How it started
With more and more market share being captured by Google and Apple Education, Microsoft sought to understand the goals, motivations, frustrations, and responsibilities that drive educational technology decision makers – and how to better reach and engage them.
The problem wasn’t lack of awareness – education decision makers know Microsoft and its longtime commitment to the sector. What Microsoft needed to identify were the trust and need gaps where the brand could strengthen relationships with its customers.
What we did
Program 11 conducted a hypothesis workshop with representative from Microsoft product teams to gather what they believed were the core challenges in education they were uniquely qualified to address. We then designed and deployed an online survey to hundreds of decision makers, following up with 1:1 interviews with those we identified as leaders with large-scale influence (preferably to more than 10,000 students).
Our a-ha moment? We uncovered that “relationship-centered information collection” is the primary way for our study respondents to discover new educational technology solutions.
How it’s going
Program 11’s resulting personas, messaging recommendations, and peer-to-peer content and distribution tactics informed a series of guides we created for lead generation and relationship building.
Through this outreach, we successfully helped Microsoft reach educators, IT administrators, and business decision-makers with the message that Microsoft technology effectively supports teaching and learning now and in the future.
Microsoft continues to be the leading platform in education worldwide.
Sam Reich, Marketing Director, Microsoft
