We help school districts build meaningful connections with their communities through proven engagement strategies and tools. Our comprehensive approach helps districts engage their stakeholders, assess current realities, generate innovative solutions, test new ideas, and drive changes that will garner community support. The process is collaborative, inclusive, and transparent.

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Services Include:

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Stakeholder Advisory Panels

We facilitate problem-focused citizen advisory groups, commissioned for a period of time to research and study a specific issue (i.e., school safety, student mental health & wellness).

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Community Insights Panels

Engage hundreds of stakeholders in regular feedback activities (polls, surveys, focus groups, interactive townhall meetings). Designed to help you build lasting relationships with community members and create advocates for your district's initiatives.

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Strategic Research

We conduct comprehensive stakeholder surveys and analyze community sentiment using AI. We can help you assess a community’s readiness for change initiative and produce data-driven recommendations for district leadership.

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Focus Groups & Individual Engagement

We’ve done over 1,000 focus groups (in-person and virtual) with sessions of 6-10 participants. An effective tool for gathering qualitative feedback, assessing community attitudes, preferences, pain points, and sentiments. A proven strategy for identifying potential champions and advocates.

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Strategic Storytelling

One of the oldest forms of human engagement, storytelling is perhaps the most underutilized, least understood method for engaging your school community. There are two categories of storytelling, both important but serving different purposes.

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1. Storytelling for sense-making: A methodology for collecting and analyzing the lived experiences, sentiments, and personal stories of your school community. District leaders, principals, PTO members, community partners, and even students can be trained to conduct interactive storytelling sessions. Not only can this strategy produce valuable data points, but you gain valuable insights into community sentiments, aspirations, fears, and pain points. This is also an excellent way to use AI as it can often see patterns and identify commonly held beliefs.

2. Storytelling for influence: Data and evidence gathered in the community engagement process (the sense-making described above) become components of stories you now create to influence people to take action. Our Storytelling for Influence program teaches you how to organize and facilitate sessions that produce strong stories that will resonate with your community.

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Collaborative Tabletop Scenario Gaming

We specialize in facilitating interactive scenario events where community members work together in groups of six to eight using an illustrated tabletop exercise to assess their district’s current realities and ideate potential solutions. These events are extremely popular with participants and have proven to be an effective means of both providing information and bringing community members closer to the challenges a district is facing.