DICE MARKETING PLAN
OUR CUSTOMER
2005
(Estimated)
2006
(Estimated)
Year of Enrollm ent
2004*
2003*
2002*
Number of
Students
Total Market
All universities and colleges are our target customer for DICE. By the nature of
these institutions, our secondary customer is the faculty and students who will be using
DICE to enhance their educational journey. In the fall of 1999, the US Department of
Education reported that there is 39581 degree granting institutions. This is the total
number of possible customers that DICE can reach. When determining our actual market
share for the services that we will provide, this number decreases roughly in half. Of
these degree granting institutions, 56% (as reported in 2005 and published by Sloan’s
Consortium) have identified online education as a critical long-term strategy2.
Additionally, United States online enrollment increased from 1.98 million in 2003 to 2.35
million in 20043. These figures, as
well as estimated figures can be
4,000,000
3,500,000
seen in the chart pictured at right.
3,000,000
DICE’s benefits can be realized in
2,500,000
the traditional full-time on-campus
2,000,000
student profile exhibited by all of
1,500,000
the degree granting institutions.
1,000,000
However, the benefits are
expressed in greater quantity to
distance and online education
curriculum in these institutions.
First Customer
For our first instantiation of DICE, we have selected Old Dominion University as
our premier customer. The reasons for choosing ODU relied on two items: this is the
current university that the DICE development team attends and ODU has a vested interest
in the success of their distance education program. Old Dominion University is one of
the largest providers of distance learning degree programs in the country. It serves over
4,000 students at 50 sites in 6 states and U.S. Navy ships deployed around the globe.
These also reflect students who are enrolled at certain sites, but attend their classes in the
online setting.
1
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d01/dt180.asp
http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/overview.asp
3
http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/overview.asp
2
5000
4500
4000
3500
3000
Students 2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
1984-1985
1989-1990
1994-1995
1999-2000
2004-2005
Year
ODU Distance Education Enrollment 1
Additionally, as outlined in Old Dominion’s Strategic Plan, ODU is committed to
providing quality student support services to students who are in distance education and
strives toward providing services that are at least as good as the services provided to the
on-campus population. This commitment to distance learning is clearly explained in the
6th goal of ODU’s Strategic Plan.
Old Dominion University’s 2005-2009 Strategic Plan Excerpts:
“6a.1 Develop new programs or enhance existing programs in all academic
colleges that focus on regional needs or “changing lives” within the region.”
“6b.1 Strengthen our current distance education programs across the
Commonwealth of Virginia and the world, specifically through special accessibility
agreements with Virginia community colleges but also by initiating new global
programming.”4
Secondary customers Identified
Finally, our secondary customer becomes the faculty and students who will
ultimately use DICE. Our product will be based off of the idea of community. The
educational community aspect will be the key element that truly separates DICE from
any other product currently on the market. By looking at the success of similar
community software packages, we can ascertain the potential success of DICE. Using
the product Facebook (http://www.thefacebook.com) and MySpace.com
(http://myspace.com), we can draw comparisons to the societal acceptance of online
communities. Each of these companies reported roughly a three hundred percent increase
4
http://www.odu.edu/ao/affairs/odusp2005%5B2004.12.10%5Dbov.pdf
in daily reach, with Myspace.com reaching upwards of 25 billion people logging in per
day. The trends of society flocking to some type of online community is described in the
following charts detailing the two companies mentioned above.
OUR COMPETITION
The following chart details what features DICE brings to the table in comparison
to current technologies that are available. As you can see, many other products come
close to a complete solution for distance education community building. However, they
either lack in functionality or lack community.
Most Instant Messaging clients do not include any type of community. They rely
on the user to create their own community. This however presents the problem when a
student does not know who they need to add to their community. The current academic
products of our competition create a community. However, this community is limited to
a single class. If students need additional help, these products do not address this.
All of the features that need to come together to create the comprehensive
solution are not available in any existing product. DICE creates the online community
and adds each of the modules of communication that are necessary to facilitate the
learning environment. Therefore, as shown in the matrix above, DICE is clearly the only
solution for colleges and universities who want to facilitate the learning process for their
online or distance education faculty and students.
BENEFITS TO CUSTOMER
What physical items are purchased?
As shown in the above figure, schools will receive DICE, along with Training
Materials, and a custom interface to their own Student Information System (Banner,
Oracle, PeopleSoft, Matrix, Datatel, etc.). This listing is subject to change as new
releases or versions of DICE are instantiated. These three items are outlined below:

Training Materials
o 20 Printed User Guides
o 20 Electronic User Guide (in PDF format) on CD
o Sample of Promotional Materials to Use for Faculty/Staff/Student
Acceptance
o 20 Hours of Onsite Training from a DICE Expert to each school’s
identified support personnel

Interfaces
o Customizations as detailed in the purchase agreement
o Documentation describing interface links and data mapping

DICE
o Initial setups to link to your database of choice

Supported databases include (MySQL, Oracle, SQL, Solid,
Access)
o Installation of client/server and web based tools for management
staff
o Customizations as detailed in the purchase agreement
o Reporting mechanisms as detailed in the purchase agreement

What is not in the box that is required?
o Database to house DICE community information, archived
communications, and management data
o Local support staff (1 staff member per 10,000 students
recommended)
o Peripherals needed to use certain features of DICE (i.e. computer
speakers, microphones, etc.)
What Do You Get That is Not in the Box?
When purchasing DICE, your benefits will start coming in a chain reaction
fashion. Starting with a higher retention of students and ending with increased money
from tuition payments of these retained students. Learning communities, like DICE, will
increase study with others by 20%5. This amount of increase is key to retaining freshman
who will get lost in the shuffle, for recruiting non-traditional students, and for offering
support to students in higher level classes.
Benefits of Learning Communities:
Once student retention is achieved, federal funding will increase. Although it
may be a bad indicator, graduation rates are key in determining how much federal
5
http://cade.icaap.org/vol5.1/8_powell_et_al.html
funding a school will receive. To the federal government, higher graduation rates are an
indicator that the institutions are performing well. However, this does not take into
account the non-full time students, who decrease this number drastically. DICE will help
to even the playing field in this regard. Students will be able to take more classes since
the amount of time they spend looking for help will be reduced to a negligible number.
This idea will help ODU tremendously, since they have one of the lower graduation rates
for 4 and 5 years in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Graduation Rates in Virginia:
Finally, a return on investment for schools is in the increased tuition that they will
see from student retention. Just bumping up retention or recruitment to one percent well
outweighs the monetary cost of DICE. In the example below, we can look at the benefit
that ODU would receive if one percent of their student population took 12 credit hours
more than usual. This directly relates to retaining freshman and increasing the amount of
classes that part-time students can take.
 If we can increase ODU enrollment by 1%
o 208*12*181=451776

student * 12 hr * $181 cost per credit hour = $451,776
o $45,1776 * 2 semesters = $903,552
o Annual comparison:

1% retention/recruitment +$903,552

Cost of DICE -$35,000

Increase realized by ODU +$868,552
CUSTOMER RETENTION AND NEW CUSTOMER SOLICITIATION
We will need to continue to address the needs of our current customers, as well as using
them to promote our product. We will employ certain forums that will encourage the
word-of-mouth sales tool. Using word-of-mouth publicity, we can reach markets without
spending a lot of time and money. In essence, we are employing our customers to create
the buzz on DICE to increase our customer base.
Our post-sales/retention plan consists of:
Educational conferences
User Conferences
Training of users
o Step-through demos
o FAQ listing
o Online help “wiki” format
o List serves
4. Customer feedback forums
5. “Golden User” reviews
1.
2.
3.
We will explore what Educational Conferences are attended by faculty and administrative
officials who make decisions on IT solutions and on distance education curriculum.
Some conferences that we will plan on attending include: Annual Conference on Distance
Teaching and Learning as sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, TCC
Worldwide Online Conference as sponsored by the University of Hawaii, etc. Once our
customer base increases to several institutions, we can then create our own annual User
Conference where we can facilitate the word-of-mouth publicity. Finally, we will create
an intensive company website that will allow customers to get direct feedback, updated
notes on DICE and the company, and online tutorials/help. Each of these items will be
available to current and interested customers so that the materials can play a dual role of
education/support and marketing.
BREAK EVEN ANALYSIS
DICE will use a strategy to bring its first customer on-board at a special
discounted price. This will allow our product to take root into the market and create a
buzz. Since DICE will be roughly $379.000 shy of breaking even (after the federal
grants are applied), we will be able to sell this product to ODU for a $10,000 one time
fee. The next cost that must be considered is the recurring cost, or OutYears cost of
DICE. This is roughly $524,000. It makes absolutely no sense to license this product to
one individual school for such a large amount. Just looking at the recurring cost quickly,
we can see that 10 schools paying $75,000 one time setup fee and a $35,000 yearly
licensing fee will cause a break even point. The DICE staff has agreed that setting a goal
of the break even point to be 10 schools is acceptable. There are 29 potential customers
in the commonwealth of Virginia alone who we can sell DICE to. Additionally, there are
over 3900 schools where DICE is a product that may be of interest. This makes our
break even point at .25% of the total potential market. Therefore, any amount that we
charge ODU can be applied as promotional discounts. We have chosen $25,000 as the
discounted yearly licensing fee for ODU. This number was derived as a medium point so
as not to have the discount a stumbling block or point of frustration for new customers.
The chart below shows our break even analysis in simple form:
Total Cost of DICE
Phase 1 grant
Phase 2 grant
Initial Amount in Deficit
ODU Implementation
OutYears Cost - Year 2
ODUI + 6 new clients
Year 2 Earnings
OutYears Cost - Year 3
ODU+6 old clients + 6 new clients
Year 3 Earnings
-$1,228,928
$100,000
$750,000
-$378,928
$35,000
-$545,765
$685,000
-$204,693
-$545,765
$895,000
$144,542
After DICE is rolled out to around 6 customers, we will start seeing a net profit on
a yearly basis. We estimate that DICE can be safely rolled out to 6 schools each year.
This means a new implementation will occur every two months. By maintaining the
staffing plan that we have for Phase III and the OutYears, we should be able to sustain
this rate of implementations for many years.
A chart listed below shows our net income potential on the basis of charging
customers (after ODU) a price of $75,000 one time set up fee and $35,000 yearly
licensing cost:
Profit
Customer #
Years
Amount Profit/Loss
1 - ODU
1
7
2
13
3
19
4
25
5
$1,600,000
$1,400,000
$1,200,000
$1,000,000
$800,000
$600,000
$400,000
$200,000
$0
($200,000)
($400,000)
($600,000)
($343,928)
($204,693)
$144,542
$703,777
$1,473,012
$1,473,012
$703,777
$144,542
($204,693)
($343,928)
1
2
3
4
Years (6 units per year)
5