How Do You Reach The Right Decision-Makers in Schools?

How to reach the right decision-makers in schools with targeted data, role-based messaging, and smarter campaigns.

Author

Kat Ricketts

Published: 1^st May 2026

Reaching the right person in a school can feel harder than it should. You know your product fits, you can point to schools already dealing with the problem, and yet the emails either don’t land with the right person or don’t go anywhere once they do.

A behaviour platform might get opened by a classroom teacher who recognises the issue straight away, although they are not the one setting behaviour policy. A budgeting tool might land with a head of department who is already under pressure to manage spend, although the decision sits with the business manager. A safeguarding system might be seen by admin staff logging incidents, while the responsibility for choosing a platform sits with senior leadership.

None of those are wrong contacts in isolation, although they are not always the people who can move things forward. That is usually where campaigns stall, not because the product is irrelevant, but because it has not reached the right combination of roles at the right time.

Reaching decision-makers in schools is less about finding one perfect contact and more about understanding how decisions actually take shape, then making sure your campaign reflects that reality.

Start with who deals with the problem day to day

The easiest way to miss the right person is to start with job titles instead of the problem you are solving. Titles are useful for filtering data, although they do not always reflect who is actually dealing with the issue in practice.

Take attendance, for example. You might assume that responsibility sits with the senior leadership team — and they may well be held accountable for it — but the day-to-day reality usually sits with attendance officers, pastoral teams, and heads of year who are tracking patterns, chasing follow-ups, and dealing with issues as they come in.

A campaign that only targets senior leaders misses the people closest to the problem, while a campaign that only targets operational staff may not reach the people who can approve a change in approach.

The same pattern shows up across different categories. A literacy intervention might involve a head of English reviewing outcomes data, classroom teachers delivering the content, and senior leaders looking at whole-school impact. A school trip provider might first get interest from a teacher planning a visit, while approval, risk, and budget questions sit with senior leadership or the business manager.

Looking at the problem first gives you a clearer view of who needs to be involved. Instead of asking “who should we email?”, the question becomes “who is already dealing with this, and who needs to be involved for anything to change?”.

That usually leads to a more accurate picture of the roles that matter:

Map out who experiences the problem directly, such as teachers managing behaviour, heads of department tracking attainment, or admin staff handling processes.
Identify who influences or approves decisions, such as senior leaders, business managers, or trust-level roles.
Include both groups in your targeting, so the campaign reflects how decisions actually move forward inside a school.

When you start from that point, you are not relying on a single job title to carry the conversation, which makes the campaign more resilient from the outset.

Build your targeting around how decisions actually happen

Once you know which roles are involved, the next step is turning that into a workable audience. This is where campaigns often become too broad, because it feels safer to include everyone who might be relevant.

The issue with that approach is that different roles look at the same problem in very different ways. A message that tries to speak to a headteacher, a classroom teacher, and a business manager at the same time ends up sitting at a level that does not fully land with any of them.

A more effective approach is to group your targeting based on how decisions are likely to move.

For example, a MIS add-on designed to reduce reporting workload might be split across senior leaders focused on reporting accuracy and inspection readiness, data managers responsible for pulling reports together, and heads of department using that data to track progress. Each of those groups sees the same product through a different lens, so treating them as separate audiences makes the messaging easier to shape.

School structure also affects this. In a multi-academy trust, procurement decisions might sit centrally, with trust-wide priorities influencing what individual schools adopt. In a standalone secondary school, that same decision may sit entirely within the leadership team.

This is where accurate data becomes critical. Sprint’s dataset includes over 803,000 contacts across 31,000 establishments, segmented by role, school type, and structure, which allows you to build audiences that reflect how decisions are likely to develop rather than relying on broad assumptions.

Targeting built in this way gives the campaign a clearer path, because it is reaching people who are already part of the decision-making process, rather than hoping the message gets passed around internally.

Shape your message for each role involved

Once the right roles are in place, the message itself needs to reflect how each person experiences the problem.

A behaviour platform is a good example of how this plays out. A senior leader may be focused on consistency across the school and how behaviour links to outcomes and inspections. A head of year may be dealing with repeated incidents, parental communication, and follow-up processes. A classroom teacher may be thinking about what happens in the moment when behaviour disrupts a lesson.

If all of that is combined into one message, it becomes harder for any one person to see themselves in it. Splitting the messaging allows each version to go further into what matters for that role.

For example:

Position the message for senior leaders around whole-school consistency, reporting, and visibility of behaviour trends.
Shape the message for pastoral leads around managing incidents, tracking patterns, and maintaining consistent processes across teams.
Present the message to classroom teachers in terms of ease of use, in-lesson support, and reducing disruption.

The same principle applies across other categories. A CPD platform can be framed around staff development strategy for leadership, practical delivery for subject leads, and usability for teachers. A finance tool can focus on budget control for business managers, while linking to wider planning for leadership.

The product does not change, although the way it is introduced does. That shift makes it easier for each person to recognise why the message is relevant to them.

Make sure your data can support that level of targeting

All of this depends on having data that is detailed enough to support it. Without accurate role-level data, it becomes difficult to separate audiences, and campaigns tend to fall back into broader targeting.

School data changes regularly, particularly around the start of the academic year. New headteachers are appointed, heads of department move schools, responsibilities shift internally, and roles like safeguarding leads or data managers can change completely between July and September.

If that is not reflected in the data, campaigns start to drift. Messages land with people who no longer hold the role, or miss people who have recently taken on responsibility.

Sprint’s dataset is maintained with that in mind, with over 600,000 updates made each month to keep pace with changes across schools. That level of ongoing maintenance helps keep campaigns aligned with how roles are shifting over time, rather than relying on data that quickly becomes outdated.

That makes it possible to:

Build role-specific audiences without relying on guesswork about who might be involved.
Adjust targeting based on school type, structure, or trust-level decision-making.
Keep campaigns consistent over time, even as roles change between academic years.

When the data supports that level of detail, the rest of the campaign becomes much easier to execute.

Keep multiple decision-makers engaged as conversations develop

Reaching the right people at the start is important, although decisions in schools rarely happen in a single step.

A school trip provider might first get interest from a teacher planning a visit, then be discussed with a head of department, and finally reviewed by senior leadership or the business manager because of budget, risk, and cover implications. A safeguarding system might be raised by a DSL, then evaluated by senior leadership before anything moves forward.

If the campaign only speaks to one role, or only appears once, it relies heavily on that first interaction lining up perfectly.

Keeping multiple roles engaged over time reflects how those conversations actually develop inside schools.

Send campaigns that reach different roles connected to the same problem, so the message is seen from multiple angles.
Build ongoing sales enablement activity that revisits the message as priorities shift, rather than relying on a single email.
Reinforce the same core idea across those touchpoints, so it remains familiar as it moves between roles.

This is where Sprint IQ comes in. By combining targeted campaigns with personalised sales enablement emails, it keeps your message visible across the roles involved as decisions take shape.

What this means for your school marketing

Reaching the right decision-makers in schools is less about finding one perfect contact and more about understanding how responsibility is shared across roles, and how decisions actually move forward.

When your targeting reflects that structure, and your messaging speaks to each role involved, campaigns stop relying on chance and start generating conversations that can actually progress. Instead of hoping the message lands with the right person, you are building campaigns that are designed to reach them from the start.

If you want to reach the right decision-makers in schools more consistently, book an education strategy call with our team and we’ll show you how our data and campaigns are built to reach the people who can actually act on what you’re offering.

FAQs

Who are the decision-makers in schools?
Decision-makers vary depending on the product, although common roles include headteachers, deputy heads, business managers, bursars, SENCOs, subject leads, and IT or facilities leads.

How do I reach school decision-makers?
Identify who deals with the problem your product solves, then target those roles using accurate school data and tailored messaging.

Do schools have more than one decision-maker?
Many school decisions involve multiple stakeholders, with different roles influencing different stages of the process.

What data do I need to market to schools?
You need accurate, role-level school contact data that reflects how responsibilities are structured within schools.

How do I target different roles in a school?
Segment your campaigns by role and tailor your messaging so each group sees a version that reflects how they experience the problem.