Research-to-PR Case Study — Microsoft Education
Turning parent research into a public moment for families and the teachers who reach them
How it started
As schools increasingly moved to remote and hybrid learning in the early 2020s, parents ended up in a role nobody had hired them for. Microsoft Education’s own brief called them a de facto teaching assistant.
Program 11 conducted research with K-12 families: 1:1 in-depth video interviews of up to two hours each, and an online survey of 525 parents across 46 states.
The research showed that parents weren’t having one shared experience of hybrid learning. They were having three. More than half had considered at least one big change to make it work, like switching work schedules or hiring a tutor, and 61 percent wanted activities to keep their children engaged.
Microsoft decided to share the findings publicly, which it doesn’t usually do. It wanted parents to know it understood what the home half of hybrid learning was like, and it wanted to put its resources in front of them. We were asked to turn the research into a PR moment. The brief named parents and caregivers as the primary audience and K-12 educators as the second.
What we did
We started with a content plan that listed every piece Microsoft could build from the research, who each piece was for, and where it would run. It covered the main findings write-up and the full data report, parent spotlights drawn from the interviews, a self-identification piece for parents, and a follow-on series of standalone articles. We sequenced the series on purpose. The article asking how parents are handling hybrid learning and what they need was set to run last, once Microsoft had its own solutions ready to point to.
The media package took its cue from how public opinion polls reach reporters. You hand over a written summary, the full topline numbers, a chart pack, and an infographic, and a reporter can find their own story in it. We wrote the article, “Microsoft Research Reveals Three Distinct Parent Mindsets When It Comes to Remote Learning.” We also formatted the raw survey data for download, built a deck of key findings with charts, and produced a designed infographic in Program 11 and Microsoft branding.
For the consumer side, we defined the three mindsets (Thriving, Coping, and Overwhelmed) and wrote a persona selection page. Parents read short descriptions in their own voice (“I feel like my child’s education is a team effort,” “I don’t have the time, resources, or skills required to be a co-teacher”) and pick the one that sounds like them. Each choice leads to a landing page of recommended resources in the Microsoft Education Center. We wrote the copy for those pages and a side-by-side infographic of the three groups for download.
We also wrote an educator-facing blog post that explains the research and the three mindsets and links to the resources, along with the blurb that sits on top of the persona page.
Finally, we designed an employee package. Many Microsoft employees were themselves navigating hybrid learning at home, and many were fielding questions from friends and family about Microsoft’s tools. We designed a survey in Microsoft Forms to see how U.S. employees split across the three mindsets, an announcement email with a link to the resources, and a follow-up email with the results and a quick check on whether the resources had helped.
How it went
Microsoft published our educator post on the Microsoft Education blog and promoted it in its monthly newsletter as “Understanding the parent mindset during remote and hybrid learning.”
The post links to the full research brief and the survey charts deck, and it sends readers to a page where families can find which of the three mindsets sounds like them. Teachers were invited to share that page with their students’ families, along with Microsoft’s own free family workshop series, designed by Program 11.
Microsoft’s Latin America newsroom then ran a Spanish version, “Entender la mentalidad de los padres durante el aprendizaje híbrido y remoto,” which credits Program 11 as well.
Microsoft Education carried the framework into its own parent outreach. A Microsoft Education team member's video, "Remote Learning Tips For Parents," walks families and educators through the three parent mindsets (thriving, coping, and overwhelmed) and has drawn about 4,600 views.
