Project: Caretivity
“Caretivity REALLY helped us coordinate. I'm so thankful that we were already rolling it out in our county with our movement to work from home for the foreseeable future!”
Peggy Garcia, Athens County Family and Children First Council - Director
Opportunity
As part of the innovation lab at Northwoods, a company that made software for government child protective services organizations, I was constantly looking for new problems that we might be able to help solve. I was often hearing how hard it was for social workers to engage the families they were serving and coordinate with the other organizations also working with those same families to be able to create and execute an effective care plan.
I started trying to map out all of the government and non-government organizations in communities that serve children and families and learn as much as possible about each organization.
On one occasion, I was observing a family drug court session and watched as family after family came through and every single one of them had smartphones. However, after the judge would give them their requirements for the next month including scheduled drug tests, counceling sessions, etc., they were only given a piece of paper with their requirements on it by the court. I witnessed one man casually tear the paper up and throw it in the trash while talking to his legal council and another woman leave hers on a chair in the lobby and walk out. Why wasn’t the court utilizing smartphone technology to help keep them engaged in their treatment plans?
Solution
I decided that a mobile app would be a simple solution to help engage families in their care plans as well as keep the various organizations coordinated so that they can serve the families as efficiently and effectively as possible.
To prove this idea and to develop the ability to market directly to multiple types of organizations, I created a fake company called Careteams.App and started running various smoke test digital marketing campaigns and landing pages.
In doing so, I was able to prove that there was interest in solving this problem and that we could successfully market directly to end-users, something Northwoods had never done before. As a result, our innovation team was given two developers for three months to build an MVP and successfully pilot this idea.
I was able to build relationships through my time spent researching at conferences and observations which led to three different organizations agreeing to help me pilot my app with some of the families that they served.
We were able to prioritize which features needed to be in the MVP, get it built quickly, and roll it out to our pilot partners. As we gained more and more success with our pilot partners, we started proving what were previously only assumptions and a business model was starting to emerge.
Results
After successful pilots with three various government and non-government organizations, the company decided they had seen enough and it was time to re-brand Careteams.App into a core product for Northwoods and start figuring out how to monetize it.
I created a SaaS pricing structure based on the number of teams an organization was utilizing in any given month. They would get 5 teams for free and then pay for packages once they wanted to go over 5 teams. Since these teams were made up of people from various organizations, only those originating new teams would be charged. This led to a SaaS Fly Wheel business model in which end-users would tell their friends and coworkers and eventually enough workers would be using it that they would request their organization to purchase more teams. This not only allowed Northwoods to reach customers in new markets but it also reduced the lengthy and expensive sales cycles of slow-moving government entities.
We got to the point where we had thousands of weekly active users and had made several sales of a large number of team packages which was the first time Northwoods had ever made a sale to a non-government enterprise.
Then in early 2020, COVID-19 hit. This was devastating to the child and family services industry as face-to-face interaction and observation is a hallmark of how they serve their clients. We immediately adapted and added a team video call feature to the app which allowed the service providers and families to stay in touch even when they had very limited in-person meetings.
Case Studies
