Ready for success

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the College Success Foundation (CSF) seeks to create a sustainable culture of college and career readiness for students of color and those from low-income families throughout Washington state. CSF hosts multiple programs serving youth from grades six through 12.

CSF wanted to launch a major community outreach campaign to improve college readiness among key communities. They lacked current, targeted research to inform their efforts as it related to emergent best practices and desired strategies.

Understanding the importance of engaging all key stakeholders, Pyramid interviewed and conducted focus groups with a range of individuals—including school administrators, teachers, community leaders and school board members—to help craft a wide angle view of what is needed to increase college and career readiness. Pyramid’s research findings were used to develop a set of best practices for increasing parental involvement, community engagement and effective communications in schools.

Pyramid’s research informed the developent of Are You Ready?—a campaign to help schools and school districts engage their communities in supporting students as they prepare for college and career—for which we created a strategic plan. Pyramid produced a campaign identity, message platform, toolkit for principals, brochures to recruit mentors and internships from employers and campaign posters and banners. We worked with CSF to organize and produce a day-long conference with principals and counselors from the 16 high schools to present the materials and discuss the challenges and best practices for engaging the community.

To date, CSF has granted 4,000 scholarships and raised over $300 million to give students the necessary preparation for college success.