Thursday, January 12, 2012

Our Parent Pathway website was launched in July 2011.  We began with a “soft launch” to ensure we had time for early viewers to give feedback so we could make any adjustments necessary.

Our first priority has been to ensure that our processes associated with the website are working well.  For example, in the “Ask the Expert” feature we needed to queue up our experts properly and make sure that all technical aspects were robust.  We have been ensuring that all business processes are solid so that we can respond and interact successfully with our customers as our visitor load increases. 

Sucesses
We have seen a steady increase in traffic since we introduced our site, as seen below:

Parent Pathway Website Traffic

Here are some highlights of the projects successes:
• Website design and programming has produced a very professional and well-laid-out site.
• Business mechanisms set up and automated for product purchases.
• Affiliate marketing set up through relevant products.
• ”Meetings in a Box” product launched.  Parents are purchasing and using this resource to help facilitate their meetings.  More topics will be added in 2012.
• We are building up our Stories of Hope by utilizing “Help A Reporter” website  and interviewing recovering addicts and recovering co-dependents
• We have developed additional marketing materials to reach health care professionals and other organizations.
• “Ask the Expert” service is helping many parents as we have a steady flow of questions coming in.

Challenges

There have been small challenges along the journey, but the biggest challenge that we face is drawing website traffic.  We have focused our efforts on consistent and high-quality daily blogging to draw traffic to the site. "Ask the Expert" and "Stories of Hope," features that attract reader submissions, are beginning to gain traction.  We are getting a consistent increase in the traffic flowing to our website.  We will continue to focus on marketing plans throughout 2012.

The second challenge is continuing start-up funding.  During the coming year, we will tap our revenue-generating products on the web site, but we understand that it will take time to grow the business.  We are working on building a proposal for angel funding to further develop the site and its functionality.

Testimonials

While we are proud of the product we have delivered, we believe our customers are the real proof of the value.  Here are a few of the comments that we have received:

“First and foremost, a sincere thank you to all the experts (and everyone on this site) for a terrific job in helping us parents. I don't know what I would do without my 15 mins each morning.”

“Thank you! This has been an amazing and thought provoking blog series. Thank you for sharing your experience, STRENGTH, and hope. I look forward to your next blog post.”

"Thank you all for sharing, it makes life a tad bit more hope-able for not abandoning myself while my son experiences his path that I cannot control."

“Hi There! Just found Parent Pathway yesterday and so grateful that I did! After reading many posts, I almost felt like I walked out of a therapy session seeing a light at the very end of the tunnel. I am praying I can take some of your messages/life lessons and run with them. All I can do now is try; like you said.. one day at a time. One day I hope to put myself back into this life and be strong. I will say having found this blog and others yesterday, I no longer feel alone and literally get goose bumps as I read my life on the blogs. I do see there is hope. Will I be strong enough one day to smile again and not let our sons addiction consume my every thought? Maybe/Maybe not. Will I always be that helicopter mom? Maybe/Maybe Not. So happy I found your blog!”

With Gratitude

The progress that we have made would not have been possible without the New Media Women Entrepreneur award.  We are so grateful for the opportunity that has been given to us via this award.  Thank you for helping us take our passion to help parents and their families and make it a reality.  It is has been a wonderful journey working with Jan Schaffer and her staff at J-Lab!

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

We’ve now got the wind behind our sails and would like to report on recent developments with ParentPathway.com.  We have had a soft launch and are now attracting new subscribers to the Parents Seeking Serenity blog; our Ask the Expert feature has received some submissions; and we’ve received very good feedback from users who have found our site.

Keeping the content fresh is a requirement and a challenge.  We recently posted Part 1 of an interview with Joyce Mitchell, the producer of our Collision Course documentary. (You can watch Collision Course here), and we plan to conduct our next interview via videotape or audiotape.  Once we have developed a good following, we plan to offer webinars by experts, such as an expert in the abuse of over-the-counter drugs.

We will soon develop the marketing plan for our site.  Who can benefit from the information we provide?  Parents, certainly. What about rehabs?  Hospitals?  Associations of counselors and physicians? We will be brainstorming soon about the best ways to reach these audiences.

We need to fine-tune the monetization of our site.  We have listed some great books in our Resources page, and we need to finalize our affiliate marketing relationships. We also plan to post links to affiliate marketers who sell drug test kits and small drug safes (www.RxDrugSafe.com).

We continue to work out the kinks on the technical side.  Our site is complex with a lot of back-end intelligence, and it is time-consuming to trouble-shoot some of the puzzling glitches we have encountered.  In spite of the little issues,  we are very happy with the progress we have made on ParentPathway.com.

Friday, September 09, 2011

It is a very exciting time for the Parent Pathway team!  We have official launched our new website - www.parentpathway.com

We consider this phase a ‘soft launch’ which means it is live on the internet and fully functional but we are not going to advertise the site for the first couple of weeks.  We will be going through the site and have identified parents who will use the site and give us feedback on issues.  This way we will be able to make sure that any problems not caught in the pre-release phase testing are identified. 

We have had many delays in our release of the website.  Our main delay has been underestimating the amount of work on our project team’s side versus our web developer’s side.  There have been many points along our timeline where the content has held up the development side.  While this must seem obvious in a project of this sort, it still eluded us along the way.  Our team is a group of very capable professionals with a mixture of skills and experience, yet each of us has responsibilities that have competed with the workload of our project.

Nevertheless, we have focused and got the work done.  Of course, launching the website and working through any technical issues is only one side of the equation.  Just as important, we are working on our processes.  What happens when a question comes through ‘Ask the Expert’?  How will it flow to our experts and then be posted on the website?  How will we receive and post ‘Stories of Hope’?  How is our Meeting in a Box purchase working?  All of these are areas that we have created process and procedures for along with key personnel to manage them.  We know that having the website is step one but how we interact and serve our visitors will be crucial to the success of our project.

After we work through our website and processes to ensure they are robust and without issues our next step will be the ‘grand opening’ launch.  We have three weeks until the grand opening.  The date is set for Sept 26th in order to be prepared to advertise in conjunction with an event premiering the new documentary Collision Course - Teen Addiction Epidemic.  We are focused and enthusiastic as we enter into this exciting phase!

Thursday, July 28, 2011

We are so close to the finish line that we can almost taste it now!  Our web design is complete, we have finalized most of our content, and we are taking a final pass to make sure everything is working as planned.  Along the way, we have found that things tend to take much longer than expected, which is frustrating because we are anxious to launch but want everything to be right. At the same time, we realize that our site is a work in progress and we will continue to fine-tune it over time.

Our design has struck the balance we were aiming for, with a color scheme and design that should appeal to both moms and dads.  We have integrated dynamic flash elements that keep the page vibrant and interesting. The content seems to flow in a logical manner.  We do plan to add some affiliate marketing links (to RxDrugSafe.com, Barnes and Noble, and a drug test kit company) that will make it easy for parents to make purchases confidentially.

We expect to finalize everything and launch our Beta site by mid-August; until then, take a look at the screen shot of our Parent Pathway home page to get a sense of what is in store.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

As we draw ever closer to launching our website, we have an exciting announcement:  We are changing our name from “Parents Unite Against Addiction” to “Parent Pathway.” We found that our former name certainly conveyed our reason for being, but it was a mouthful, and it was not particularly memorable. 

When we realized the name we chose was not quite right, we began researching website names.  We found excellent resources that helped us understand why certain names worked and others didn’t, what to consider and how it might affect our website visibility.  For instance, you can create a word that isn’t a word (such as Facebook or Yelp), but then you have to work hard to brand it and get visibility since search engines won’t easily find it.  This is one of many elements to consider in selecting a successful website name.

Parent Pathway is simpler, more to the point, and more intuitive: We offer resources that help parents make forward progress on the road to their recovery.  Also, the name Parent Pathway connects us conceptually to “Pathway to Prevention,” the non-profit we founded to prevent teen substance abuse through education and awareness.

Does the logo we developed, which features a hand-drawn heart bridging the words “Parent” and “Pathway,” still work for our new name?  It seems to capture the spirit of an imperfect path with dips and turns that hopefully ends up where it began—with a healthy family.  That seems to be a fitting visual metaphor for parents’ circuitous journeys as they navigate teen addiction.

Monday, June 06, 2011

We are continuing with our full court press to complete the web design and content so we can launch the Parent Pathway beta test site within the next month.  One unexpected snag:  we found that our original web page design lacked the vibrant and dynamic sense of “connection” we were looking for.  Because we felt that the design would fail to create a “trusted advisor” relationship with our readers, we went back to the drawing board to some extent to infuse it with energy and connection.  Our requested changes were more than cosmetic and required rework on the back end which ended up being very time-consuming.  We are so fortunate to work with a web designer who shares our passion and our vision.  While she is flexible and accommodating, the changes consumed an unexpected amount of time.  We have been delighted to find that the rework has paid off—the revised web page creates a dynamic connection with the reader, and our team is excited about the results.

From the content perspective, our team is taking a “divide and conquer” approach to complete the content necessary for the Phase One launch.  While some of our experts are already lined up, we need to formalize our agreement with others, so each team member is now tapping an expert or two on the shoulder to firm up their commitment.  We also continue to divvy up the creation of the “meetings in a box” which are proving to be more time-consuming than expected.  Our “brand” design for the meetings in a box is under development, and we plan to format the Meetings in a Box, turn them into a PDF and then turn them over to our web designer.

Many other little details need to be ironed out, but when this project is complete, we are confident that we will deliver a credible and much-needed resource for parents everywhere.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

It is an exciting time for our project!  We are nearing our launch goal of May with many activities to complete in order to make it to the finish line.  It is a wonderful place in the process when you get to view the full website and see your wireframe come to life.  We’ve spent countless hours mocking up the wireframe and reviewing pages and graphics; seeing it in its full implementation is just magical!

Last week we had a meeting with our web developer to review where we are and what we need to complete to go live with our website.  As we all know, there are multiple dimensions involved when developing an on-line social media environment.  Our web developer has approximately 80% of the website complete, but our team has about 70% of content to create or finalize, along with processes to complete to manage the administration once in production.  We have reviewed the areas where the content was complete and developed a plan to populate the remaining areas.  This translates into actions ranging from formatting content that we have completed and sending it to the development team or creating some new content entirely.

After meeting with the developer, we held our business meeting to review where we are and how we would complete the various tasks.  The team is very excited and enthusiastic about the impending launch, but we are all aware that we have a lot of work to do.  Just as we created a plan with the developer, we have created a detailed plan with owners to complete the content side of the equation.  During the coming week we will also obtain access to the website in order to give the full team an opportunity to review and test our pages. 

On the project management side, we have had to make some difficult decisions on what features we can afford at this first phase of the implementation.  We have a vision for our site that will require higher levels of funding.  Our strategy is to get as much functionality with this first phase as possible in order to create value for the parents who will access our site.  Then we will be able to drive value and have a working model that we can use to attract funding from angel investors.  Over the past month we have begun to engage in conversations with a local venture capitalist to understand the local angel investment landscape here in our region.  There are many options and possibilities to explore!