Private schools identifying addresses of full-pay families is really not that difficult – the hard part is getting these families to consider purchasing your educational service. Nonetheless, there are several ways to find the addresses of the families you want to pursue by contacting various data service companies. They can filter data by using descriptors such as children of a certain age or household income range. One can also find data that estimates the capacity of a geographical area – county, zip code, block group – by using descriptors like median household income, home value or percent attending private school. The Census Bureau is one of the best sources within our reach at a reasonable cost to find the latter group. Listed below are several other organizations, who based on their research of individual families, can help schools to identify certain high income households.
INDIVIDUAL HOUSEHOLD
- Experian Mailing List – This is probably the most well known company. In the past I used Clarion, a company who actually captured their data from Experian, and have since been bought out by them.
- InfoUSA.com – I have not used this group as of yet, but have heard it mentioned in posts.
GEOGRAPHIC AREAS
- Census.gov has some filtering capabilities, but will mostly give you data based on singleton areas – one zip code, county, block group or address. I do believe it’s better though, to let someone else collate the data for you, then purchase it in the form you want.
- Easydemographics is a good choice. For around $1000 (my last not-for-profit price) you can get many different categories of data from the census.
- Geolytics is another choice for getting data, including data that you can have appended on to your actual inquiry data. For example, you might want to see the median family household income of your inquiries. This is based on their geographic location not the actual household income.
- Alteryx is interesting to me. I have not explored it and they seem to have taken over DemographicsNow which I had use successfully in the past. I would suggest investigating it for data collection and analysis.
- Experian Data Appending – They will append census type data to your inquiries and they have some other non-census data to append as well to give you insights about your customers.
- NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) is free of charge to its members and uses data from Easydemographics. It also has a nice set up for analysis.
- SSATB (Secondary School Admission Test Board) has test taker data divided by students considering day, day or boarding, and just boarding. It is a great source, if you have ways to cut the data up further and create segments.
Using data in this fashion should be a part of the school marketing plan. None of this data is helpful if you don’t know how and when to use it. During The Five Pillars workshop we provide examples of actual data and talk about which data works best in a particular situation. We will also take a look at the types of data that might not be useful in marketing to full pay families and the data that will be the most useful.