The Pros and Cons of DIY mapping your catchment by James Leggett

With marketing budgets squeezed ever tighter, the more you can do yourself the better. At MTM, we are seeing more marketers using DIY methods of mapping their current pupils. As far as we are concerned this real progress! Knowing where your pupils come from and whether there are any holes in your catchment is the first step to understanding recruitment behaviour, and from there you can build on this knowledge and implement other marketing techniques to drive new enquiries.

You could go on to ask:

• What are the travel times from these ‘holes’? Just because they look relatively close, are they accessible? Online journey finders are a good start here. Ask the site to give you directions from a place name to your school as a guide to the realistic travel times. It could be that the sector is close as the crow flies, but is relatively inaccessible. Draw these travel times on your map.
• Where are your competitors? A high proportion of pupils travel less than 10 minutes to their school, so identifying the locations of your competitors will help you to identify another reason for reduced recruitment. You can even run some journey times from key areas in the catchment to your competitors to draw catchments around them.
• Is there any evidence of the catchment contraction? Overlay your past and future pupils. Have the holes in the catchment always been there?

There are somethings that your DIY mapping will never do. The knowledge that ten pupils are coming from a postcode sector doesn’t really tell you how well you are doing from it. What is the potential market within that sector? If there are only ten children in families who are realistically able to afford your fees, then it may not be worth investing any further effort. However, if there are actually 100 target pupils, then further investment is likely to prove fruitful.

MTM’s Market and Catchment Intelligence is designed to do all this and much more. We not only map the locations and travel times of your current, past and future pupils, we can also tell you over 650 variables on their lifestyle habits – where they shop, what they watch on telly, how much they spend on credit cards, etc. This provides detail on the types of parents you serve, clues on how to engage with them, and crucially, how to attract more families like them. As MTM know the lifestyles of all families in the UK and their ages, we can tell you where to find more families who are most likely to be independent school buyers, and who have children in the same age ranges that you cater for, saving you the trouble. Our map packs provide clear and accessible data, and we can even provide A0 size maps. Easy. Don’t struggle building a DIY mapping solution that only does half what you need, let us do it for you.

If you are interested in debating the pros and cons of DIY mapping please do call me on 01502 722787.