Project Red

Jeanne Hayes


CEO and Founder, The Hayes Connection
[email protected]

In 2005, Jeanne Hayes established “The Hayes Connection” to consult for both established and start-up education market companies and school districts. Ms. Hayes‘ 30 years of strategic insights gained from building a business, creating databases, analyzing market trends and helping clients market to schools enable her to connect her clients to the education market. 

Ms. Hayes founded Quality Education Data, (QED) in 1981. Her vision was to create the highest-quality education database possible. To grow the business, she established a marketing research division in the early ‘90s and later expanded the database through QED’s National Registry of Teachers™. After she facilitated the sale of QED to Scholastic Inc. in 1999, she served as VP of Marketing Development at Scholastic through 2004.

A former educator and debate coach, Ms. Hayes has testified before congress and speaks at conferences nationwide about instructional technology and other education issues. With her co-author Tom Greaves, she has researched and written America’s Digital Schools 2006 and America’s Digital Schools 2008, both of which look at education-technology trends, such as 1:1 computing, learning management systems, mobile devices, and broadband access. She has presented findings from these reports at numerous webinars and conferences to both educators and publishers.

As part of her industry connections, Ms. Hayes served as one of the founding members of the CEO Forum on Education and Technology, as a corporate member and treasurer of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and as a board member of the Education Section of the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA). Ms. Hayes was recognized as CoSN’s Private Sector Champion for 2002, as well as Converge Magazine’s ‘Those Who Make a Difference 2000’ and the eSchool News’ Impact 30 for 2001. In December 2002, she was inducted into the Association of Educational Publishers’ Hall of Fame. In 2005, she was recognized as a recipient of the ‘Making It Happen’ award. Currently, Ms. Hayes serves on the board and is the past-president of the board of Creating Caring Communities, a Denver-based nonprofit focused on making schools safe through the creation of positive role models and the elimination of bullying.