State Superintendent: Denise Juneau
About The State of Montana OPI
The State of Montana, Office of Public Instruction (OPI) has issued a marketing RFP, related to a research project, called MDUC (Creating a Montana Data Use Culture). The project will fund up to five research projects in collaboration with units of the university system. These projects will provide valuable information regarding how to improve student performance and college readiness for Montana students. It will also provide research results relating to helping teachers and prospective teachers use data in the OPI’s data warehouse to inform student performance. The role of the selected agency will be to promote the results of this work statewide to targeted audiences and market the data warehouse as an effective tool for those in the education community.
The OPI has received a federal grant to expand the use of the Office of Public Instruction (OPI)’s K-20 warehouse. The project, called MDUC (Creating a Montana Data Use Culture), will fund up to five research projects in collaboration with units of the university system. These projects will provide valuable information regarding how to improve student performance and college readiness for Montana students. It will also provide research results relating to helping teachers and prospective teachers use data in the OPI’s data warehouse to inform student performance.
The MT OPI’s data warehouse, called GEMS – Growth Enhancement for Montana’s Students, was built in 2009 and has been in use since then primarily to be used by teachers, administrators and education related interest groups including parents. Despite marketing efforts at education conferences, meetings, webinars and website postings, evaluations of the website indicate limited use by users to take advantage of the wealth of data and value that could be gleaned. By combining GEMS data with local data, it is possible for teachers and administrators to inform teaching techniques and approaches to better serve Montana students. However, evaluation results repeatedly point to a need to better market GEMS data along with providing targeted training to educators so they can use the website in a more focused way.
The MDUC project is designed to provide a couple of new approaches to address this issue:
- Fund new research projects to use the existing data available in GEMS. These projects are anticipated to provide results to help policy makers and education leaders with improved student performance.
- Provide curriculum to help teachers and student teachers learn techniques of data analysis which includes the use of GEMS data.
- Other research projects related to education issues pertinent to Montana.
As per the federal grant funding the project, the OPI will contract with an outside marketing firm to assure that new reporting tools as well as the general uses and functionality of GEMS are well understood by stakeholders and the public. The marketing component will be ongoing during the development and implementation phase, and it shall be designed to provide ongoing support allowing for ongoing improvements to the system.
The objective of this RFP is to find a contractor that shall:
- Provide a tool or method to be used to connect with stakeholders and the public for the purpose of building stakeholder buy-in.
- Provide an ongoing tool or method to be used for assessing the effectiveness of the marketing plan.
- Provide a tool or method to be used to determine what improvements can be made to the marketing plan yearly through the life of the grant.
- Explain how the tools will provide with clarity the necessary information to the Project Leadership Team and allow them to take action in response to any feedback.
- Explain how the measurement and marketing tools utilized by the contractor are efficient, accurate, and cost-effective.
- Explain past relevant experience with marketing projects and with the education system.
Proposal due on September 12th to:
Rhonda Grandy
rhgrandy@mt.gov
+1 (406) 444-3320