POPtalk

This week BrainPOP UK launched an improved range of subscriptions and prices.

We have been intently gathering feedback on BrainPOP UK since we opened for business at the end of Feb 09. As a new product one of the big issues for us going forward was: is our subscription structure right?

After all, the educational marketplace is splintered into dozens of customer types these days. We cater to home schoolers, virtual schools, pupil referral units, libraries, teacher training colleges, parents, TEFL schools and more besides.

Not forgetting the Primary & Secondary schools, Colleges and LAs.

Oh, and VLEs/MLEs/Content portals/purchasing groups…well, you get the idea.

We don’t have field sales people to send into your school to dazzle you with a corporate PowerPoint presentation before negotiating prices and access. We’re only a little company so we have to think a little differently.

So how can we deliver a pricing structure that accommodates every establishment type?

The answer? We can’t. We can’t have a subscription for every type and flavour of requirement out there. It’s fruitless even trying.

So we took a fresh look at the packages we offer and have concluded that we need to offer a greater range of subscription types based on a model of “user number bands” rather than “establishment size“. It’s not a radical change but a necessary evolution.

We think this is fairer as it is simple (no messing about with exact seat numbers; no hidden licence, support or training costs; no per year group/class charge) and flexible (you can buy for the whole school,  specific key stage, user group or even just one user for example).

There are some extra things you need to know about our new subscriptions:

1. We have named each size after an animal to show how they increase in size. This is not just for fun, it is supposed to help you identify quickly and easily what size might suit you.
2. Well, maybe it is a little bit fun.
3. If you want to buy for more than one site you need to get in touch to talk about our very special package: The Forest. This is not necessarily about having 1000′s of users but about using BrainPOP UK in different places. We need to adjust the licencing to accommodate that.
4. If you just want to use it for yourself and not have a whole school licence (perfect for a supply teacher for example) there is a single user BrainPOP UK licence made just for you.
5. Each site subscription can be purchased as either:

• School hours only (8am-4pm) – Some schools prefer to restrict access to teaching time only and simply want to use BrainPOP UK in the classroom, as  a dip in/dip out resource. Some teachers do not want to let their pupils take all the quizzes outside the classroom as it may impact their effectiveness when they come to use them inside the classroom.
• 24/7 home access – This costs a little more but is licensed for all day use and full home access too e.g for staff to plan and kids to use, perhaps linked via a VLE or similar, as a homework or revision resource.

It’s all explained on the price grid on our pricing page . The home user annual and monthly subscriptions will remain the same.

These new prices should not impact any current subscribers – your subscription will carry on as you expect and you will be able to pick one of the new options when you renew.

We hope that these prices more accurately reflect the needs of the modern educator and establishment. You can always get in touch to chat through your options of course, but we want YOU to be able to make up your own mind without too much interference from us.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/josefstuefer/ / CC BY 2.0

The X-Large subscription - "The Blue Whale" - £599 or £699

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seabass_london/ / CC BY 2.0

The Large subscription - "The Elephant" - £399 or £499

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizard_queen/ / CC BY 2.0

The Medium subscription - "The Lion" - £299 or £349

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/ / CC BY 2.0

The Small subscription - "The Monkey" - £199 or £249

What is our featured movie?

The featured movie is always free – to anyone who visits BrainPOP UK, not just subscribers or those on a free trial.

It appears on our front page and is kind of a “spotlight” movie. Today we changed it from the long standing “Swine Flu” movie to the enlightening “Surrealism” movie. We try to change it regularly as we can. Or remember

How do we choose what gets to be a featured movie?

It really does depend. We usually check the days headlines by visiting BBC news and the brilliant CBBC Newsround website and see if there’s been any interesting stories that might come up in the classroom. We also try to tie featured movies into events and topics e.g. Pi day.

Here are some we chose in the last few months (you may need to be logged on to view some of these movies):

• Satellites – when American and Russian satellites collided
• William Shakespeare – to celebrate National Children’s book week
• Email & IM - when we reached our 100th follower on Twitter (but we can’t remember who it was!)
• Floods – due to flooding in North Dakota (these photos are amazing!)

Once we even made our “Sun” movie the featured movie simply because it was a lovely sunny day outside. And why not?

If nothing in the news or around us seems appropriate we’ll usually turn to you guys and ask.

A good way of doing that is to turn to our Twitter crowd to see if there’s any teachers on there that can be helped out by one of our movies.

For example @stevebob79 recently asked:

We reckoned we could help out so we said…

“@stevebob79 We’re very proud of our Blog movie for KS2. Would make a cracking starter. I’ve made it free, just for you: http://bit.ly/ePnGA“

So the Blogs movie became our (free) featured movie because @stevebob79 had a need for one. Simples. He also suggested a way we could tweak it to make it more effective which we did.

Our tweet was also spotted by another one of our followers, @HGjohn, who said:

In fact, HGjohn (John Sutton of CreativeICT blogs fame) went on to mention us and the movie as a recommended resource in his newsletter. Peter Rafferty (@Raff31) also said:

As my Granny said, if you don’t ask, you don’t get!

So there you have it for the humble featured movie. If you want to suggest a featured movie that you can use with your class we are all ears.

Teachers use BrainPOP UK in lots of different ways – but almost all find BrainPOP UK an invaluable resource to deliver their plans for teaching and learning.

Most of our teachers find the movies they need by starting with the 6 topics shown on our lovely home page and exploring from there.

But some teachers want a more targeted search or browse, perhaps to compliment a lesson plan or react to a world event.

We are looking for Primary and Secondary teachers in the UK to help us build version 2 of our planning support tool for later this year.

You can find version 1 right here: http://www.brainpop.co.uk/support/standards_correlations.weml

We’re still very new and our first attempt is just about OK. And just OK isn’t OK for us. We think it can be much better. We have some ideas, but…

We are looking for a handful of teachers who are already BrainPOP UK subscribers or on the free trial to tell us how they’d improve this important bit of the site.  If you don’t have current access to BrainPOP UK then you can sign up for a 30 day trial here .

We’re not big fans of focus groups (they tend to tell you what you want to hear). We essentially want to hear honest feedback that starts with: “As a teacher using BrainPOP UK I would love to be able to…“.

It’s the … that’s the important bit.

These points may help spark your feedback neurons:

• Is it easy to find what you need? Or do you ever fail to find something of use?
• Is the tagging clear and appropriate? What words do you use?
• Is the user experience a good one? How would you like it to work?
• Are working to a curriculum we haven’t tagged against? Would you like us to?
• Can you link us to another planning tool that you use, or describe elements of other tools that you particularly liked? Who does it best in your opinion?
• Is there any functionality that you WISH it did and you tear your hair out because it doesn’t? Examples might be “Let me build a playlist of movies” or “Print out the whole Science list” button. Perhaps you want to filter by movie length?
• Is “Curriculum planning tool” even the right name – what would you call it?

We don’t promise to implement every idea but every idea is hugely valuable.

You can feedback or simply let us know you’d be up for helping when the time comes in a number of ways:

info@brainpop.co.uk

0800 141 2404

Or simply comment below!

Which ever way you do it we need to know who you are. Because if you do manage to get round to helping we will treat you to something nice