Christy Potter with the Children’s Services Council of Palm Beach County gave a presentation to the Royal Palm Beach Village Council last week about a new mobile app and web site that her agency is developing for parents.
“Since Palm Beach County voters reauthorized Children’s Service Council in 2014, our communications team sought to reach out to parents to better understand what kind of information they are looking for in raising their children,” Potter said at the Nov. 17 meeting.
The organization held 11 focus group meetings and took three surveys with county parents, and the research revealed two items they were especially interested in.
“Parents are eager for a local, unique resource, and before parents hear us, we need to earn their trust as a source of expert and timely information,” Potter said. “The research also gave us a clear understanding of how to best deliver this information to Palm Beach County parents. They want a web site that’s easy to navigate, intuitive and has a strong research component.”
Because parents often live on their cell phone, the development of an app for Apple and Android phones was a must, she said.
“After we collected and analyzed the research data, we shopped the idea of a parenting campaign around to county groups and partner agencies,” Potter said. “We met with more than 24 organizations, both large and small, to get feedback, including the school district, the health department and cultural organizations. We also held two large-scale community meetings with partner agencies to dig deeper into the issues to ensure that the content we developed reflected the needs of the community.”
About 40 groups were represented at the meetings, who helped them focus on seven topic areas and identified eight age categories based on children’s natural development from prenatal to age 18.
“We determined to develop a universal campaign to increase parent engagement and empowerment, and build awareness around community resources,” Potter said. “We designed the creative aspect of the campaign so that it’s warm, personal, positive and universal.”
The new app is called EveryChild.
“The goal of EveryChild is to connect emotionally with the community,” Potter said. We want to build trust with those parenting in Palm Beach County by strengthening their awareness of CSC’s working goals. In this phase, we are laying the groundwork for phase two, the soft launch of the parenting campaign, when we introduce the web site and apps.”
Phase one will be in operation in December when the CSC will advertise on billboards, radio, TV, digital media and theater ads throughout the holiday season, she said.
During phase two, the program will lead people to a new web site, EveryParent.org, which will ask them to sign up for additional information.
“This will allow us to keep them in the loop and, once the web site and apps are available, invite parents to join in,” she said.
Parents will be able to sign on to specific information via the web site and apps and receive information designed specifically for each family. “This campaign will reflect the diversity of our community,” Potter said.
After signing up for an account, parents will be presented with a screen of customized information based on their child’s age.
“Depending on what they are searching for in a topic area, they will find full articles with links relevant to their child,” she said. “The search bar will show some of the popular searches of other parents and research relevant to their child. It works in a fashion similar to Google, providing them with information they might not have thought to search for.”
The app will also provide a history of previous searches and see future milestones for parents to be aware of, customized to the age of the child. Parents can also add milestones important to them. They can add photos of important events, such as their child’s first steps, first words, first day of school or first day driving, acting as a digital keepsake box. The milestones are kept in the private box unless they choose to share them with other parents.
As new children are born, the parent can add them to the same app and switch the timeline to each child with information relevant to that child.
Vice Mayor Jeff Hmara said the app appears to resemble a new online resource introduced by Royal Palm Beach Elementary School designed to assist parents in helping teach their children.
“I’m thinking that this rather sophisticated and robust project you have with the app is something that they may want to tap into in their parent resource center program,” Hmara said. “If they haven’t already collaborated with you, I suspect that’s going to be coming.”
Councilman David Swift asked how the program would be used to reach out to minorities. “Would it be in Spanish, for example?” he asked.
Potter said that there are plans to develop the web site in Spanish, noting that the CSC has 39 agencies providing more than 50 programs throughout the county, including in the Glades.
