Royal ISD Bond Campaign

In Brief

The Need: Royal ISD and Huckabee Architects partnered for a bond proposal to upgrade, renovate and replace facilities across the district and a bond campaign was needed to fund the proposal. This bond was a special challenge as the district called their votes only a few weeks before the election.

Skills In This Case Study:

  • Art Direction
  • Content Management
  • Website and UX Design

The Result: $34.824 million in bond funds that would extend the life of existing facilities and provide much needed replacement and new facilities to match the district’s growth – and executed in just a matter of weeks.

Refined Requirements

In the state of Texas, bond campaigns are conducted to obtain funds for school district projects and are decided upon in bond elections that take place twice per year. The regulations for campaigns impose their own special requirements:

  • A bond campaign may only be conducted for a district once per year
  • The bond campaign must be presented without messaging for or against the campaign and must present factual information only

User Experience Needs:

  • A website platform that allowed for easy user management
  • User experiences that suited their goals, not roles
  • Training suitable to each user

Brand and Design Needs:

  • Brand design based on district colors and representative of its constituents
  • Design elements that could be used by internal partners with little guidance

Management Needs:

  • A scrappy, quickly assembled campaign that could be executed reliably
  • Art direction that could be developed and implemented across collateral in under 8 weeks
  • A website launched in the same time period, managed against simultaneous launch of other campaign sites
  • Content communicating the most relevant data to voters

Research

Similar to the Hallsville ISD bond, research was conducted to ensure success of the campaign:

  • Input was taken from district leadership, faculty, and community members
  • Demographic study of the current community and forecasting its growth
  • Understanding the voice and aesthetic of the school district and its schools
  • Review of existing campaigns to manage the compressed timeline
  • Looking into the potential user structures to build roles that matched needs

Synthesis and Direction

Even with a compressed timeline, research yielded the following:

  • Project management would need to be flawless, with very few delays in the production of the bond campaign, so using existing assets and approved content structures would be paramount
  • Communications would need to give extra focus on bond processes due to the demographics of the district
  • Tax rate history and the homestead exemption would need to be called out in response to the senior citizen demographics of the area
  • Per usual, clarity on what was in the proposal would be important
  • As the bond campaign was incredibly fluid, the user experience for anyone editing the site had to be smooth without allowing for site-damaging edits