trinity christian academy
Re-Engineering the Story: How Dala Turned One engineering Teacher's Journey Into 15+ Years of Earned Media
THE SITUATION
Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) came to Dala with a goal familiar to many private schools: stand out in a competitive market, build awareness for the school and its innovative curriculum, support enrollment growth, and strengthen student and staff retention — not through advertising, but through authentic storytelling.
The TCA community had something every school administration and parents want: remarkable people doing remarkable things. The challenge was not finding the stories. It was finding the most strategic way to tell them — and then telling them again, and again, in ways that continued to earn attention and showcase TCA’s brand and mission in front of its key stakeholder groups.
DALA’S SOLUTION
In public relations, most practitioners think about stories as individual pitches — one placement, one cycle, move on. Dala thinks differently. We look for the thread: the person, program, or idea that has enough depth, dimension, and staying power to be told more than once, in more than one way, to more than one audience.
At TCA, that thread is the teachers. After more than 16 years working with this client, we constantly look for the innovative teacher. The one who goes above and beyond in the classroom, has tenure and provides new learning experiences inside and outside the classroom. While we have found many Trinity Christian Academy teachers to build thought leadership campaigns around, one of the teachers stories that stands out year over year is Lisa Wong.
A former mechanical engineer with Raytheon who left the defense industry to become a teacher, Lisa brought a rare combination to the classroom: corporate-level technical expertise, a deep commitment to mentorship, and a conviction that engineering should be used to serve others. When she launched TCA's first engineering class in 2015 — building STEM clubs at both the upper and lower school levels and designing a senior capstone program in which students engineer custom assistive devices for children with disabilities — she gave us a story with genuine roots.
We took that story line and ran with it, building it to more than a decade of storytelling.
THE RESULTS
Dala has built a long-game narrative strategy that has built a strong thought leadership campaign around both Lisa as a teacher and TCA as a school driven by innovation and a forward-thinking staff. It mirrors what Lisa herself has done throughout her career: take a strong foundation, rebuild it with purpose, and adapt it as the world changes around it. We call it re-engineering the story for this inspiring female engineer turned teacher.
Here is how we have done it.
The Annual Anchor: The Engineering Capstone Project
Every April, TCA senior engineering students present their final projects to the families they have spent a semester designing for. Every spring Dala pitches this seasonal story because it is emotionally compelling, and visually rich making it a natural fit for broadcast, digital, and community media. It earns coverage year after year because it is never the same story twice. The students change. The families change. The devices change. The heart behind it does not. This is the steady drip of stories that keeps Lisa's name — and TCA's brand — in front of parents, educators, students and the community.
Award Strategy: Building a Record of Recognition
A compelling educator story is one we quickly recognized as an opportunity for the awards scene. Dala identified award programs aligned with Lisa's profile — innovation, STEM leadership, women in technology, education excellence — and built submissions that positioned her not just as a teacher, but as a trailblazer. She is now an award-winning teacher with countless awards on her resume including being named a Tech Titans finalist, a Future 50 honoree and Women Who Steam. And Lisa’s students love her too, so we’ve turned that into an earned opportunity to publicly recognize Lisa’s accomplishments from the student voice. Each recognition created a news hook, a new round of media interest, and a new chapter in a growing record of proof that Lisa Wong is someone the industry should know.
Profiles and Thought Leadership: Letting Lisa Speak
Beyond project coverage, Dala worked to establish Lisa as a credible, quotable voice on issues that matter well beyond the walls of a private school. From gender equity in STEM, the #ILookLikeAnEngineer movement, tech and COVID-19, the role of mentorship, and engineering as a vehicle for servant leadership, these placements did not just cover what Lisa does, these narratives explored who she is and why it matters, giving editors and reporters a fully developed subject rather than a one-note quote. The result was a growing body of editorial coverage that positioned TCA as a school staffed by forward thinkers, not just credentialed instructors.
The Promotion: A Story Earns Its Culminating Chapter
After more than a decade of building, mentoring, launching, and leading, TCA created a brand-new executive role and named Lisa Wong its first-ever Chief Innovation Officer — a title no other K–12 school in the region held. Dala pitched the announcement as both an institutional milestone and a deeply personal triumph. Coverage in Dallas Innovates framed it exactly as we intended: a woman who walked away from a corporate engineering career to transform how a school thinks about the future, now holding the title to prove it.
This story helped amplify Dala’s 16+ years of storytelling with countless earned media placements for TCA and Lisa Wong across broadcast, digital, trade, regional print, and lifestyle outlets.