OUR TURN’S VISION 

Youth advance education justice as the most important civil rights movement of now and the future. 

OUR TURN’S MISSION

Our Turn is a revolutionary movement dismantling oppressive structures that limit access to quality education. We ignite youth-led change, activating young people of color and allies to catalyze a national movement to heal and liberate current and future generations of students. 

THE OPPORTUNITY

Our Turn activates and trains the next generation of diverse civic leaders who know what’s possible for all students because they’ve built power in their communities through leadership development, grassroots organizing, and movement building. Our work and members have been recognized by Fast Company, Buzzfeed, The 74 Million, and more. We are procuring a web development agency to support the expansion of our digital footprint and our ability to manage a plug-and-play system supporting base-building efforts. We are looking to engage students across the nation who will join Our Turn as youth organizers leading the way toward a more equitable education system. 

WHY WORK WITH OUR TURN?

We approach our work with the audacity of believing that youth have the power to rewrite the rules of education in our country and the humility to know that thousands have come before us in this fight. We know that young people, especially young people of color, have been shut out by decision makers who shape their educational experience and respond by providing transformational leadership development and grassroots organizing experience that flip the traditional power dynamic on its head. Our team is highly collaborative and works with urgency, passion, and — most importantly — a lot of joy. We create intentional spaces to build our relationships and set aside time to celebrate milestones, problem-solve together, or just share our latest Our Turn swag! We are looking for purposeful, entrepreneurial social justice activists to join us and continue the fight for educational equity.

SCOPE OF WORK

WEB DESIGN

Our Turn currently hosts web management through NationBuilder.  NationBuilder is a platform that supports Our Turn’s organizing efforts and functions as our CRM system.

Our Turn’s website was launched in 2020.  We are looking to revamp the website such that all functions align with our digital plan for hybrid organizing, including both on and offline organizing involving youth in current coalitions (CA, CO, NC, and ATL) and those outside of established coalitions across the country.  

Our success will be measured by our ability to demonstrate scale and impact, as we see Our Turn coalitions grow, and achieve a steady flow of newly engaged students across the nation.

Key issues we would like to address with website will include:

• Positioning of key information
• Increase conversion rate
• Promote coalition expansion/Our Turn’s scale and mobilization footprint
• Amplification of youth voice, thought leadership, and impact
• Enhanced storytelling around the connection between racial/social and education justice
• Highlight successes/impact driven via youth-led campaigns (policy and practice changes, for example)
• Is NationBuilder the best platform to use for Our Turn to achieve base-building objectives, or are there other options that are more conducive to supporting a well functioning website?

UX/UI DESIGN (HYBRID MODEL DESIGN)

Our Turn will launch a national remote organizing program in 2022 to engage young people across the country who want to take action around education justice but don’t live in an area where we have an existing coalition.

Context / What We Know

• The hybrid model will allow leaders to:
  • Engage in direct action with Our Turn on a national level
  • Access trainings & materials to get started with local organizing where they are
  • Access leader calls and national mobilizations to be a part of the national Our Turn community
  • Mobilize their local community with the support of targeted resources and actions
  • Participate in individual/collective storytelling + narrative shifting efforts

• The hybrid model will allow Our Turn to:
  • Mobilize leaders on a national level toward national policy goals in line with the Student Agenda
  • Build our digital organizing field while supporting our local organizing
  • Create entry points for anyone who wants to get involved in education justice
  • Expand our reach for taking meaningful action, engaging young people, and building a broad, diverse, and inclusive field
  • Expand national name recognition 
    
    

DRIP COMMUNICATIONS/USER JOURNEY NURTURE 

Our goal is to make it easy for students to enter a CRM pipeline that allows our team to easily step them up the ladder of engagement, while tracking insights that inform how to better engage users and maximize retention.  We would also  like to make it easy for youth to launch sub-coalitions in their cities, whether organizing at their schools or across entire school districts.  

We would like to explore automated drip campaigns and other tools that would improve outreach and engagement.  

SEO/SMO

We aim to increase our digital presence, build brand awareness, and amplify our movement.  According to our brand health report generated on Sprout Social, our penetration level and ability to align with shared-voice involving other comparative youth-led social justice organizations is low.  Therefore, as we deliver a strategic brand-communications plan that will help us to improve in key areas that would improve brand health, we are prioritizing the need to build social media audience reach.  Coincidentally we would like to deploy a back-end SMO plan that supports the delivery of our social media strategy and enhances our ability to expand the first level of our ladder of engagement, defined as followers.

To drive traffic to our site, we are looking to increase our rank in SEO.  Additionally, we are aiming to improve connectivity, and build a strong base of participants while building our social media followers and audience reach.  It is important to establish a system that ensures these two digital expansion tools are in sync as we aim to base-build and establish brand equity among audiences. 

Our base-building ladder of engagement: 

PROPOSALS

PROJECT TIMELINE: MARCH - MAY

Proposals should outline a project management plan that  includes onboarding/discovery, design, testing, soft launch/testing, full launch and post-launch management for a minimum of 30 days.  The 30 day post-launch time allowance will ensure that the system is functioning properly while reporting key information.  The agency will need to reserve time to ensure that any tweaks to any aspect of the SOW are able to be made within the proposed timeline.

KEY INSTRUCTIONS:

The RFP response period will last between March 1, 2022 and April 15th, 2022. The Q&A period will take place March 12th - March 15th EOD with responses shared between March 16th and 17th.  All submissions should include an estimated breakdown of hours against the budget and the scope of work that has been provided.

Submit proposals to [email protected]. Short list announcements will be shared no later than April 7th, 2022. Short list presentations will take place during the week of April 11th.