The Education Partnership
The Education Partnership
Embedded Files
Fall 2024 - Spring 2025
How can we help teachers, students, and community members become more aware of and engage more with TEP’s work on education inequity?
Project Lead
Ramitha Mallavarapu
Team Members
Gryphon Chong, Karen Gonzalez-Cifuentes, Saanvi Kandala, Kajal Mehta
Community Partner
The Education Partnership
Context
Working with The Education Partnership
Working with The Education Partnership
The Education Partnership (TEP) aims to provide school supplies to students and teachers who need them in Southwestern, PA. Their programs include a Teacher Resource Center and the Adopt-a-School Program, and they have a strong commitment to sustainability and environmental impact.
Teacher Resource Center - an area for teachers to come in twice a semester and get whatever supplies they need; also includes a supply drive every semester
Adopt-a-School - community/corporate partners providing students homework kits throughout a specific "adopted" school
Problem Space
Problem Space
Our problem space was centered around how we could help teachers, students, and other community members engage and become more aware of TEP's work on education inequity.
Our problem space was centered around how we could help teachers, students, and other community members engage and become more aware of TEP's work on education inequity.
Project Overview
Project Overview
We created a marketing archive structure for The Education Partnership to utilize internally, and we also created a visual flowchart for TEP staff to have easy access to the archive.
Research
Learning about how The Education Partnership operates
Learning about how The Education Partnership operates
Expert Interview with The Education Partnership Staff
We toured TEP's headquarters in the fall, getting to see their different operations and learn more about their different programs. Afterwards, we interviewed TEP's Director of Operations and Director of Outreach to get a better understanding of The Education Partnership's mission, how they currently carried out their marketing, and what directions they were hoping that our project was going to go in.
Modeling
Synthesizing stakeholder needs based on our research
Synthesizing stakeholder needs based on our research
Using an Affinity Diagram, we organized the information that we got from the expert interview and then labelled the responses to each question based on similarity, resulting in six main categories. From this process, we found that the biggest areas where TEP wanted to make a change included their marketing strategy, improving their website and search engine optimization, and meeting needs that they are currently unable to reach.
Reframe
Narrowing down the problem space
Narrowing down the problem space
After we looked through our Affinity Diagram, we started re-examining our project's direction, considering each one of the six primary categories that we had identified. We identified TEP's Marketing Strategy as the ideal area that we wanted to help The Education Partnership with because it had a direct effect on the other categories: a more efficient marketing strategy could help bring the spotlight onto Un-reached Needs, better showcase TEP's mission, and encourage sponsors to donate to TEP.
How Can We Statements:
How can we help TEP strategize effective marketing guidelines that adequately convey their message?
How can we help TEP structure the division of responsibilities between staff members in relation to their marketing strategy?
How can we standardize TEP’s use of their marketing strategy?
How can we streamline the marketing process in a way that intuitively integrates the standardized strategy?
Design Goals:
Streamline and standardize TEP's marketing strategies.
Ideate
Coming up with Various Ideas
Coming up with Various Ideas
Refined Concepts Storyboards
Scenario Checklist
Responsibilities Flowchart
Community Partner Feedback
Based on TEP's feedback on what would best serve their needs, we decided on creating marketing archive flowchart and accompanying folder structure that would allow TEP to revisit their past social media post and marketing materials and quickly create new materials.
Build
Building out a solution
Building out a solution
Low Fidelity Prototypes
High Fidelity Prototype
Test
Getting feedback on our ideas
Getting feedback on our ideas
We met with The Education Partnership staff to determine what categories would best work with their workflow. We ended up basing our flowchart off some internal documents that they were able to provide us.
Final Product - Marketing Archive
The Education Project Internal Staff
Determine the message to be conveyed.
Follow flowchart through what makes most sense for the message. Select the relevant Story Type, then follow it down to the relevant Category.
Click on the link in the final category that best represents your message to find past examples of similar marketing materials.
Create marketing materials.
Add created materials to the relevant folder for future reference.
Reflection
Looking back on the work we accomplished
Looking back on the work we accomplished
One of the things we learned as a team from working with The Education Partnership was the importance of remaining flexible. We pivoted from our original plans to help TEP
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