Launch Fellowship Program
Emphasizing partnership value through community building
NMSI Launch Fellowship is a six-week cohort program for education leaders committed to supporting students traditionally left out of STEM education.
Project Overview: The National Math and Science Initiative was experiencing a decline in the number of schools partnering year over year. The organization was looking for new ways to attract and retain potential school partners. The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) Launch Fellowship was developed to nurture new and warm school district relationships to convert them into a formal teacher training partnership with the National Math and Science Initiative.
Role: UX Strategist and Senior Program Manager, School Partnerships
Scope: 6 weeks
Project Goals:
Optimize the awareness stage of the customer journey by increasing client knowledge of the NMSI partnership and resources
Achieve 30% client conversion
Methods: Competitive analysis, customer journey mapping, prototyping, and user testing
Exploration and Discovery.
As a result of the stress that came with the uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers and students were unprepared for virtual instruction. Countless students fell through the cracks and there was a higher teacher turnover rate in school systems.
This brought teacher professional development organizations, such as NMSI, into an awkward space. More than ever, schools needed to build teachers' knowledge and capacity in their instruction. However, cautious school leaders feared overwhelming their remaining teachers with additional professional development among uncertain expectations around teacher instruction.
NMSI’s current interactions with prospective schools primarily leaned towards cold outreach. I hypothesized that NMSI needed to transform its initial interactions with schools to build the relationship, confidence, and understanding of its teacher professional development programs.
To understand where NMSI’s processes currently lay, I developed a customer journey map for the school partnerships team.
An opportunity that stuck out as I developed the customer journey was the idea of providing additional spaces where potential schools could sample products before committing. These opportunities fell in the awareness and consideration phases, so I considered ways to combine these solutions for these potential clients.
I hypothesized that this short-term commitment would allow potential customers to learn more about NMSI, give them mini “strategy” workshops that they can utilize immediately in their schools, and also provide insight into our more long-term product offerings.
To get a better understanding of what options looked like in the field, I conducted a competitive analysis of two education programs that offered fellowships.
I considered the strengths and opportunities from my competitive analysis to determine how to develop the NMSI Launch Fellowship program. Things I noted were:
It was important to provide an easy application process for the NMSI Launch Fellowship with clear connections to a network of professionals.
Since we would use this opportunity to recruit individuals in the awareness and consideration phases, it was helpful to explore offering leaders a stipend for attending the program as an incentive.
Design Process and Results.
I worked closely with our Program Design team to build out the courses for the Launch Fellowship. I provided low-fidelity course templates that outlined the titles, goals, objectives, and outcomes of the 5 sessions that will act as a starting point for the final courses.
The Program Design team was able to finalize the content, aligning it with the session goals and outcomes I developed. I then began the pilot/testing phase of the NMSI Fellowship and recruited 24 individuals across 8 schools who have had at least one previous touchpoint with NMSI to be our first participants. After each hour-long session, I shared a survey with participants that asked them to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity for the sessions they attended.
The results were insightful! Leaders shared the following positive feedback:
Enjoyed the opportunities to collaborate within and across school teams
The content covered was relevant - they often shared real examples around where the content aligned with some of their practices and addressed places where their school was not aligned with suggested strategies.
Another success - 19 out of 24 participants attended 4 or more sessions! Considering this pilot spanned over 5 months, it was good to see how many stayed with the program.
Leaders also shared the following areas of opportunity:
More opportunities to practice with new ideas/materials. Some schools were already having conversations related objectives of the fellowship – they were looking for deeper conversation and action items that aligned
Additional resources to support topics. Leaders wanted to know what else they should be doing outside of the fellowship – is there a library of resources?
More collaboration time during break-out groups. Leaders wanted longer dedicated time to unpack the concepts presented.
Conversion
We started with 8 schools and 5 moved forward with a partnership, resulting in a 62.5% conversion rate. This exceeded the stated goal by 32.5%. These schools stated that the NMSI Fellowship solidified their decision to move forward. This resulted in not only $564,122 of grant revenue but also shifted the mindset of leaders across schools, regardless if they moved forward with additional training support.
Recommendations.
I suggested the following to the leadership team based on the outcomes shared:
Recommendations
Fall and Spring sessions - this was a plan to scale the program
Increase meetings to 75 minutes to allow for group discussion after break-out groups
Connect fellowship content to teacher training instructional content
Identify the strategies, concepts, and outcomes that leaders should be striving towards
Provide clear connections and opportunities to upsell additional organization products