How I Met Your Awesomeness: Meet the Teacher

In this post I detail how I first found out about Meet the Teacher/Parents Evening System and, if people like what they hear in this post, I encourage educators to do a quick "5 minute favour" as Nikki Robinson and Steve Isaacs have done in the past.

Given the momentum of the Scottish Governments Enterprising Schools and Developing the Youth Workforce, Digilearn Scotland etc I hope that some of my new Scottish education connections might also be in a position to help an award winning, innovative Scottish EdTech startup out.

I am confident that members of my PLN on the other side of the pond will be keen to help someone like Marcus Field and his team out... Once they hear about how I met their awesomeness.

It's the run up to #ISTE2015 and I'm trying to get buy in with one of those crazy ideas I have from time to time. On this occasion it's #Get2ISTE, an idea designed to crowd fund educators PD and getting the costs of the conference covered.

I curate exhibitors Twitter accounts in the hope of reaching out to them to look for their support. Meet the Teacher is one of the exhibitors, they are also one of only two Scottish companies who will be at the event. "Cool!" thinks I, and check out what they do.

I make a note drop in on the guys to find out more about what they do. It's taken a while but we finally spoke earlier this week, we had a chat to see if and how I might be able to help them with their growth plans.

Enterprising Scotland... Meet an Enterprising Student
At the Scottish Learning Festival among the various initiatives that was launched one was Enterprising Schools which is;

"The online resource and professional learning community centred on sharing and developing creative ideas for enterprise education"

If Meet the Teacher founder Marcus Field was at school when this initiative was around he might be one of the projects success stories.

Marcus started his company in fine Silicon Valley/HP style... working from his bedroom while he was still a student in 2006, and started working on the company on a full time basis when he graduated in 2012.

Today the company is an award winning EdTech company, works with over 2,000 schools and employs 11 members of staff... and counting.

Great Teaching... and More of it

Subscribers to my blog will know that a question I ask when assessing any education solution is "Does this facilitate great teaching and more of it?" I would have said that the way that Meet the Teacher removes the need for teachers trying to co-ordinate their schedules for parents evenings and booking rooms does fit this criteria. It frees up educators time as there is less admin.

The other thing that I'm hot on that the company seems to have is the right culture and attitude towards their customers.

Free Trials, Repeat Bookings & Word of Mouth Referrals
We discussed how Meet the Teacher gets new business, how they look after existing customers and their net promoter score.

Net Promoter Score:
On a scale of 1-10 How Likely are you to recommend this org to a friend or colleague?

Everything Marcus told me was extremely positive! For example;

• A lot of new educator enquiries came from;
  
  i) Word of mouth referrals... Music to my ears!!
  
  ii) Educators who's children's school use Meet the Teacher. They find the user experience is such a positive one... so get in touch to find out more about having this for their own parent evening

• Their ratio of repeat business was extremely high. Last... but by no means least

• They have so much confidence in their product that, as you can see from their ISTE exhibitor bio above, the first Teach Meet/Parents Evening is free. 

What's not to like about all that? But, in case you were not aware...

EdTech is a Tough
We discussed another favourite topic of mine: Sales.

The company has clearly achieved "Product Market Fit," have got the implementation, customer relations and engagement with educators right... so I'm going to put in an "ask" with two groups of educators (Obviously other educators are more than welcome to join in too though! Lol).

There were two projects that I was involved with that got a big mention during ISTE 2015, but my involvement with both projects started in June 2014, and was for a brief period of time. 

My experiences with Nurph and #Get2ISTE led me to see how different the sales process could be and encouraged me to see what's possible with blogging (See Blogging, Sharing New Ideas... Or Selling)... So here's me asking ISTE2016 delegates and Scottish Educators what's possible with this start up. What impact would you doing a quick 5 minute favour have?

ISTE2016 Delegates
Nikki Robinson and Steve Isaacs helped Nurph get traction without a single phone call being made or any sales people required in education. This, in turn, helped remove any objections to the idea of #Get2ISTE.

I wonder if some of the US educators in my PLN might be willing to follow suit and do me a quick favour and click on the "Book a Demo" button on this link: Meet the Teacher.

Scottish Educators
With all the talk of innovation in education, adopting technology quicker and encouraging entrepreneurship... how about giving one of the few award winning EdTech companies who are based in Scotland a helping had?

In my previous post I demonstrated the extent of the problems with adopting new ideas, 30% of uptake with Twitter after 9 years? How about taking a few moments out of your busy schedule and hitting the "Book a Demo" on this link Parents Evening System 

If all goes well I look forward to seeing Meet the Teacher on the big screen at ISTE2016.