Upcoming Changes to the UK Education List Builder

In the upcoming weeks, some big changes will be made to the UK Education Data List builder. These changes have been designed to improve the flexibility of the list-building process, giving our Campus users much more control over the lists that they are building and the teachers/staff or schools that they are targeting. Below is a brief overview of the main changes and, we will be providing users with further documentation on how to use the new list builder.

As most users will know, the current UK list builder takes you through a step-by-step building process for the UK database where you can set:

  • A single job role
  • School types
  • Locations
  • Any extras (for example, Pupil Premium %)

While the old list builder had its perks of being very intuitive and easy to use, the step-by-step process meant that the data sets that could be targeted in a single list were very limited. This ultimately meant that users had to create lots of individual lists. The new list builder, which has been available to our clients with access to the International Database or any clients that build Contact Lists, instead has all of the same data available but uses  filters to narrow down the audience rather than the original step-by-step building process. Below is a list of new or improved functions available:

Target Multiple Job Roles in a Single List

Rather than create different lists for each job role, which has led users to quickly reach their plan's Education Data List limits and have to send their email to each list, it is now possible to add multiple job roles in a single list. Enterprise users can now set five job roles per list, while Professional users can now set three job roles per list.

Improved Flexibility with Data Sets

Before now users have had to build a new list for different data sets, even though they may have wanted to send each list the same email. The new filtering system allows a list to be built up of multiple data sets, creating multiple 'groups' that combine into a single list to broadcast to.

For example - you may want to target all Head Teachers in London OR Head Teachers at any school with more than 15% of pupils eligible for Pupil Premium with the same marketing email. You can now do this by setting up two groups in your list by using the or function:

The list builder will build the two lists (each OR statement) and then combine/dedupe the teachers that fall into each, giving you a single list to target.

Limiting the Number of Teachers per List

The builder comes with a List Management Filter that allows users to set a limit on the number of teachers to target per school. So if you are on a plan that has a credit limit to adhere to per month, rather than using lots of these on lots of teachers in a single school, you can tell the list builder to limit the number of teachers you target in a single school:

See 'Counts'

A great new feature available on our Enterprise plan is 'Counts'. This feature will provide more than just an overall list count, users will now be able to see counts within certain segments, focusing on aspects like job roles, school types and locations, giving your team a clear idea of who they will be reaching with their marketing:

These counts also give you the ability to plan your marketing strategies based on our data counts, your credit allowance, and our Education Calendars. 

Flexible Table View

Finally, the old table where you could view the data in your list had set columns that you couldn't personalise to suit your own needs. Now you'll be able to set the columns that you wish to view (and export) on your table:

Limitations

While we've done our best to make this Campus update as effortless as possible for all of our users, one trade-off for more flexible and advanced list building is that your Campus lists will now only be able to be one of these (not a combination):
  1. Teachers Direct Emails
  2. School Office Emails
If you have any UK Education Data lists built of both Teacher Emails + School Office Emails OR School Office Emails + Teacher Names, in the new release these will convert to either a Teacher Direct Email list OR a School Office Emails list. If your marketing emails have [[teacher_full_name]] personalisation but are being sent to school lists following the release, the data fallback will be used - these can be found in Settings > Education Data > Data Fallbacks.