001Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. You. Okay. Good evening. We called a special board meeting for Wednesday, September 24th, 2025 to order at 6:40 p.m.. Roll call please. Miss Olson. Director. Banks. Doctor. Bankers will be joining us momentarily. Director Kerry here. More or less. Director Lee here. Director Huber here. Director. Jorgensen. Present. Director. Malcolm. Kim. Director. Here. So on six. There are six board directors who are, here in person joining us. And, Director Kerry is joining us, more or less. As he journeys, towards his destination. Thank you. Please join me as we observe a moment of silence. Thank you. Director, safely, can you please make the motion to adopt the agenda? Sure. I move that the Board of Education adopts the agenda as presented. Second, moved and seconded. Roll call, please. Director bank. Hi. Director Kerry.
002I director Haley. I director Huber. I director Jorgensen. I director Matt Peckham. Director. I eyes have it. The agenda has been adopted as presented. We do have public comments, pertaining to action items specifically on the agenda. Miss Olsen, are there any anybody signed up for public comments today? Okay. There are no public comments for, the action agenda items, the non-action agenda items which are usable will have a public hearing next. Week. During the regular board meeting. So, to the community, if you want to come and comment on the exhibits that the board has been listening to in the past two work sessions. Next week is the opportunity. This is, your opportunity to provide a feedback on your schools. So please take this opportunity to come and talk to us about what you see in your
003schools and the improvement plans that were discussed over the last two work sessions. Action agenda item. Moving on to that is one next, one action agenda item on the agenda today, which is a contract award. Comprehensive marketing services phase one contract. Director Jurgensen, can you please make the motion for action item C1? Yes. I move that the Board of Education approves contract C 2026 0027. In the amount of 500,000 to we as them for comprehensive marketing services. Phase one ending March 25th, 2026. Second moved and seconded. Superintendent call, this is a new agenda item. I'm going to hand it over to you to introduce this item. Yeah, I'm super excited. On behalf of our team, present a contract opportunity for the board tonight in this idea of thinking differently about how we connect with both
004our current customers, our future customers and even customers that we've lost over time. I think the the name alone of the contract here, the company for the contract we asked them, should really help people understand the way we're trying to think differently about this. I'll let them speak on their behalf. But I do also want to highlight the, the strength in the process. Miss Odom will, of course, go through that when she goes through her awesome soliloquy of how she describes that. But just first of all, to any of the organizations and companies and individuals that, competed for this and the process and the way that it was conducted. And I appreciate the board members that, were a part of that process as well. So I'm going to hand over to chief armor first. Thank
005you. Good evening. Board. I'll be super brief, just to remind you of the context that got us here this evening. On August 6th, at the board meeting, you approved a contingency transfer for us to issue an RFP toward this contract in the amount of $500,000. From there, we followed the RFP process that, miss Odom will speak to in just a moment. But I'm also going to welcome, Doctor Jess wise up because she gets to talk about the strategy and the return on investment pieces that we talked about when the board approved the contingency transfer in order to issue the RFP. Good evening. Nice to be back. It's been a while since I've been up here. I will try to be brief, although since I was out, I. I feel I have a little bit more
006to say to catch up on this. And I some of you know this about me. In a past life, I did a lot of sort of research on storytelling, and it's something I still think about every day, because at the heart of good communications is great storytelling. And to no one's surprise, I have raised a four year old who is also a rapacious story reader and teller. He's a little bit of a raconteur himself, and so I will start with a story. Just this morning, he and I were reading a kid version of the Odyssey. And as because he read so many stories, he's a harsh critic, right? So we always rate them. That was a good one. That was a bad one. We finished the Odyssey and he said, no, that was a good
007story, mommy. And then he looked at me and he said, his wife must have been so scared for him. And I looked at my husband and I said, you know what? That's right. If you took ten years to come home from work, you would also have to have a really good story for me to open the door and welcome you back into the house. And I started thinking about a lot about Odyssey. And I'm not going to get into the nuances of that. But he is. He is known for his persuasive abilities, for better or for worse, sometimes for good. In, sometimes for not. And I was thinking about us in comparison and what we're missing. And the difference between us is, in order to persuade his audience, Odysseus had to embellish his stories. But
008I don't need a cyclops to embellish my stories. I don't need Polyphemus. I need to make that up. Even though it'll be fun and we challenge our apprentices to do those kinds of things all the time. But the point is, we have the truth in the heart of our school district, and that's the students. And that's the amazing things that are goi It's time that we elevate those stories to the position that they deserve to do the hard work of persuading our community. That district 11 is worth investing in, and it's worth sending your kids to your neighborhood schools. Our students deserve that trust. Our teachers deserve that trust, and our buildings deserve that trust. You have even seen that. I think the strategy and our Instagram and the way that that shifted, if you're
009on Instagram, we realized that we were doing too much. We were trying to overcomplicate and explain and frame and tell and orchestrate the story in such a way that we wanted our viewers to receive it. When we peeled back and started just showing the unadulterated pictures of what's happening in our schools every day, our engagement has gone up twofold. It's it's remarkable. And we get comments all the time on your Instagram instead of I'm not sure what's going on on your Instagram. Right? That's just a small example of how this strategy works. My team works tirelessly to make this happen every day. You've seen us in schools, Justin, Derek, Allison, everyone. I'm going to shout out my father Tella, because he's filming this right now and he'll get mad at me. Mike, we appreciate you.
010Everyone's in schools, but we're not enough. And we're not big enough. We work very hard on boots on the ground. We've had some success in small places and pockets where we've really put our whole team to it. For example, base camp, our home school, enrollment, as soon as we put a marketing campaign behind that and we had boots on the ground, advertisements and engagements. We saw a boost in enrollment interest by 200 students, not all of those converted to enrollment, but that's how many interest forms are coming in. We've had that at Mitchell with our flight program, but that's one off, one at a time that we will continue working at. We have to work on each individual school and each individual program. But our district deserves what our families deserve. What our community deserves
011is for the entire city to see what's happening, not just pockets. And that's why we need this marketing firm to help elevate all that we know is all is going on and that's why we chose we as them. They understand that everything has to be student centered. That that's the truth. That it has to be rooted in what's real and what's happening in classrooms right now in this classroom. This contract gives us the ability to do that. So thank you for, entertaining this contract tonight. I hope you see the value of the storytelling. Hope you all had to go back and reread the Odyssey, if you haven't in a little while. And I'm going to actually pass it over to our partners that we asked them to introduce themselves. Thank you. Good evening everybody. Thanks
012for having us today. My name is Ashlyn Cutty. I'm one of the principals at BSM. I'm joined by Danielle TransLink, who's the other principal at BSM. Between the two of us, we oversee strategy and creative in our firm. And, we're glad to be here. And thank you for having us. We've been asked to talk about a couple of things. One of which is, I don't know if I should jump in or not, but I will, if it's regardless of sort of what our approach and strategy will be. With regards to the campaign here, we know that there is a there's been a lot of work that's already been done. We know that we don't need to recreate the wheel here. So what we are trying to do is we're trying to supercharge it, amplify it.
013We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. We want to make sure that the good stories that are out here are being told and being told well, and it's being shared widely and it's being consumed, and it's actually resulting into conversions that we're hoping to measure. And we can come back and talk to you about those results as snapshots and those reports at the end of the campaign as well. We also want to talk about, as Jessica just mentioned, storytelling, but authentic storytelling. I think one of the things that, you know, we try to shy away from is trying to get those authentic voices to talk about their own stories. One of one of the fundamental things that we have learned in our decade and a half of being around is that some of the
014most authentic stories are the most powerful, and the ones that actually drive change, and that drives the conversion that we look for as well. So that's that's the type of thing that we also look for. The other thing is, we don't work in isolation. We work very closely with our client partners, and we think of our clients as partners. We don't think of them as clients in the industry. You know, I understand as an industry, one of the things that we've been taught to do is talk about accounts. So our clients and accounts and we are the agency that actually services their account. We will look at you, our clients, as partners. And so when we think about sustainability, we look at how we can make sure that we provide that level of sustainability once
015we're gone. So we're going to be here for two months. We'll have six rounds of a campaign. So we want to make sure that all the work that we do is grounded in real data, and also comes with the recommendation and report that we hand over back to yourselves so that you can take the work forward. You don't necessarily need to bring us back. We want to be able to support all the work that you have to do going forward as well. When we think about how we're going to do this, we look at a multi-channel approach. So we want to reach the most widest audiences that we possibly can reach. They'll be targeted. There'll be audiences, demographics that we're looking at as well, but we want to look at that multi-channel approach as well.
016And and the last but not least, this is around that reporting piece which I mentioned. It's transparent. We want to be able to share those reports to you. And it'll be done monthly in the form of a snapshot. And then of course, we'll have a final report at the end of the day as well, to be shared with you as well. The question about why us? It's a great question as to why we ask them. I think the superintendent alluded to our name. Our name came about from a discussion that Fatima and I had when we first put the agents together. And it came from a formula that we were putting together, which was lea equals us plus Nam. In the agency world, there's a lot of us plus them or us and them and
017us versus them that we think about with regards to customers and brands and what we wanted to do was we wanted to change the narrative, and we wanted to make it so that we were much closer and we were bringing those customers and brands together, and we wanted to bring them closer so they could have those conversations together as well. That's how you create brand affinity and that's built into our ethos. It's what's driven us for the past decade and a half. Why us? Just speaking to our history. We've been doing a lot of work in education. And we've been doing that across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East as well. We are an international firm all the way through, and we do work in six continents. I joke around about this, but,
018when we have the seventh continent call us. That's the little penguin's calling us. We will certainly go to Antarctica as well. Until that time, we are stuck to the six continents. You know, the other, the other aspect of why, as we have worked with students of all ages, from K to 12, all the way into post-secondary as well, and we've had those conversations with them across multiple campaigns. And that has led us to delivering on successes, not just by beautiful creative, but actually creative that's grounded in ness results, in our industry. David Ogilvy, who is a giant, basically one, said, if it doesn't sell, it's not creative. And I think we live that ethos as well. They may run one of the largest holding agencies in the world, but we actually believe in that ethos
019as well. My eyes are shot, but let me just look at this experience at scale. We have done work, as I said, in numerous countries, and we have run campaigns in numerous countries. One of the examples that was in our proposal that you probably have, in your packets, was a a campaign that we ran for an initiative called Teen Mental Health. Teen mental health, an org was an initiative, that was first championed by doctor stand culture. By the time we were done. And I don't want to belabor the time here, but by the time we were done, we were in 142 countries organically delivering content across multiple channels, and we had over 7.2 million users consuming that content on a monthly basis. And that was just the last stat that I have in my hands.
020But that was incrementally growing every month as well. We do work at scale. We do work at that level of economy, of scale, and we continue to do that as well, fostered by governments. We have worked with multiple state governments and even federal governments as well in the United States. The state of Colorado, we have worked with them in the past Wyoming, California, Hawaii, Commonwealth of Virginia. And, and you name it. And we've also worked with the federal agencies as well. USAID, even they were around. And as well as in Canada with the government of Canada and various state agencies there as well. And then, of course, in international, geographies as well. Recognized of leadership, I can tell you that we've won numerous awards, and our boardrooms are full of a lot of hardware. But
021I think what really drives us is what delivers on the organizational goals that our organizations sort of challenged us with, and that's what delivers on what our successes is. And that's what we are so proud of, because we actually have an 85% client retention rate. We are committed to sort of delivering on each and every time. The last piece is KPI transparency. Our, our roots as an agency was built in business consulting. So as a business person, one of the things that I'm passionate about is data. I love data, and although fashion is the creative in the house, I like to see what the KPIs look like. I like to see what the results look like. So everything that we do is rooted in those results. Everything that we try to do is not just
022marketing results, solutions to be marketing metrics that we look at, but that, again, how does it tie into organizational metrics and how does it move the needle for the organization as well? We call it brown and green dollar returns, but I can talk about that until the cows come home. I'm going to go sit down. Someone else can come up, but I'd love to take any questions after the fact as well. Thank you again for the time. I feel like I'm speed dating. Good evening, Board of Education then. Thank you. Superintendent. Call. Thank you, Chief Latimer and Doctor Wise for your testimony and support. And welcome, team. We ask them to D11. I'm going to go over our RFP structure, the evaluation process, and then the contract, overview itself. I do want to highlight the
023Rosa Garcia led the procurement, process and that there was a lot of people that did a lot of work. And, I'd like to express my gratitude for a yeoman's job to get this to the point it is today. So let me get started on how we structured the RFP. We structured the RFP to have two phases. One phase is to do the high intensity monthly waves of, campaign efforts. And phase two was more or less our sustainability strategy. That would take the deliverables from phase one, and it would campaign and run it out for the next two years. When we issued this nationwide RFP, we received 139 pulses from companies nationwide that downloaded this RFP. We received 33 intent to bids and ultimately 17 proposals that were responsive and responsive from companies spreading the nation.
024All the proposals that we received bid on both phase one and phase two work. We structured the pricing in the RFP so we could have more of a comparable price point. So we gave, scope to budgets. And we had each of the vendors identify what work could they do for that price point. So it made it more of a level of effort comparison to stay within our budget. Vendors had to submit a written technical proposal, and we asked them to ensure that they provided relevant past performance accomplishments, along with samples of what this work really looked like. We also had them provide a video that demonstrated their approach to meet this requirement, along with telling us what is creativeness look like to you? Go to our website and tell us in 15 seconds something about
025D11. So we were able to evaluate this professional consulting service on what their previous relative work was, and as well as what creativity meant to them to ensure the strategic visioning was in alignment with the desired outcomes. The initial phase of evaluation included individual evaluations and our team consensus down selection from the 17 proposals we down selected to the top five ranked vendors for both phase one and phase two work. All five firms were invited to participate in virtual interviews. These interviews focused on how each company would leverage the stories of 23,000 students as a strategic asset. We asked them to define their approach to build a deep understanding of our community, and we also included and asked them why you described the values and strategic message that makes your team the best strategic partner
026for D11. This evaluation team down selected to the top two ranked firms that were forwarded to our superintendent for final selection. These evaluations included our team makeup from our core functional experts to senior leadership that represented as IT advisors, our superintendent, and even board representation. It is important to note that during the initial down selection phase, the evaluation team decided to pause on the phase two award. They down selected to the top ranked firms, but didn't want that to drive the phase one outcome because phase two was going to spread a strategically sustained the work from phase one. Next week, we're going to pick that up and move forward with finalizing evaluations for phase two efforts. All vendors will have been notified of their current status for phase one and phase two. Now, you have
027heard testimony from two former and doctor Ys undesired outcomes. The strategies that we're using to make sure we implement are what does this look like campaign and our and our anticipated return on investment. I'm not going to repeat or read from this slide, but this is what we put in the RFP. This is what we evaluated. This is what we discussed throughout our evaluations, throughout our interviews, and even in our execution to develop the contract. To wrap up my overview. Here is the contract details. I'm just going to share at a very high level to ensure phase one. We want to make sure we express to everybody the viewing audience that this is to ensure family voters, community leaders, understand the value that our district's transformation is bringing. D11 is launching our campaign. This is
028what it looks like built on authentic stories from schools, from students. And this campaign brings to life this strategy, showcasing what real success looks like in the classroom, in our community, and in the lives of our students. Phase one will have six monthly campaigns that have high intensity, refreshing creative assets. It will build and amplify district messaging, brand standards, active storytelling, and scalable events across different platforms. They will work through Doctor Wise's office to ensure alignment and strategy and voice to our board and to our superintendent. At the end of this contract, you will get our monthly. You will get dashboards that show outcomes to each of these monthly campaigns. It will identify KPIs. And at the very end of this campaign, you will get a return on investment that correlates what these measures have
029delivered and showcase. So you'll get information on how the reach you're going to get, information on how the message is being received. You're going to get touch points. But collectively, at the very end of this campaign, we're going to get all the intellectual property ownership that creative work, the strategy planning and, KPI tracking for us to continue in our two year sustainability effort to follow with the phase two initiative. All of our standard terms and conditions are included in this contract. And this concludes my overview of the structure of the RFP. Our evaluation process and the contract details. I turn it back over to the board for any questions they might have for this team. Thank you. Superintendent. Or do you have anything to add before I open it up to the board? I do
030not. Okay. Thank you. Board. Comments questions before I call for, a vote on this. Director. Bankers, you are up first. Yes. I have a question for you. Did your presentation and the experience at scale I grew up with? Yes yes yes, yes. Experience at scale. And I don't know, you have to go back some slides. What you had said was, a 94% plus conversion rate. You don't understand what the conversion rate means. I believe it was talking about your campaign in Wyoming. Conversion for us, is really dependent on what it means to drive business or organizational goals. So in your case, it could be enrollment. It could be awareness, it could be recruitment. It could be any one of those sort of metrics that we want to measure. Most other organizations, most of the brands
031would have different definitions of what conversion looks like. And in this case what we saw in, for example, Wyoming. For them it was awareness and recruitment. And so the 94% conversion that we received for them was to drive recruitment for, young moms to come into their programs and take part of the program that was federally funded, as well. I see, yeah. Thank you. Pleasure. Just do you want to add anything to the term conversion rate from a marketing perspective? Was that did that suffice? I think that suffices. I think for us, Allison Burrow uses that most frequently to talk about converting from an interest to an actual enrollment. That's what we're doing in enrollment terms. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Director. Bankers. Director Jorgensen, is there. We see this. Everything we're wanting to do and
032and that those three slides that the three sections that Chris had on that slide, the, you know, our desired outcomes piece is huge. We we have a story to tell. We've had transformational change, and we're we're still doing more. We are just wanting to be able to have that storytelling approach to folks that are, you know, maybe like my mom, who we went through D11, but she's still in village seven area, and unless she had the sun on the school board, she wouldn't know what was going on in D11. And so we want to reach those people that are also voters and that have their their property taxes coming to, to the district. And so, yeah, this left box here, you know, we really do want to show the excellent things that we've been doing
033over these past few years. In anticipation of a bigger picture of the fact that we have a big bond, ask that we're going to be considering in the next year or so. Will we be how does it work with the contract? Are we going to be focusing on first priority is enrollment. Second is community awareness. Third is, you know, just elevated visibility. Is there a way that we're that you're going to break down your efforts? Or is every piece you do through the multimedia approach going to touch on all of those? Obviously you can't if you canvas a post, be too busy. Right. Like like you said, Jessica, so are we pushing mainly for the enrollment piece because that drives our income dollars? Or are we pushing more for, hey, whether you've got kids in
034the district or your elderly or your business owner, we want you to know what's going on. And D11 is there is that is there an approach? You can talk about that briefly? Sure. Absolutely. You go first. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. No, that's a great question. And I think the answer to that, I think, is a combination of things. What we don't want to do is because this is six months where we can try to do is try to do everything right. So what we want to do is we want to maximize that, efficiency and efficacy across those six months. And what we would try to do is talk about all the good things that are happening here. And it would be geared towards enrollment, recruitment. But as as a byproduct of that, we're building on the
035brand of D11 as well. Okay. And the only way, the only way I can explain it is if the more good stories that come out and the more it resonates, the more the brand actually gets more effective and impactful and sticky. And conversely, that also becomes a conversion point for us, which leads to enrollment as well. So I think there is a there is a there is a combination there. But if you were to ask me, you know, actually, you know, would we want to ever do an awareness campaign or a brand campaign or whatever? Those are very much dedicated to those efforts. But I think in this sort of six month span, the efforts geared towards that for enrollment piece tied to building the brand affinity, which is people wanting to love the brand,
036is what we would be driving towards. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. And there's some print budget I saw in the I forget where in all the papers. Is that going to be. What would that be geared towards? Is that more for folks that maybe aren't online like younger generations or, Sorry, could you repeat that again, please? There's a budget for, monthly print spend. Yes. Is that like mail pieces for those that aren't on smartphones or, How? Yeah. So because we talk about a multichannel campaign, we want to do is we want to hit everybody, including your mom, to make sure that taxpayers, along with, families, know that there is that is an ever changing evolution that's happening here at D11. And people want to love and be behind and want to be very supportive of. And
037that's the reason the print line is in there as well. And this could take the form of print advertising, but it could also take the form of printed media that goes out there as well, which we haven't sort of narrowed down just yet. Sure. But it has been put in there just to make sure that we also capture the majority of the audiences that are out there. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. And just as an affirmation to that commitment to this multi-way, we've gone back to sending report cards this year. So I made a contingency transfer for the postage cost to be able to send report cards home, because we know that not every one of our families believes in a parent portal. And the way to access the which some people would think of a
038more efficient way to get it. So we do believe that we are missing market, to be able to talk about the great things that are happening and to invite people to join into new opportunities. It's very infrequently that we have collateral even to hand to folks that are here that attend our meetings of of the incredible things that happen. Are you good? Thank you. Any other comments or feedback at this time? I don't see any other comments or feedback at this time from the boat. So, just as a feedback to you, you guys, welcome first to district 11. We look forward to working with you, over the next six years. Six months, maybe it's, that's not up to me. That's for future boards to make that decision. But, one of the things that, we struggled
039with and as a board member and as a parent, often I get to engage with community members. There are a lot of good things that are happening in the district, but with all the noise that surrounds us, that message doesn't end up into our delivered stakeholders, whether they are going to be even 11 parents. We have tried numerous ways to approach them through newsletters, and social media. We struggle with that. The good things that are happening. So the good things that we hear about on the board meetings, the student experiences. Often when I go to talk with parents, parents are completely oblivious about what's happening out here. Those are the stories that we want to resonate out there. And this was mentioned already at the board that the board is considering a bond, probably a
040year from now. So we need to build up our community trust. That's one of the, return on the investment that is, mentioned out there. And, increase the positive image of the school district as well. So, those are the opportunities that you have in front of you. And, to the community that is watching, and you may have numerous questions on the subject matter. And whenever we spend, money on marketing, often we end up getting, a lot of feedback from the community that this is the board trying to, promote themselves. This is not anything that the board's spending on themselves. This is about sharing the stories of our students with the, with the taxpayers, whether they have a child in the school district or not. And to have the positive image of all the things that are
041happening in district 11 to share it with the community. So, with that, seeing no further questions from the board at this point in time. Roll call please. Mussels. Director banks, I, director Carrie. I director Haley, I director Huber I director Jorgensen. I director I know. Okay, so, the, contract. Is approved. And again, welcome to, district 11, and we look forward to working with you. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, moving on to the next item on the agenda. This is the not non-action item. You know, this is the unified school improvement plan for, Adams, Wilson, Carver, man, and Galileo Schweikert and Mitchell. Mitchell high schools. The board has reviewed all these uses, in depth during the recent work session. So we are not going to have a lengthy discussion about it at the non-action meeting at this
042point in time. We have asked all the necessary questions at the work sessions. And if you have any additional questions, please bring it to, superintendent calls attention between now and next week when this comes as an action agenda item. Superintendent, call anything you need to add at this time? No. Nothing new. Okay. Thank you. Moving to the next item on the, non-action agenda item. It's the unified district improvement plan. Ditto to what I commented on the previous agenda item on this. We just discussed this earlier at the work session today. And again, this will come as an action agenda item. Future request. Any questions directed to Superintendent Gall. Again, I assume you have nothing additional to add on this. Nothing new. Thank you. Okay. So both, any comments or questions before they adjourned for the,
043before we move on to executive session on this matter? Okay. I don't see anything. So moving on from the non action items to executive session. We do have executive session this evening. Director bankers, can you please make the motion to move into executive session? I move that the Board of Education convenes into executive session to discuss legal advice for CRS 20 4-6, dash 402 for B particular matter. Colorado Springs Education Association CSA strike related issues. Second. Moved and seconded. Roll call please. Director Bank. Yes, I Director Kerry I director Heffley I director Huber I director Jorgensen. I director Mel Packham director I deserve it. We will move into executive session and if it is necessary, we will return back to the board. Yes. If not, we'll adjourn from executive session. Thank you. Oh. Oh oh.
044Yes. I. Can. You. Yes. Oh. Oh. 00000.