I promote the writing workshop and "author visits" I do in primary and secondary schools, sometimes through personal contacts and sites like Artscape and Contact An Author, but very occasionally through a bulk emailing to schools in the local area.
The latter has resulted in half-a-dozen bookings for the first half of this year, so it seems to be kind of worth it. Mostly I get no response, and occasionally I get a curt one ("Please do not send marketing emails to this address - so I removed that school), and even a sardonic/rude one ("Do you think we are interested??").
Just wondering about people's perspectives here, as parents, governors, teachers, secretaries - whatever. Does it annoy you when you get this kind of thing in school?
DW works in a school so I know full well how much crap they get in the inbox and I half-suspect they just bulk-delete anything unsolicited. On the other hand, I haven't found out any of these schools' emails by nefarious means - they are all in the public domain, either from downloadable databases on the relevant council website or on the schools' websites themselves (and in passing, aren't a lot of school websites badly-designed and uninformative?).
Using the postal services for this isn't cost-effective for a freelancer, and although I do advertise in writing newsletters and so on, there still seem to be few other ways of letting schools know I exist - yet it does feel as if I am getting people's backs up at times. And yet kids love having writers in, and some teachers and librarians are hugely enthusiastic about it - I tend to get asked back once I have been once and they have seen what I can do.
(Disclaimer - I think people know me enough on here to realise this is for general discussion and not a "stealth advert", but if MN Towers feel otherwise I'm happy to defer...)