Each month on Teacher Tapp, usually on the first Sunday, we ask 3 questions about a set of education ‘things’ – names of organisations, people, brands, it could be anything. (Mostly it is companies).
Why do we do this?
Ever since we started Teacher Tapp we wanted to keep it as a place of research about schools and teachers’ lives. We wanted to ask interesting questions about things that matter to teachers but often aren’t in anyone’s interests to research. E.g. Does it make a difference if you teach in multiple classrooms? Are you charged for car parking? If you’re a head of department buying marker pens for your colleagues, which is the better choice: chisel or bullet tip?
One thing we did NOT want to do was ask a load of market research questions about your favourite toothpaste. Those questions aren’t interesting to answer and the results aren’t interesting either.
However, about a year into the project we found ourselves in a pickle. We had a lot of well-liked organisations that do great work in education asking us if they could use Teacher Tapp to learn more about their brand and how they might improve it. They wanted to check if the reason teachers weren’t engaging with their services was that they didn’t know about them or if the service wasn’t very good.
Given we had worked on research projects with many of these companies, and they were genuinely trying to make their services better for teachers, it seemed silly not to help out. But we also didn’t want to slip into being a brand survey and asking this sort of question every day.
This is when we came up with the Brand Tracker idea!
We figured that if once a month we asked a few questions about a whole load of brands then that would give us lots of information about which services and products were well- known and used and liked. It would mean that if a company came to us and wanted to know how they were thought of by teachers, then we could quickly get that research together for them. AND it meant that you would only be asked these sorts of brand questions once a month.
We ummed and ahhed and a final thing got it over the line. One of the things you told us at the time was that few of you had a CPD library at school. We knew from other research that many of you are keen on reading education books but couldn’t always access them. Given we are paid for doing research – i.e. finding the data, cleaning it up, analysing it and presenting the analysis back to clients – then one way of sharing that reward back to schools would be to do a monthly prize draw for everyone who completes the Brand Tracker questions, and we would provide a whole CPD library of books to that school.
(We don’t pass on individual data in this research, btw, we only do the sort of analysis that you see in our weekly blogs).
I think we’ve now provided 35 libraries to schools across the country and we hope those of you in those schools have enjoyed reading and learning from the PD books 😁
We still want to improve Brand Tracker
Our first ever month for the tracker was in February 2020 and we had plans for how we would use the data and feed it back to the community. Unfortunately, a few weeks later we all found ourselves in the land of Covid Emergency Rules and we, like you, had to change a lot in our working plans. It’s only recently that we’ve had the headspace to get back to looking at this again.
We’ve started sharing GIFs of the most successful companies each month over on LinkedIn (mainly because that’s where the businesses are so we can loop them in). But if you have thoughts on anyone who might be interested in the tracker service or you have thoughts on ways that we might usefully share information back to teachers, do let us know via Contact Us in the app.
We hope this explains what the Brand Tracker is and why it happens each month!
The Teacher Tapp Team
