The Feeding Your Kids Foundation is operating a free internet based program for parents to learn how to feed their children healthier. The program is designed to build skills and prompt behavior to enable parents to feed their children healthier and raise competent eaters in an environment which does not support this objective. The program is unique in taking a parent behavior focused approach, as it is based on the latest research which shows that behaving around food is what influences most how healthy and competent eaters children become and parental behavior change is required to complete the effect of school, nutrition and local policy based initiatives.

Our users report that they take the program together, and even "manually" score themselves to compare how they are doing. From the data we receive it emerges which skills are more difficult to acquire, and which challenge prompts an "Aha moment" which is a very important tool in increasing self efficacy. Our new development project would institute this capability into the program, thus making the specific skills more explicit and transparent for users, as well as help with developing user profiles to further customize the program for.

We would like to obtain a small fund to pay for developer time to integrate a simple scoring and comparing system into the Exact Target infrastructure we use.

Problema

Users worldwide are telling us that they are taking the program together, and derive benefits from comparing notes manually on how they are doing on each day-challenge. We would like to add a feature to the program where users could score points for fulfilling the challenges, compare their skills to the desired skill profile and to other users in their communities. This would add a dimension to the program which would make it more usable as an integral part of a community/school/healthcare provider initiative

Solución

Our solution would turn the one way "push" program into an interaction with the program as well as facilitate independent user interaction. It would also create a unique tool for collecting data internationally from tens of thousands of users on which desired feeding behavior elements they find hardest to practice. The capability would be part of the program and free for every user.

Ejemplo

Since the skill set to be acquired by parents was built systematically, and feeding children in a more healthy way is a holistic and complex problem, interactivity and the increasing social aspect would multiply the effectiveness of taking the program. When a user receives the daily challenge, they could indicate whether they have and use that skill. They can follow their own development of skills more explicitly. They can compare their skills to other users, which would allow to connect on how to conquer the challenge locally.

Mercado

There are no programs addressing the child obesity problem from the parent's perspective. Some pediatric obesity clinics run a several month long coaching and medically supervised program which has led to some success for parents. Our initiative makes this kind of intervention available for a much lower cost. The need for this kind of initiative appears to be crossing cultural geographic and socio-economic lines, as evidenced by our user base.