People & Culture
We completed a 5-year strategic plan, mapped out FY26 goals, launched a working group to revamp our performance management cycle, and redesigned the staff meeting structure. We learned that time for thoughtful planning is a game-changer for effective teamwork and sets us up to reach ambitious goals. In the upcoming quarter, we’ll launch the next Culture Amp survey, kick off the next round of anti-bias & plurality work, and design a new manager training series.
Policy
Fresh off the release of our 2025 State Policy Scan, the CivxNow team 1) formed a youth coordinating group for State America250 Commissions; 2) met with Congressional leaders on AI policy and are preparing to release a state AI report; and 3) are developing a targeted lobbying strategy for 2026. The team is also planning several fall events in Missouri, Ohio, and Colorado, and a Hill Day for educators tied to NCSS in December in DC.
Curriculum (Supplemental)
Huzzah! Civic Star Challenge, Investigation Declaration Game & Pack, Curriculum Strings. Please Pass the A1 Sauce. Playlab, GoodEd, general exploration. Now! Next! Accessibility, Functional Approach, Branding updates, Elementary, Design Thinking Principles, Equity Updates, Small Interactives, Rule of Law. Nota Bene. One consultant can’t solve allthethings for user accessibility. Google Docs isn’t meant to be a content management system. 70 words is a heck of a text limit. Fin.
Curriculum (Core)
The core team is hard at work on US2, our high school inquiry-based curriculum, with three completed units already. The team successfully streamlined its approach to summative performance tasks, incorporating support for MLs, socializing parts of the summative with the whole team, and navigating a new relationship with contract writers. In the next quarter, we are continuing to streamline our processes as we start our next unit on the Great Depression, including our use of GoodEd AI.
Tech
We launched the Civic Star Challenge and the Through Inquiry websites! Through these projects, we learned that more lead time is needed before launch so that we can be responsive to stakeholder feedback and that we should implement small things along the way during planning to make our jobs easier later on. In the next quarter, we aim to finally start migrating out of Drupal!!
Innovation & Experience
We've been supporting design thinking research on the Kellogg Elementary planning project. Ask us about the 170+ page Research Design Document! We’ve conducted and synthesized market research, a survey of 180 elementary educators in the iCivics network, and a competitive analysis to see what peers like InquireEd and Studies Weekly are up to. Distilling our findings into elementary teacher personas in September, with journey maps to follow in November.
Professional Learning Services
We launched 10 pathways across 8 districts and a new Youth Fellowship cohort, expanded our programming to NH and IN, implemented a new design process that led to the development of over 100 high-quality professional learning sessions, and started a series of micro-learning sessions that build skills across the team. Looking ahead, we are project managing cross-departmental initiatives such as the NCSS conference and the Common Good AI tool.
Marketing
This quarter, we juggled the launch of numerous initiatives, including the Civic Star Challenge, Investigation Declaration, and We Can Teach Hard Things. We learned you can never prepare enough for Back-to-School, but the excitement we get from our educators makes the chaos worth it. Next quarter, we’ll turn to local elections, more A250 activations (including trivia!), and preparation for Civic Learning Week.
Development
Molly has been developing a new dashboard for high-level updates for staff reference. We've been working with a contractor to improve our data, identifying many current donors with capacity to give more. Quarterly donor webinars are on a roll, including Emma’s recent one: Teaching Hard Things. Our next in-person event will be at the History Colorado Center in November in collaboration with Policy.
Education
We're developing an iCivics Learning Framework alongside key internal stakeholders. Think of it as a promise to our teachers: use the iCivics platform fully, and we promise your students will gain these critical knowledge, skills, and dispositions. During our internal audit phase, we’re tagging our resource library according to identified knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Analysis of these tags will be utilized to further refine our draft.
Getting It Done
A group defined a set of practices for how we use Slack at iCivics that we’ll roll out in the next two fiscal quarters. Other groups worked closely with Deloitte to optimize select org-wide business processes, one of which will be directly applied in workflows built in Asana. Retros have been helping teams identify changes they can make during the project, not after. In the next quarter, we’ll be running our Asana workshops, and half of our departments will be collectively working in Asana.
