Am I a Sellout?

Since many of you ask about our sponsored content, I thought that we should clarify how we approach this tricky area.

Why Do We Publish Sponsored Content?

We really love running SchoolMum!

You tell us everyday how positive and useful the community is, how many tips and ideas that you really use and how our mum questions often echo your own. It takes a staff team of 5-6 people to keep things running as they are so as you can imagine, the cost runs into hundreds of thousands each year.

The truth is that without sponsors and ads, SchoolMum would not exist … and we don’t want that!

How Do We Decide?

We are approached everyday by big and small brands to promote their products so we need a way to decide what we will accept and what we won’t.

Firstly, we never promote things that we disagree with or just don’t like. These are the easy ones and we just say ‘No thanks!’

On the other hand there are times when a product that we really LOVE wants us to endorse them and that is also an easy decision … ‘Ummm YES!’

Clearly the hard decisions come when we think there are some positives and some negatives for our schoolmums or where we are not 100% convinced of the message.

We think very hard about these opportunities.

Sometimes our approach to these is to go ahead and present the information as best possible for you to make up your own minds. We do this because we respect your intelligence and believe strongly that each of you should make your own decisions … we never expect you to think the same as us.

It’s also important to understand that with over 375 000+ followers, nothing will be right or wrong for everyone. If a particular message or product is not relevant to you … just skim over it. It could be awesome for someone else 🙂

Making it Useful

When we do a straight review of a product then hopefully it’s useful for people who want that information … but if the message is more general, we try to make sure that the article itself has lots of great free information. Our goal is that even if that particular post was not sponsored, it would still be useful reading.

Quite often articles are sponsored by someone without very much input at all from the sponsor … BUT we always write or create everything ourselves including images, videos and text.

How Do You Know

All sponsored content is clearly labelled.

It’s usually the very first thing in the article so you know everytime whether something is sponsored. This is both a legal requirement and something that we think is fair to everyone.

If you ever wonder if a post is sponsored, just check at the top for the clear link. 

Feedback

We aren’t perfect so if you think that we have made a mistake, please let us know.

Please just remember that you won’t agree with everything and not all of the content is relevant to you. It could still be super relevant for 20 000 other SchoolMums haha

If you feel strongly about something that we have included as sponsored content, please let us know using this form below.

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