’re very excited to introduce our new interactive education calendar, an online tool you can access wherever you’re working, whether that’s on your laptop, your phone, a colleague’s computer, or in the middle of a planning meeting when you need to quickly check what schools have coming up.

You can move through the school year, search for particular events, filter by category, region, engagement level, and term dates, and click into individual dates to see more information about what’s happening and why it might matter to your marketing.

You can also save the dates that are useful to you, add your own notes, check local authority term dates, and sync key dates with your own calendar. It gives you far more flexibility to explore the school year properly, focus on the dates that matter to your audience, and use the calendar as part of your actual planning rather than simply checking dates as they come up.

It’s still the education calendar you’ve loved for years - just with far more depth, flexibility, and usefulness built into it.

See what each date means for your marketing

This is probably our favourite part, because when you click on an event you’ll get more than its name and date. The calendar gives you context around what’s happening, why it could matter to your marketing, the likely level of engagement in schools, a recommended action, the type of campaign that might suit the period, its marketing importance, and the audience affected.

Budget announcements are a good example. School leaders may be waiting to see what’s been said about funding, pay, capital spending, or wider education policy, and there can be a short period where attention is firmly on understanding what the announcement means for their school. Knowing that helps you judge whether to press ahead with a campaign, adjust the timing, or simply give things a few days to settle.

That extra context helps with the finer decisions around campaign timing. You can see when schools are likely to be especially busy, distracted, cautious, or focused on something else, and factor that into your plans without having to research every date separately.

Save the dates that matter to you

You’re unlikely to need to know every single date in the education year in detail, unless you have an extraordinarily complicated marketing plan and a very large supply of coffee.

You can save the dates that are important to your business and keep them together in your saved events, so they’re easy to come back to when you’re planning campaigns.

It means the calendar can gradually become your education calendar. A school workshop provider, an EdTech business, a furniture supplier, and somebody selling CPD could all start with the same calendar and save completely different dates, because what matters will depend on what you sell and who you sell it to.

Explore term dates right down to local authority level

This is a key upgrade from the old desktop calendar. We only had room to show the main school holidays for England, Wales, and Scotland, so you got a useful overview, but not the local differences that can really matter when you’re planning marketing activities.

Now you can filter term dates by region, look at individual local authorities, or focus on a specific holiday such as the spring half term. You can also choose how much of the country you want to see in your calendar, from one local authority or region right through to the wider UK view.

If you’re marketing to schools across different areas, that makes it much easier to see when schools are actually in, when they’re off, and where those dates don’t line up. It’s a much more useful level of detail than we could ever fit onto the old desktop version.

Sync the dates straight into your own calendar

You can also sync the education calendar with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook, so the dates you care about sit alongside everything else you’re already planning.

You can choose to sync the whole calendar, particular categories, or just the events you’ve saved, depending on how much you actually want appearing in your diary. And because it stays connected, any new events we add or changes we make will update in your own calendar within 24 hours.

It means you don’t have to keep remembering to come back and check what’s changed. Once you’ve set it up the way you want it, the useful dates are already there when you’re planning campaigns, booking meetings, or looking ahead at the next few weeks.

Start planning with the new education calendar

The new education calendar is free to use and gives you one place to see what’s coming up across the school year, understand how different dates could affect engagement, check term dates by area, save the events that matter to you, and sync them straight into your own calendar.

You can sign up to access the calendar 100% free here: access the all-new education marketing calendar

There’s also more help there if you want it. You’ll find free resources on getting better results from your marketing to schools, guidance on buying education data, and information about the managed marketing services we offer at Sprint.

And if you’d rather talk something through with a person, you can book a consultation with one of the team too and get some practical advice on how to improve your marketing to schools.

Tags
Marketing Marketing Strategy Schools Marketing Sprint Education

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