Going the Extra Yard for Teachers
Leveraging the reach of the College Football Playoff National Championship to celebrate and empower educators
In 2015, college football’s annual championship game moved away from the BCS Bowl Game to a brand-new playoff model: The College Football Playoff National Championship.
The board of directors of the newly minted championship game allocated the proceeds of its merchandise sales to fund the College Football Playoff Foundation (CFPF): an entity dedicated to elevating the teaching profession by inspiring and empowering educators.
As the CFPF considered its first steps, the leadership team approached Ensemble to ideate, strategize, and build a signature event to celebrate educators in the host cities where the National Championship Game would be played each year. The evolution of those conversations led to the creation of the Extra Yard for Teachers Summit.
The Summit has evolved from market to market, from TED-styled talks, to serving as a community hub for teachers and their families, to celebration, and more. In six years, we reached more than 6,500 teachers across Dallas (2015), Phoenix (2016), Tampa (2017) Atlanta (2018), San Jose, CA (2019), and New Orleans (2020) – and thousands more with online content posted from the conferences. We’ve worked with hundreds of speakers, entertainers, artists, and community partners to build out programming to make the teachers the real winners of the CFP National Championship Game weekend.
At the Summit, we’ve flash-funded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of DonorsChoose.org teacher projects, facilitated classroom makeovers, helped connect teachers to down payments on homes, produced music videos, and had so much fun along the way!
SCOPE OF WORK
Event Concept and Execution
Speaker Curation and Program Development
Stage and Production Management
Video Production
Graphic Design Management
Sponsor/Partner Benefit Fulfillment
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What started out as an opportunity to work alongside The Dallas Morning News, The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and several other partner institutions to produce the annual Dallas Festival of Ideas turned into a logistical tour-de-force at the 11th hour when weather threatened to implode the outdoor festival. This was our second at-bat with the Dallas Festival of Ideas, and our role had expanded to include all artistic production, speakers and stage production, as well as to oversee the team responsible for vendor and community partner exhibits.
The Festival steering committee had a vision to host the event on Dallas’ front lawn: the sprawling plaza in front of Dallas City Hall. When the weather reports painted increasingly grim pictures of the weekend forecast, the team made the hard call to move the entire Festival inside the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center. Within a 72-hour period, our team re-conceived sites plans and space usage, reformatted performance and art installations in the new confines, worked with dozens of community partners to revamp their schedules and plans, ate a lot of pizza, chocolate and coffee (and wine) in our war room, and moved a festival. While the weather didn’t ever materialize to quite the level we were fearing, it was about 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity, so we were all grateful for the air conditioning. And for the dance party we had with the Polyphonic Spree as the Festival’s closing act!
SCOPE OF WORK
Event Concept and Execution
Speaker Curation and Program Development
Stage and Production Management
Art and Performance Curation and Installation Management
Sponsor/Partner Benefit Fulfillment
Exhibitor Management