Panorama Education

Panorama Education is an SaaS education technology company that enables schools to improve their climate and culture, which are critical components of a successful school. Schools hire Panorama to create and administer surveys to students, teachers, administrators, and parents to assess their school’s current climate and culture. Panorama then compiles and transforms the data into usable and actionable information through data analytics and visualizations. These reports (featured on the left) enable administrators to quickly determine the strengths and weaknesses of various elements of their school’s climate and culture from the perspective of all stakeholders. These comprehensive assessments allow administrators to begin an informed discussion about how to make improvements based on various metrics, which they can continue to measure their progress against with subsequent surveys. These tools allow them to make measured improvements on two critical components to a school’s success and creates metrics to hold stakeholders accountable to in the process.

In addition to reports, Panorama also provides a tool for teachers called “Playbook” that makes recommendations for new classroom management and student engagement strategies based on the results of the surveys. The combination of actionable reports and tools, enables Panorama to promote climate and culture best practices with schools and in classrooms across the nation.

By using electronic surveys and data analytics, Panorama has created a scalable business model that delivers tremendous value to customers while allowing them to charge an affordable price because the marginal cost per new customer is low. The price of $499 per school, in addition to the efficacy of their products, has enabled Panorama to achieve significant traction with schools. Panorama’s value proposition is so appealing that over 6,500 schools nation-wide have used their surveys and reports since their founding in 2012.

Is Panorama’s position defensible? Unfortunately for Panorama, nothing about their surveys or data analytics is particularly advanced or proprietary. Instead, Panorama has carved out a defensible niche in the education space by being first to market with their usable surveys and reports. Over the last few years they have been able to amass a significant database of survey responses, which allows them to continually improve the efficacy of their surveys and analytics. They have also created a robust Playbook platform with content sourced from teachers. Their database and Playbook would be incredibly hard and expensive for a new entrant to develop. In addition, Panorama has developed a strong relationship with customers in an industry that highly values peer recommendations and robust track records.

Now that Panorama has become a trusted name in the education space, they could easily develop and up sell current customers on new analytics products. These new products could capitalize their core competency of data analytics by integrating new types of data that are critical to the success of a school, such as per pupil spending, teacher effectiveness, student performance. This would be a logical product extension for the company and would provide administrators with a more robust analysis of their school or district’s performance.

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