Customer Success Story: Ounce of Prevention Fund / Early Childhood Connector

In March, the Social Edge team kicked off a new community implementation project for the Ounce of Prevention Fund - the Early Childhood Connector. The Ounce of Prevention Fund (the Ounce) is a nonprofit that works to ensure that all children, particularly those living in under-resourced communities, have quality early childhood experiences from birth to age 5. 

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The Early Childhood Connector (ECC) is a co-designed, online community that provides a place for early childhood professionals to seek and exchange knowledge and build upon best practices to amplify collaboration and improve outcomes for all children. The ECConnector is a powerful combination of online and human-led components, democratizing access to best practices and elevating community voices across the country. 

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Utilizing the Verint Community platform, the Social Edge team worked closely with the Ounce to get the ECC community up and running in about a week. Their original objective was to provide peers who work for local, state and national nonprofits a hub to connect and collaborate with each other as well as share knowledge and resources.

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The Social Edge team originally was engaged with the Ounce to help implement and launch a community experience where members of the early childhood community could come together to collaborate, discover and share resources, get support and strengthen their network across the country. While this project originally was expected to take about eight weeks to launch, the COVID-19 pandemic made the need for collaboration and connection much more urgent.. Their goal was to get the community up and running as soon as possible so they could provide early childhood leaders with the resources they needed during this public health crisis.

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For their initial launch, the primary focus was providing resources specific to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically creating a COVID-19 wiki along with blog posts where they encouraged community members to participate, share stories of impact, and more. They also utilized discussion threads so that members could share the challenges they were facing and resources on how they could work together to help each other during these unprecedented times.

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“This was a fascinating community that must be the fastest from inception to launch. I received notice from the client on a Sunday of their interest to launch a COVID specific community," said Andrew Kratz, President & Founder of Social Edge Consulting. "Our team helped them soft launch by Thursday. The full public launch was two or three days later. the Ounce does great work for early childhood programs, supports and systems and Social Edge is proud to be one of their partners.”

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In the first two months since launch, the ECConnector community has over 821 active members and over 450 pieces of active content. ‍

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“We accelerated our timeline for launch and were able to accomplish this thanks to the quick support of the Verint Community team and Social Edge Consulting,” said Colleen Murphy, Vice President of the Early Childhood Connector. “As of April 21, the community has grown to over 650 engaged members sharing much-needed credible resources and best practices to help navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. We encourage anyone in the early childhood field to join our growing community.” 

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During these challenging times, while we may all be separated physically, stories like these, where organizations are embracing digital collaboration tools to remain connected are so important. Congratulations to the ECConnector team on going above and beyond to put together such a robust community!