[Edu] Reaching the Educational Market

[Magi D. Shepley]

Hm.  Well, for starters, this confirms that I'm not getting all the 
messages from this list.  I have Ryan's message, but never saw Maureen's.
> The biggest inroad I can think for a game company would be to befriend 
> an interested teacher.  Offer to come into a classroom or an after 
> school program to demo one of the games.  Come prepared with some 
> sample lesson plans for the teacher to show how the game could 
> directly address their particular state's standards.
>
I want to agree with Ryan.  This is the best way to get noticed by the 
teachers.  A good time to do this is either at national conferences 
(although be forewarned that many of the larger conferences attract 
mostly administrators and college faculty because classroom teachers 
have a harder time getting released to attend conferences.  I've only 
been able to attend ones that are local to me), or at teacher in-service 
days.  I would bet that most districts have district-wide in-services on 
one day, and many also have special sessions for brand-new teachers.  
You could ask to attend those sessions by having a table set-up at one 
of the main locations with flyers or coupons, maybe a raffle to get a 
few games.

> Speaking from experience when I began a Go program I had a few 
> distributors donate some equipment to me.  Later that year I got 
> around 400$ from my school and spent almost the entire amount with 
> those specific vendors.  I also thank those vendors in my handout to 
> the kids and our school website to try to give them some advertising 
> back for their help.
>
This tends to be what I do as well.  If I've been treated well by a 
company, I'm going to go back to that company if they sell the product 
that I want to purchase.  I will also recommend that companies' products 
to other teachers and friends.  Like Ryan, I've been "gifted" with 
things based on proposals I've written.  Some of the proposals were 
written when I was a pretty new teacher in the late 90s; of the 
companies that helped me out, I still purchase or use a lot of products 
from IntelliTools, and Attainment.  On the other side, I had one company 
turn me down, and even now, I will often look at another company to see 
if they have the product available (there is a lot of crossover among 
educational publishers) in their catalog before going to the company 
that turned me down.