Raising a Reader Project Proposal

Raising a Reader Project Proposal

Creator: Mariola Johnson, Cara Jennings, Earnest Kim, Maelle Jeanty, & Riha Khan.

This is a project proposal for our collaboration with the Massachusetts organization Raising a Reader. In this proposal, we outline some goals to better understand our target market and potential market research ideas.

Raising a Reader Project Proposal

(i) Definition of the problem.

Parent engagement and early literacy are two of the main determinants of subsequent academic achievement of children. Statistics show that factors including family classification as minority, low-income and/or non-English speaking tend to correlate with a lower level of parent involvement, which could lead to academic struggles later on. Raising A Reader Massachusetts works to target communities of high need to end the cycle of low literacy and to close the opportunity gap for children ages zero to six. For children, Raising a Reader strives to promote curiosity and a love of learning from a young age through joyful, interactive home reading routines. For families, they teach how to develop practice the high-impact routines but also look to empower parents to be active participants in the child’s continued education.

Our problem statement:

With their small staff, Raising A Reader Massachusetts has not previously had the resources to dive deeply into their market. They know some things based on research of the problem of the literacy gap  itself. They assume some other things based on success by trial and error as well as interactions with users and community members. However, their focus is on implementation and making an impact, not necessarily doing extensive research into if their impact is optimized. Our job is to ensure that their efforts are as effective as possible by doing market research to provide a basis for potential change in the business model and implementation through email and website marketing.

(ii) Organization and person of contact.

Raising A Reader, Massachusetts branch

Bridget Malicki, Development Manager

(iii) Sources to better understand social problem and ecosystem.

Most of our secondary information will come from Bridget, and we will rely most heavily on the primary information that we obtain from our survey and segmentation.

• Great statistics about the national Raising A Reader organization and their demographics here: https://www.raisingareader.org/our-impact/measuring-our-results/
• Libraries’ impact on young literacy and anecdotes on programs that they are doing worldwide: https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/topics/libraries-development/documents/libraries-for-children-and-young-adults.pdf

(iv) Methods for market research about the social problem, consumers affected, and how to measure effective interventions.

Our strategy will be broken down into four parts: target market, market research, business model evaluation, and implementation of findings.

Target Market

The first step is defining the target market and how to target them. This will involve marketing strategy and communication. Part of the problem is segmentation, seeing as the market is complex. There are lots of end users, and we will have to map out the ecosystem as well as the barriers. Some things to consider:

• Ecosystem – children, parents, implementers
• Define who they are
  • Kids: age birth-6, low-income families, don’t usually have access to books themselves
• Find barriers
  • Parents have many other things on their plates
  • Implementers may want to work with parents in different ways (teachers have a lot of asks)
  • Barriers for the kids may include distractions
  • Consumer behavior, parents’ behavior, lack of resources in certain areas, etc.
• Problem of access
• How do you create an environment/culture that reading is a good thing, but in some ways, it may be a competition?

Market Research

We will then do market research to paint a picture of the story – the who, what, when, where, why and how. This will involve talking to end users and then putting it into context from a competitive scan of the market.

• Descriptive research:
  • Talk to some end users via a questionnaire or (if possible) send an email out to the whole contact list.
    • Try to understand their barriers
    • Have they heard about Raising A Reader? If so, how did they hear about them?
    • Language barriers
      • Talk about how the implementers are key, parents having connective discussions even if they’re not in English – parent involvement is the most important part
    • Are there any hidden costs for implementation?
• Competitive scan:
  • Research other organizations with similar objectives (eg. public libraries) and what they do that is successful as well as what isn’t working
  • How are the RAR sister orgs are working? What are they doing well/not well, what can we learn from them?

Business Model

Next, we will take a look into the Raising A Reader business model. With the learnings from the previous two parts, we may be able to find ways to make their operations more effective.

• What is the best model to work with? Directly to parents, through implementers, a combo or another solution?
• What is their income? Only donation based or is there a way to think about a meaningful commitment – eg. putting money down to participate

Marketing Implementation

Lastly, we will help Bridget with some of her goals for marketing and communications implementation. We will use Google Analytics to analyze the data from their two websites. Our goal is to learn more about site visitors/donors, and not just what people are clicking, but who is clicking and why.

We will then use this to answer some of Bridget’s design questions. In making changes to the websites, we are not just making them for the sake of design. We are using design thinking backed by data to improve the efficiency of the marketing and messaging.

Process:

• Pixel placement on the sites
• Reassess the Google Analytics dashboards that are currently being used
  • Set up one main dashboard that will make it easy going forward for Bridget and her team to quickly gather the information that they are most interested in
• Make a report consolidating the past year’s worth of information
  • Based on insights from these results, make site suggestions

Two Sites and Goals:

For implementers: http://dialogicreading.com/

• Page visits – when are they looking for this information?
• Link clicks for resource downloads – what sources are they using the most?

For everything else: https://raisingareaderma.org/

• Newsletter: increase readership , so start with seeing if people are joining from the site
• What people are going to our site for, where are they clicking? And from there, try to assess what type of people are looking at our site (i.e. donors, potential partners, other organizations?)