SPREADING THE WORD, ORGANICALLY

The Wildflower Foundation

Project Details

Client The Wildflower Foundation
Date Ongoing
Skills Spreading the Word, Branding, Annual Report

The Wildflower Foundation is helping something that started small grow into something big: teacher-led, micro, Montessori schools. Each school is independently operated by its teachers, who collaborate across the network. The foundation, created in 2016, helps the school network set and maintain standards and creates tools to help school leaders balance their administrative and teaching responsibilities. Wildflower’s growth has been organic, starting with a single school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that opened in 2014 to, as of 2024, more than 60 schools schools across 17 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Wildflower also seeks to diversify the enrollment and educator workforce of Montessori; 58% of students and 48% of teacher leaders identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color.

The Challenge

While Wildflower schools have characteristics of schools you’ve seen, you’d be hard-pressed to find schools exactly like Wildflower schools. First, they’re very small: typically a room or two set up in a shopfront, with about 20 children. There’s no principal–the teachers do everything. And they’re authentic Montessori schools, following a curriculum developed more than a century ago but with some twists for our modern times. Oh, and did we mention that in some Wildflower schools, the teachers and kids are wearing sensors that track how they spend their time?

The Solution

Communications and marketing are low-down on the to-do lists of Wildflower’s teacher-leaders, and the foundation supporting them had little internal capacity to help in its early years.. Wildflower hired 5e to provide that capacity and expertise and help this unusual network tell its story as it grew.
Our audience-centric strategy focused on blog content that was useful and engaging to prospective teachers and parents, materials that reflected Wildflower’s brand, and national and in-market media coverage that conveyed how different these schools are–and how refreshing that is. Over our five-year engagement, 5e facilitated media coverage in the New York Times (front page!) and Boston Globe, on TODAY’s website, and in education outlets such as The 74 and Education Next. We structured and drafted Wildflower’s annual reports and curated their blog. We coached teacher-leaders and foundation staff for media interviews and commissioned some fantastic photography to show what Wildflower schools are like.

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