Educator of the Year:
recognition as
brand reach
How redesigning an awards program around values — not just votes — turned a community ritual into a national press moment.
The engagement was there. The story wasn't.
In 2021, Nearpod launched its first-ever Educator of the Year Award. The response was real — 2,000 nominations and 4,000 votes showed teachers wanted to celebrate each other. But the program had a ceiling.
A single award meant a single winner. That meant one story, one spotlight, one type of educator being celebrated. It also meant the program was easy to game — whoever had the biggest network won. That's not community. That's a popularity contest.
I saw something bigger: an awards program that could actually reflect what Nearpod and Flocabulary stood for, generate user stories we could use across marketing, and earn press coverage that no paid campaign could buy.
Five awards. Five stories. One amplified community.
I redesigned the program from the ground up. Instead of one award, I created five distinct categories — each one mirroring a core value of Nearpod and Flocabulary. The goal was to make more educators feel seen, not just the most popular one.
The categories were designed to surface different kinds of teaching excellence: innovation, equity, community building, student impact, and instructional creativity. By doing this, we could celebrate five different educator stories instead of one — and each story became a piece of content we could use across channels.
I also worked with our PR team to pitch the winners to local and national news outlets, framing the stories around the students and communities these educators were serving — not just the software they used to do it. That framing was the difference between a press release no one runs and a story that lands in five markets.
Strategy, structure, and storytelling.
More nominations. More votes. More stories in the world.
Stories that made the news.
By pitching winner stories as human interest pieces — focused on the students and communities being served — we earned organic coverage across local and national outlets. No paid placement. No press release pickup. Real editorial coverage.
"By creating multiple awards that aligned with different values, we were able to gather user stories that could be repurposed for content marketing — and recognize educators in a more equitable, authentic way."
— Lindsay Rothfeld, on the redesign
Recognition is a strategy, not just a ritual.
The Educator of the Year redesign wasn't just about making a better awards program. It was about understanding what recognition can actually do: generate stories, deepen loyalty, earn media, and signal what a company stands for — all at once.
When you design recognition around values instead of popularity, you give more people a reason to participate. And when more people participate, the stories you get back are richer, more diverse, and far more useful for everything else you're trying to do.