- O'Donnell & Associates
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O’Donnell & Associates 
Type Private Industry Market Research
Consulting
eLearning
Publishing
Product DevelopmentFounded 1990 Headquarters Stamford, CT Key people Carrie O’Donnell President & Founder
Joana Jebsen Vice President of Business Development & Marketing
Bill Walter Vice President of Operations
Claire Brennan Director of Market DevelopmentEmployees 51-100 Website http://www.odassoc.com O’Donnell & Associates (OD&A) is a comprehensive publishing services firm with clients in the education and information industries, with a focus on higher education. The firm is located in Stamford, CT and was founded in 1990 by Carrie O’Donnell. OD&A develops educational products. The company specializes in market development, product development, and production.[1]
O’Donnell & Associates is one of the few firms that offers a full array of publishing services, including project management, editorial development, market development, and market research, end-to-end product development, and consulting.
OD&A is structured as a virtual company, including project managers, experts in editorial and product development, market research and marketing, and technology. This team works alongside onshore and offshore providers for production. OD&A brings subject matter experts into projects as needed, and uses recruiters to locate and recruit experts.
Contents
O’Donnell Services
Market Development & Project Management
O'Donnell & Associates' market development technique revolves around cultivating a relationship with a target panel of potential customers. OD&A works with this panel to simultaneously shape the product (or strategy) and cultivate loyal adopters. OD&A conducts focus groups, surveys, conjoint analysis, in-depth interviews, usability labs, developmental workshops, and virtual focus groups on behalf of their clients. The company has experience conducting market development activities with both faculty and students, as well as other key industry stakeholders. OD&A also provides competitive analysis, SWOT analysis, needs assessments, and market intelligence for its clients.
OD&A also helps clients launch products into the market, conducting research to develop and test messages, orchestrating pilot tests, monitoring customer satisfaction, and initiating market seeding activities.[2]Content & Product Development
OD&A specializes in helping to create products that are responsive to dynamic market conditions. These products incorporate a real world environment into the learning process, while providing immediate feedback and quality assessment.
Some of O’Donnell’s product development services include:
- Packaging/Educational Product Development: Called the “End-to-End Publishing Solution, OD&A will shepherd a product or group of products throughout its lifecycle. From concept development to market–ready delivery. OD&A manages the process from author acquisition, to prototyping and product design, to content development and production, and into the product launch and revision.
- Instructional Design: Design that aids in the learning process.
- Content Acquisition: The process of locating and securing content for publication.
- Content Reviewing and Peer Reviews: OD&A will recruit reviews and then manage the review process.
- Author or SME (subject matter expert) acquisition and management: OD&A recruits and manages authors, writers, and content experts.[3]
Production
Production is the third phase in the End-to-End publishing process. It is where the ideas from market and product development materialize into a final, polished product. OD&A oversees all phases of production, including manuscript preparation, pre-press print production, copyediting and proofreading, website development, supplement development, media and video supplements, text permissions, photo research and art permissions.
Consulting
O'Donnell & Associates offers consulting services for strategic management and process development. Some consulting services include creating a market development process, business planning, market planning, building a customer pipeline, and list management.
Publicity
O’Donnell & Associates was one of the Friend sponsors of the 2009 Association of American University Presses conference[4]
O'Donnell in the News
An article by Carrie O’Donnell, Preparing Your Computer for E-Learning was reprinted in Inc Magazine. In it, she discusses the need for growing companies to dedicate time to training new employees. This, she says, often takes a backseat to product delivery and an “e-learning system can help you over come this problem by providing reusable and easily updated training modules.”[5]
Higher Ed Café
O'Donnell & Associates is the founder of Higher Ed Café,[6] a blog that covers topics in publishing and higher education. Higher Ed Café features an interview with Carrie O'Donnell, herself, in which she discussed why she started ODA:
When I started OD&A 19 years ago, I thought that technology was going to change the business, and that we, as an industry, were not set up to be customer-oriented during this change. I wanted to create a business that could help publishers focus on customers to shape product and strategy, and to build loyalty. As the industry started outsourcing to companies like ours, we moved into full service development and comprehensive publishing services.[7]
She also discussed future trends in higher education:
I see a groundswell of process change across the industry with people and companies trying to be more streamlined. And the processes are going to continue to change because technology requires that you go back to the drawing board all the time. The other thing I see is an increase in customer-centric behavior in Higher Ed—a trend that is just beginning to creep into other segments of our industry such as university presses and professional publishers.[7]
Student Opinion Panel
OD&A created the Facebook College Student Opinion Panel,[8] a student database operated via Facebook. The group is composed of students who are interested in participating in market research activities and eager to assist O'Donnell in future development endeavors. Membership grew to over 900 students in 2 months time and the facebook grew has nearly 400 members.[9]
Clients
O’Donnell & Associates clients are education information content providers, mostly in higher education. Some of their clients include:
Association of American Publishers
Blackboard Inc.
Cengage Learning
ESI International
Expanded Learning Voyage
Flat World Knowledge
Harcourt Brace Publishers
HarperCollins
Harvard Business School Publishing
Hewlett Packard Company
Impact Planning GroupMathSoft Engineering & Education
McDougal Littell
McGraw-Hill, Inc
Microsoft Press
Oxford University Press
Pearson Education
PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLC
Primedia, Inc.
The Princeton Review
ProQuest
Simba Information, Inc.Stockton Press
Thinkwell
UOL Publishing/VCampus
Von Holtzprinck
Vista Higher Learning
WiZeUp.com
Wolters Kluwer
XanEdu.com
Yale University PressOD&A has also worked for clients outside the education industry, including research for the Stamford public schools, and for players in the Stamford political arena.
External links
References
Categories:- Companies based in Fairfield County, Connecticut
- Marketing companies of the United States
- Companies established in 1990
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