SCHOOL SPOTLIGHT
27J Schools
27J Schools had a story to tell, and they needed a website that could keep up.
Located in the rapidly growing Denver metro area, 27J Schools serves more than 21,000 students across 24 schools. But as families moved into the area and competition for students and staff intensified, the district realized that its outdated website wasn’t doing the district any favors.
"It wasn't just that the site was old," said communications manager Mikel Philippi. "It was layered with years of decisions made in a different context, and it no longer worked for the people we were trying to reach."
"We couldn’t run an effective marketing campaign with the tools we had. Our old site wasn’t flexible, it wasn’t visual, and it wasn’t built with storytelling in mind,” shared Mikel. “We had a very outdated digital communication infrastructure, and it became crystal clear that it couldn't do the things we wanted to do. We just kept running into walls.”
At a Glance
Located northeast of Denver, 27J Schools serves more than 21,000 students across a growing and diverse region.
Committed to innovation, family engagement, and preparing students for life, 27J Schools is known for its four-day school week, strong community partnerships, and a forward-thinking approach to learning and communication.
"Our schools are thinking more like marketers now. They're owning their identity and learning how to tell their story. That’s something we’ve never done at this scale before."
MIKEL PHILIPPI
COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER
The Challenge: Outgrowing the Old Site
"We needed a tool that could meet our needs without having to rely on two or three different platforms to do the job of one," shared Mikel, adding that parents struggled to find important information, and staff faced steep editing processes for even the simplest content updates.
“Our Blackboard site was already considered old when I joined, and the more layers of outdated content and organization we added, the harder it became to navigate and maintain,” Mikel said.
The same information might be located in multiple places across schools, and in some cases, important details like homecoming dates or enrollment instructions were outdated by years.
"Our site map was based on our internal organization, not on what made sense to parents," Mikel explained. "You’d have to know that transportation falls under operations just to find your child’s bus info, and that doesn’t help new families or prospective employees."
Among the most critical concerns were broken search functions, outdated navigation, and a patchwork content strategy. To address the gaps, 27J’s team even built a separate WordPress site for specific campaigns, but that approach created inconsistencies in the branding, navigation, and user experience.
Until this point, marketing the district to prospective families and employees had been an afterthought, and those who did land on the homepage faced hurdles from the start. “Our recruiting subdomain lacked visual engagement and didn’t convert visitors into applicants,” said Mikel. “We were invisible in search and not set up to track interest.”
Meanwhile, the district was preparing for a critical ballot measure and needed the ability to effectively tell its story. 27J Schools' online presence had become more of a barrier than a bridge. That realization sparked a full-scale redesign that prioritized user experience, improved communication, and gave the district the tools to showcase what makes it special.
Since partnering with Finalsite
2X
Improvement
in organic visibility
62%
Boost
in traffic to the homepage
177%
Increase
in visits to the recruiting pages
The Solution: Partnering for Progress
Finalsite’s acquisition of Blackboard K-12 provided a timely opportunity. Mikel and his team had already been exploring Finalsite and were eager to move forward. The project kicked off with the Studio Advantage team, Finalsite’s marketing strategy and support partners, who played a central role in the redesign and quickly focused on high-traffic areas like:
- The district homepage
- School landing pages
- Recruiting subdomain
- Enrollment information
- School calendars
- Meal and bus pages
- Contact pages for departments and schools
Together, Mikel and Beth from the Advantage team jumped into the data to run card-sorting activities, gather analytics, and realign the site’s structure around the expectations of real users, not internal naming conventions.
“We looked at the 100 most-visited pages first and started grouping them in a way that made sense for families. We asked ourselves, ‘How would a parent describe this page?’ That’s the label we used,” said Mikel. Pages labeled "Transportation" were renamed to "Buses," and "Nutrition Services" became "Meals."
Discovery became the foundation of their success. “Don’t rush discovery,” stressed Mikel. “That’s where all our best ideas came from."
That effort paid off. The seemingly small changes also improved accessibility for English and non-English-speaking users alike, and as Mikel shared, "Parents started finding things on their own, and we saw fewer calls to the school office. That’s the goal."
The team created consistent, intuitive menu structures across all schools, eliminating the “every school is a different maze” experience. A streamlined approach to content management reduced the burden on site editors, too. With Finalsite’s virtual webmaster service, content migration was completed efficiently while avoiding burnout for Mikel’s team.
“Beth was my co-pilot. I felt like a team of one, but I always had her in my corner helping coordinate everything,” said Mikel. “Her intake sheets and structured process made it easier to engage our departments and school leaders in the right way.”
“We're seeing more and more Denver metro districts hitting the walls of their growth and starting to deal with school closures or combining programs, and we're looking at that forecast and building some infrastructure, knowing the good times might not last forever. We need to start getting our act together in terms of marketing schools.”
This required a mindset shift, especially for schools unfamiliar with strategic messaging. Each school was tasked with identifying three clear marketing points, which now appear directly on their homepage panels.
“We sat down with each principal and asked, ‘What makes your school different?’ For many of them, it was the first time they’d ever been asked to think that way,” Mikel said.
The Results: Growth, Engagement, and Momentum
Once the site launched, the feedback was immediate and enthusiastic. "We had a few internal folks who resisted the change at first," Mikel admitted. "But once they saw how much easier it was to find information, even they came around." From families to internal staff, the site’s usability was a major improvement:
- Key information was easier to find, especially on mobile devices, which accounted for the majority of site traffic.
- Parents reported fewer issues navigating to pages like open enrollment, bus schedules, or school lunch menus.
- With Finalsite’s search optimization tools and integrated workflows, job seekers could find the district more easily and register for virtual hiring events directly from the site. In the first year of launch, the district saw a 62% increase in organic traffic to the homepage, and visits to the recruiting pages surged 177% during its hiring season.
Google Search Console data revealed a significant improvement in keyword rankings. Pages that previously hovered around positions 30–40 now appeared between positions 15–20. “We nearly doubled our placement,” said Mikel. “It’s made a big difference in how people discover us.”
And while the district wasn’t aggressively pushing for enrollment at the time, their refreshed digital platform helped support a modest uptick, positioning them well for future growth as Colorado’s school demographics shift.
But beyond the stats and numbers, the redesign created a cultural shift. "Our schools are thinking more like marketers now," Mikel said. “They're owning their identity and learning how to tell their story. That’s something we’ve never done at this scale before.”
For Mikel and his team, the project became a model of what’s possible when strong leadership meets the right partner. “If you’re going to do a redesign,” Mikel said, “Don’t take shortcuts. Lay the groundwork. Partner with someone who understands schools, and make sure discovery is front-loaded. That’s what makes the difference.”
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