Education Public Relations / December 19, 2020
EnglishHelper revolutionizes the Indian education system with digital learning solution!
Context
With an intent to cater to the need for people to adopt English as a language, EnglishHelper debuted in India in 2009. The brand is an AI integrated Edu-Tech Company, offering English learning solutions with a vision to grow by the day and showcase the commitment towards the need for education. Its initiative ‘RightToRead,’ focused on enabling English literacy in public schools across the world. With the pilot project of RightToRead, supported by multi-sensory AI software – ReadToMe, the brand was focusing on enabling the students to read and understand English textbooks better. The initiative was spread across thousands of public schools in India.
The brand also came up with the online spoken English program, ‘EnglishBolo’, which was designed to help people with lower pay scales, especially youth, to improve their English speaking skills. The motive was for the brand to provide affordable yet effective language classes to people. Partnering with Schoolnet India Ltd. (a major India-based education provider), the program served as self-learning and virtual classroom used for self-study via a video platform. The initiative was supported with appropriate support from the teachers. All in all, EnglishBolo™ can be categorised as an affordable program aimed at youth and adults who have low English proficiency and fluency.
Communication’s narrative
EnglishHelper aspired to present itself as the pioneer, innovator and one of the primeval companieswhich shared an intent to bring a revolution in public schools through its unique English learning solutions. But the brand and its purpose lacked visibility and recognition.
RightToRead the initiative which started in 2013 by covering 100 schools, had reached across 20,000 schools in India covering 28 states and 4 Union Territories by using an in-house technology solution. Even after such extensive work in the field of education, that too in association with the state governments pan India, there was no coverage on Google search engine as the brand lacked PR visibility.
EnglishHelper and Wishbox Studio collaborated to adopt an approach that not only presented the company as disruptors in the education industry but also as a brand with a novel thought of disseminating education and enabling people to learn English. Wishbox Studio reflected the brand as a company that enabled the children studying in Government schools to be fluent in English. The brand worked towards easing the education for the low pay-scale families desiring to educate their kids.
The key messaging focused on conveying how social enterprises like EnglishHelper, with the help of advanced technology like artificial intelligence were coming forward tobridge the gap and teach quality at government-owned or semi-government schools across the country. With their AI-enabled technological method of learning, the quality of English education was seeing an upward spiralwithout changing the existing school curriculum or additional investment in any IT infrastructure. All the schools needed to be a projector or a computer and the current textbooks being integrated into their software. This further helped the teacher to continue teaching the same syllabus but with a different approach which was a lot easier to comprehend and made the session a multi-sensory interactive experience instead.
Our team highlighted how the CEO, Mr. Sanjay Gupta, a seasoned business leader decided to pursue a new career to build a social enterprise for giving back to society in his sustainable way.
Our Strategy
Wishbox Studio reached out to the right stakeholders at the right time to convey the brand story and gain worthy traction.
Keeping the core challenges of the brand in mind, our approach was focused on creating a strong messagethat narrated the company’s mission of improving English learning skills of underprivileged children pan India with their multi-sensory technology. Aligned with the narrative, we implemented a multi-pronged approach to educate target stakeholders with the right messaging that reflected ‘finding quality teachers, particularly in rural areas, is a big challenge for India’s education planners and this technology could solve the last mile problem’.We further ensured to convey how the company was in talks with several State governments for expanding the program to tier 2 and tier 3 cities. The same messaging was publicized worldwide and further helped in gaining brand recognition.
Our aim was not just to tap the industry stakeholders but also share the sentiment of improving English learning skills with ease and pitch it to the media. We went all out in our first phase by lining up meetings of the spokesperson with the writers, post which we identified the right places and forums for our spokesperson to raise his voice about the issue and provide a long term solution with their innovative approach. All these efforts combined made EnglishHelper a strong and responsible brand that was responsible for enabling English literacy in public schools across the globe.
The “Solution”
WBS team with strategic PR support was successful in communicating the right message and established EnglishHelper as the pioneer in solving India’s early grade reading crisis.
The model was proven to have a reasonable degree of success as it expanded at a rapid pace and by the end of 2019, the brand reached out to almost 20,000 schools, impacting nearly 4 million students across India.
Media across states were intrigued to feature the company and reflect its cause, which was aligned with the state government, to help underprivileged children and families with a low-income background.
With the significant announcement of a collaboration with Maharashtra Government to enable Right to Read programme in 65000 + schools in the state, the news caught the air and was widely covered in digital media, including platforms like ANI, UNI, Business Standard, India Today, Yahoo News and many more.
The initiative of Right to Read and their proprietary technology Read to Me was extensively pitched in the media showcasing how it will benefit the government school students to learn and improve their English proficiency, resulting in a better job opportunities. The idea was to promote: EnglishHelper as a tool that possessed the power to revolutionise an average student’s life and to improve English literacy across the world. The thought was well acknowledged by the media and got EnglishHelper a lot of recognition in daily newspapers like the Asian Age, The Hindu, and Forbes Digital.
Forbes.in did a standalone piece based upon the interaction with the spokesperson about how Government schooling should look forward to more of such public-private partnerships.
We managed to arrange school visits in different cities for the media people to experience the use of technology used in the classrooms. The brand gained traction and the feature stories got covered in The Hindu (Delhi, Chennai & Hyderabad edition), The Print, The Asian Age as large format brand story features about Making English Accessible in Government Schools and explaining the implementation of technology in the school by EnglishHelper. This helped the brand to gain eyeballs by building a strong rapport with the media houses.
The Economic Times (Tech) also did an industry piece on ‘how technology is helping society get better learning outcome’ with quotes of stakeholders from different communities sharing their viewpoints.
To showcase and present spokesperson Global CEO Mr. Sanjay Gupta’s extensive knowledge about the current scenario in the world of lack of English learning skills, we positioned him as the thought-leader in the said domain. Personal interviews, relationship-building meetings and opinion pieces were steered with the the spokesperson in order to familiarize the media with the offerings of EnglishHelper from the leader himself.
He was featured in NDTV Hop talking about his journey, about the challenges they had to face to get government nods for their project and their vision ahead.
Entrepreneur magazine also featured him as part of an Industry feature story about ‘The most daring CEO’s’ talking about his strength and ways of dealing with situations in difficult times.
Authored articles were shared in the media on his behalf on topics such as ‘AI-enabled reading is new norm featured in Pioneer, Reversing the Migration – from ‘free to fee’ featured in YourStory, English Vinglish: How a handful of startups are empowering Bharat to aspire for more featured in Yourstory.in, 10 critical changes that could solve India’s government school reading crisis featured in India Today.in and many more.
Conclusively, we as PR partners managed to position a positive brand image as an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based software that helps read and comprehend any material in English facilitating improved learning outcomes for an estimated one million Indian students across eight Indian States in 2016-17.
