About
EdPro Communications
Berkeley, California
Keith is a content marketing freelance writer with personal experience and insights for education copywriting, selling to schools, selling EdTech products, or marketing for K12-sector professional development services and consulting.
Keith is a published academic writer, former college instructor, and worked in K12 education for over 15 years as a teacher and administrator.
Keith knows how to speak to educators and understands their organizational structures, work life, needs, challenges, and aspirations.
As a digital copywriter and nonprofit grant proposal writer, published academic writer, and member of the Grant Professionals Association and AWAI’s Professional Writers’ Alliance, I focus relentlessly on ongoing professional development, high ethical standards, and best practices—providing clients a collaborator they can trust along with flexible services at competitive rates.
—Keith Nickolaus, Ph.D., Owner-Operator, EdPro Communications
Do you offer great education programs, products, or services?
Keith uses up-to-date best practices in content marketing and SEO planning to provide compelling and valuable marketing content, specializing in K12 marketing, WHITE PAPERS, CASE STUDIES, BLOG POSTS, WEB PAGES, and GRANT PROPOSALS…
I launched EdPro Communications to put my 15-years experience in K12 education and my love for research and writing to work for busy B2B marketers and onprofit leaders.
✔ Over eight years of academic research & writing experience (Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 1997)
✔ Published academic writer (Routledge Press, 2002)
✔ Over 15 years in public education and school administration (CA Single-Subject Teaching Credential; CA Administrative Services Credential; experience in urban small schools restructuring, digital classrooms, 21st-century learning, project-based learning, and restorative practices)
✔ Over three years of intensive digital marketing & grant writing training, and over two-years experience serving (mostly repeat) clients (including winning grant proposals and hundreds of pages of digital content…)
✔ Member AWAI Professional Writers’ Alliance, Grant Professionals Association, and American Educational Researchers Association
Let EdPro Do the Writing, So You Don’t Have To!
Need help fast with a current project or deadline?…
Need SEO guidance or SEO research and planning, or a content strategy framework or content calendar?
Looking for help creating informed and insightful content and marketing copy for selling to K12 schools, for EdTech marketing, for forging deeper connections with prospects in the K12 sector, or for understanding K12 buyer personas and purchasing processes?
EdPro can help you map out next steps for building success with digital marketing, content marketing, and grant writing best practices…
ABOUT OUR CONTENT MARKETING VISION
Education Marketing, EdTech Marketing, Educator Professional Development Marketing, and Beyond…
Schools are mission-based institutions and selling to schools and marketing to educators means aligning your company’s vision with the aspirations of teachers, school leaders, students, and school communities and helping prospects understand how your offerings improve learning, professional life, and student wellbeing, so your clients not only purchase your products and services but build lasting partnerships with you that make schools better, and the world better…
Many schools may also struggle to implement best practices or have the capacity needed to make the best use possible of innovative education technology, professional development services, tutoring modules, academic intervention resources, or curriculum tools...
When your goal is to generate leads, sell to schools, and build on initial partnerships with school clients for both school success and your own business growth, CONTENT MARKETING—the consistent distribution of value-driven, SEO-driven, and promotional content, along with strategies for crafting white papers, e-books, and funding proposals—is a great way to showcase ALL YOU DO—your teams, products, programs, services, expertise, and sustained business-to-client support and discovery partnerships, while also generating excitement that will get your prospects’ attention…
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it.”
– Simon Sinek, author and marketing consultant
Whether for introducing yourself to new prospects, making a sale, securing funding, or providing compelling content to generate leads or establish credibility and leadership in your sector…it’s about looking beyond the closest horizon and building audience networks that inform new ideas and promote products for responsive and meaningful impacts—it’s about understanding your prospects’ needs, challenges, and aspirations, and pursuing the purpose behind what you do and what you offer.
helping prospects understand the purpose and value of your offerings or programs, and enhancing your online visibility
helping your audience understand your mission and remember why you do what you do…
sharing what prospects need to know about your enterprise products, programs, or services—features, benefits, impacts)…
actively listening to and learning from your prospects, clients, or funders…
proactive client engagement & retention initiatives…
All of these are interconnected, and meaningful success come from constantly messaging on all three levels…
EdPro knows the language of K-12 professionals…
“You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.”
–Pam Moore, CEO of Marketing Nutz
EdPro offers education-sector experience you won’t find with many other content marketing and communications professionals…
✔ Classroom pedagogy & instructional routines
✔ Understanding of whole-system leadership frameworks supporting change-oriented school governance
✔ Curriculum innovation and EdTech implementation
✔ Implementation dynamics in complex organizations
✔ Student-centered classrooms and social-emotional learning strategies
Schools and the Problem of Change:
Why new technology solutions alone don’t improve schools…
In the book The Futures of School Reform we learn that we have come a long way since A Nation at Risk was published in the 1980s.
We know a lot more about what really works to improve schools and outcomes for students…
Technology and curriculum play important roles but need to be integrated with what we know about models that truly transform schools, educators, and learning!
Transforming Education
Did you know that in a recent comprehensive analysis of EdTech purchasing and implementation in schools, a major researcher argued that putting new learning tools in the hands of teachers and students was the LAST step in the planning and implementation process? (Read on to see who the researcher is…It might surprise you!)
Such a finding isn’t actually new news. In fact a number of school reform and leadership experts started making the case decades ago that no matter how great the new tools or gizmos are, their adoption and use often don’t significantly impact student learning for the better because important steps are skipped over.
What is new is that now one of the world’s leading ed-tech companies is taking notice. That major researcher we mentioned?…No less than the giant Microsoft.
That’s right.
Now even Microsoft is acknowledging the complexity of organizational culture in school settings and school systems and how these dynamics impact directly whether powerful new EdTech tools really improve schools or not.
“Many leaders ask: does technology improve learning? A much better question is: when, and under what circumstances, does technology improve learning?”
“Transforming Education” (Microsoft, 2018)
If I’ve learned one thing from working in schools and from researchers in the field, it’s that school leadership guru Michael Fullan is right when he says that even the greatest tools, services, and programs often have limited meaningful impacts on actual learning when implemented “piecemeal,” without the magic of system-wide coherence-making, collective commitments across the larger organization, and…a good dash of idealism and overarching purpose!
Implemented “piecemeal” means…
1) implemented without strategic and synergistic system-wide coordination of resources, commitments, goals, and priorities…
2) implemented without sensitivity to present or emerging organizational values, attitudes, and proficiency levels…
3) implemented without shared decision-making and without strong collective commitments
Linking different innovations, solutions, or services to these larger goals and crucial dynamics…well there’s no simple recipe for that, no static model or strategy.
In other words…
No matter how powerful the technology and applications or how well-intentioned the program or service…the long-term impact of specific tools, programs, and services, when it comes to what really matters—delivering meaningful education outcomes—will depend on a complex web of organizational processes and dynamics.
The right messaging, research documentation, and content strategies can dramatically improve how well you communicate how a product, service, or program supports and aligns with a larger school priorities framework—meeting (and supporting) individual school sites and systems (and their change leaders) wherever they are in the innovation or school reform journey.
EdPro can help…
Get more than a blog writer (or a blog writer and more!)…
EdPro helps its clients meet deadlines now, but it also helps them create a vision-focused approach to improving their content marketing, digital marketing, or fundraising initiatives for long-term growth and success!