Company: EMPRA
Founder: Ruth Sparkes
Website: https://www.empra.co.uk/
About EMPRA
EMPRA is a specialist education PR and communications agency founded in 2006 by Ruth Sparkes, who trained as an air engineer in the Royal Navy before moving into communications and becoming CIPR qualified. For twenty years the agency has worked only in education, representing schools, colleges, multi academy trusts, awarding bodies and now the EdTech companies that sell into them.
Ruth runs EMPRA as a sole founder alongside specialist associates, which has meant winning and keeping clients on the strength of results whilst competing with agencies many times its size. Her own bylines in The Guardian, TES, Schools Week and FE Week, along with comment quoted in The Independent and The Times, mean clients work with someone who knows from the inside what editors in the sector will commission.
Three recent campaigns show how that approach works in practice. For Lexia, the literacy company, EMPRA took the results of an independent national reading trial and turned them into stories about individual participating schools, which ran across regional titles including Surrey World, the Lancashire Telegraph, the News and Star and the Westmorland Gazette before being syndicated to Yahoo and MSN. Comment pieces in Schools Week and Teachwire ran alongside, and the campaign produced eleven pieces of coverage with an estimated 453,000 views in under a week.
For AskEd, a voice AI startup that answers prospective student enquiries for universities out of hours, EMPRA announced a £100,000 pre-seed round through BusinessCloud, UK Tech News and Dealroom, then followed it with founder comment in HuffPost, FE Week and Startups Magazine for a total of eighteen pieces.
EMPRA also handles PR for Quinly, the AI safeguarding chatbot for children that Ruth founded, which has secured coverage in The Times, HuffPost and Schools Week since its launch. The agency was built to prove that deep knowledge of one sector wins coverage generalist reach struggles to match, and its client list now runs from pre-seed startups to established awarding bodies, further education colleges and academy trusts.
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