The original version of this article was first published on the Bee Digital marketing website in August 2021, and was aimed at businesses. In this updated version I’ve added some thoughts on how the ethos of the book might be adapted by leaders of Computing or co-ordinators of education technology in schools.

In this article…

Introduction

When my room was flooded at three in the morning while staying in a Marriott hotel in Los Angeles, an assistant helped me to relocate to a different – and drier! – room. As compensation for the inconvenience, she gave me a voucher for a free breakfast in the morning. Bleary-eyed, I accepted it.

On waking up I realised that the voucher had no value for me. I had arranged to have breakfast that morning with my cousin, in a café she highly recommended. I explained the situation to the desk clerk. This is how the conversation proceeded:

Desk clerk: I see that you are coming back to stay with us for a week next week.
Me: That’s right.
DC: So how about we reduce the bill for that by 50%?

That was an example of what Adrian Webster calls a “tiny noticeable thing”: something that isn’t especially earth-shattering, but which makes a big impression on the recipient.

The book

In his book “Tiny Noticeable Things”(Amazon affiliate link), Webster has collated many such stories, small actions that have made enough of a difference to someone for them to act as unpaid advertisers for the organisation or person. Indeed, the book, which is subtitled “The secret weapon to making a difference in business” might just as easily have been called “Hundreds of examples of how to generate word of mouth for your business”.

Divided into chapters called Customer, Team, Personal and Covid, these anecdotes provide food for thought. Clearly, not all of them will be directly relevant for an edtech business, but several could be adapted.

Some of the anecdotes are ridiculously simple, such as including a handwritten “thank you” note in a delivery. Of particular interest, though, is that many of the “tiny things” described were undertaken by individual employees rather than being part of some kind of top-down initiative based on the observation by the comedian George Burns that if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made. As we saw in Who is responsible for a company’s image?, a company’s reputation and standing hinges on the actions and attitudes of all its employees, not just the public-facing ones.

Ideas for education technology companies

What sort of small things might an edtech company do that will stick in a client’s mind? One example cited the inclusion of a UK plug for a piece of kit sourced from overseas. Another example is even more basic: using the client’s first name.

Ideas for Computing leaders and education technology co-ordinators

Provide each student in a new class with a name plate to put on their desk, so that you can address them by name.

Ensure that every pupil has their work displayed on the wall at least once each half term.

If a pupil forgets their password, don’t make them feel like an idiot or a nuisance, but ensure that they can get continue with their work as soon as possible. To do this I ensured that each teacher in my team had a list of pupils’ login details, and also a spare set of generic logins that pupils could use (Pupil1, Pupil2 etc), with the caveat that they had to ensure that whatever work they did was transferred to their own area on the network or cloud before their next lesson. I overheard someone at a conference some years ago telling someone that whenever a pupil in his class forgets their password, he makes them log in the username Moron with the password Idiot. I think that is nasty. Even if you feel, for some reason, that you have to penalise a pupil over and above the built-in penalty of not necessarily being able to continue where they left off, why the public humiliation?

Give pupils responsibility. For example, whenever I created a new help sheet I asked some pupils to evaluate it and suggest any changes. Another option is to ask pupils to evaluate trial software or hardware. I also have had whole classes collaborating with me on parents’ briefing evenings. Some pupils decided on the aspects to showcase, while others showed parents around and others demonstrated various programs during the event.

Pupil helpers were provided with official-looking badges with the school and my department’s logo* and their own name.

On options evenings, in which students were looking at the offerings of the different subjects in order to choose what they wanted to study for GCSE or ‘A’ Levels, I provided information on paper for anyone who really wanted it, on diskette (at first), on the web and on USB sticks.

These are just a few suggestions for small things that can make a big difference.

As a new head of department in the schools I worked in, I wanted to get people used to the idea that the department now offered various ICT courses and not single subject Computer Skills (like Computer Graphics, Wordprocessing etc). My approach was to design a departmental logo and stick it on every document my team and I produced. That included:

Diskette and CD labels.
Help manuals.
Worksheets.
Memos to staff.
INSET materials.
Staff ICT bulletin every half-term.
My notices on the staff bulletin board.
Students’ work displays.
Computer room timetables.

Conclusion

This is one of those books that you can open anywhere and find an interesting, and often moving, anecdote. As I said, not all of them are directly pertinent to the world of edtech. However, this sentence is well worth bearing in mind, and applies across the board:

“As a business, you will only be outstanding if you make your customers feel outstanding, and this will only have any hope of happening if the people in your teams feel outstanding.”

Here are the book’s details:

Tiny Noticeable Things: The secret weapon to making a difference in business, Adrian Webster, Wiley, 2021.