You Need
Our first Communication Handbook, published early in 2007/08, appeared so authoritative and official looking that some schools demanded to know why the Government had not sent them one!
In the months following, sales from communication related products rose from 8% to 18% of our revenues. This followed the success of our Early Learning catalogue in supporting the many settings, including the new Sure Start centres, using ICT to support the learning of 3 to 5 year olds in the Foundation Stage curriculum.
Special Schools are very important to us and later in the year we produced our first Assistive Technology Handbook with 100 pages of advice and products that might interest them. There was also a Primary School catalogue and our 10th Birthday Catalogue too. These publications combine the talents of our marketing team who design the print and on-line versions, with our information team of expert teachers and therapists who pick the right products and describe how to get the most out of them.
Now, we hope, your job title, the setting in which you work, and what you have bought before, all help us to send you the product information and advice that is most helpful to you. All of this helped to raise our revenues by 23% and more than a million pounds to £5.4 million – our best year ever.
I’m happy to say that these trends are continuing in 2007/08. We have further segmented and served our market by launching a new brand, IT tools, to serve the needs of high schools, post-16 adult and community learning and work-based learning. By focusing on this group we have managed to introduce many new products, and new areas like ergonomics, which would not be of interest to all of our customers. The thirteen thousand IT tools catalogues we have just mailed now reach important groups like librarians and disability officers at universities.
At the other end of the range of needs, our Development team has produced some fantastic new SwitchIt! software titles, cementing our position as the leading switch accessible software company in the world. Our spin-off ChooseIt! Ready-made series won the BETT Special Needs Resources Award this January. Watch out for Kowari, a simple and accessible learning platform, and MyBoard, which combines My World type fuzzy felt activities with stunning whiteboard/interactive plasma screen software.
Getting your orders to you is the work of our Operations team who are now getting 60% of the 17,000 orders you sent us last year out on the day the orders were received or the day after.
For completeness I should mention our Admin team, although the better they do their job the less you notice them (provided you pay on time!). One thing you might notice is the annual exhibition they organise, the Special Needs Fringe, next door to BETT at Olympia. It runs like clockwork.
Martin Littler, February 2008