Causes: Education, Libraries

Programs: In 2014, intellectual takeout began moving ahead with our organization's strategic plan for the next three years. As part of the initial stages of that plan, 2014 involved a concentration of the majority of our organization's resources on our better ed project with the goal of increasing its influence in minnesota and beyond. We also hired more development staff so as to procure the necessary funds to expand our better ed project and develop other projects in the coming years. In addition, we continued to grow our social media audiences, which further confirmed intellectual takeout's ability to reach the american public with important ideas. Better ed projectwe were impressed with the growth of our better ed project over the course of 2014.Better ed's new mission is "leading an educational renaissance. " in 2014, our push toward an educational renaissance remained mainly focused on our home state of minnesota, where we continue to significantly impact the education reform conversation among the public and local thought-leaders. We primarily accomplish this by educating them about the data and ideas that currently shape the education system using the various communications channels at our disposal. By the end of 2014, we had minnesota's largest education-related facebook audience by far at nearly 35,000 fans, and a website that has between 25,000 and 115,000 unique visitors each month. We also conducted around 10-12 informational postcard drops around the twin cities, put up two billboard messages across the street from the minneapolis public schools district headquarters, we wrote numerous impactful blogs and email blasts, developed widely-shared charts and images, delivered many presentations to local audiences, and made appearances on local radio and television. Finally, we also took the first steps toward expanding better ed's national influence through regularly linking to its materials on our national audiences of intellectual takeout and momthink. Social media pagesin 2014 we also continued to educate our other social media audiences - which consist of the facebook pages of intellectual takeout and momthink- on the principles and virtues necessary for human flourishing. These audiences also continued to grow in 2014, illustrating that our messaging continues to resonate with the american public. By the end of 2014, our aggregate audiences on these pages totaled just under 1.1 million people. Our weekly reach (the number of people who engage with our content each week) averaged between 3-5 million people. We have thus positioned ourselves to have an expanded role in influencing and shaping public discourse in the coming years. Staff changesas part of our strategic plan, intellectual takeout also made some staff changes. We promoted our director of academics, daniel lattier, to vice president in order to help implement the strategic plan and direct the organization's content development. We also hired two new staff members in the area of development - barbara malzacher and adam stolpestad - to increase intellectual takeout's fundraising capacities, especially in the area of foundations. Looking forwardwe are excited about the progress intellectual takeout experienced in 2014, and are looking forward to a continued implementation of our strategic plan in 2015.As part of this plan, better ed is looking to increase its educational role with legislative issues in 2015, in addition to expanding its informational efforts to other states. We are also planning on developing much more unique educational content for our national social media audiences that will be linked to from new websites for each page. We are also hoping that our fundraising efforts will allow us to hire more staff in the areas of content production and project oversight.