We are beginning the process of bringing Parent Project facilitator support resources into the next step of the digital age. Because of the importance of our facilitators, we thought we would start with building a hub where we can share the core curriculum, discuss best practices and questions and where we can consistently keep the content fresh.
This is (as everything!) built by you our facilitators and the 500,000 parents meaning that it’s a living, breathing project. If you have any thoughts, criticisms, feedback or creative ideas. We are, as always, all ears!
This is part of our 30-year anniversary initiative to take Parent Project to the next level. There are a number of key decisions we are making to improve the core curriculum, facilitator training and support and provide a next-generation system to keep content improving at the pace of today’s technology. Our goal is to make being a facilitator easier, faster and better.
Some of these key initiatives are:
- Updated research: We realize that with best practices, evidence-based research securing and maintaining funding is difficult for you. We have already written the structure for our next control-treatment study and are aggressively pursuing that.
- This “facilitator portal” — including forums, up-to-date digital content, marketing support and a new class database. We are also working to make it easier/better/faster to access and use best practices for your programs. All of our facilitator support in the future will be brought into this portal–to be your home and your hub for all things Parent Project.
- New class database — With the new portal comes a new and improved class database which will have a better regional search function — so parents in Southern California don’t have to weed through all the classes in Northern California and vice versa.
- Updated surveys: We will be incorporating more parent surveys to capture data which will support the effects each of your programs are having on the parents and the communities.
- Updated support group structures: We are testing some new support group approaches which promise to be more impactful, and longer-lasting (!!!)
- Improved marketing materials: We have rewritten some of the marketing support documentation with the goal of refreshing all of it by the end of 2016. We are also seeking a nation-wide celebrity sponsor to help amplify the message of all the good news happening in our communities–if you have any ideas or know a great celebrity-match, let us know!
- Improved facilitator training: We are working to improve the facilitator training–our vision for this is that it is more local (one on the east coast, one in the south), and that it is shorter with a higher rate of success. Some have even suggested removing parts of the training and instead providing more support during the implementation phase–you have ideas, and we have ears. Share your thoughts with us!
- Regional leadership and facilitator meetups: We don’t want facilitators to feel like they’re on their own out there! Getting a program started and keeping it running and constantly improving is hard work. We are setting up a regional leadership program to provide support for all of the facilitators out there to meet monthly to share their learnings/best practices and build a feedback loop to train us on how to better support you.
- Marketing automation: We will be adding a basic marketing automation tool, which you can use to keep your local constituents up to date on your program: dates, results, partners and program updates. Additionally, to keep these key supporters aware of Parent Project, we will enable you to also update them from Parent Project directly on trends in parenting, upcoming and recent research, youth violence prevention and other news relevant to securing our future through parents.
- Mobile applications: We will be launching mobile applications for parents to remind them of the key concepts in the class.
To help fund this, and especially to help fund the academic research programs, we will also have to raise our prices effective September 1, 2016. This is the first price increase we have had to implement in many years, and we do it knowing that we must stay true to our mission–to be highly effective and highly affordable. With our focus on research, this simply became a necessity. In the past we set pricing based on the cost of production, limited operations and marketing only. We must now add the cost of research to our programs.
We will be able to offer scholarships to organizations to delay the price increase. We understand many of you operate with cost expectations and tight budgets through the end of the year and we do not want to cause any disruption to any parents or programs.
We hope you understand our need to make this change. Ultimately we also hope that you are as excited as we are about the potential of the future for the Parent Project with these added benefits, and as always, we are open to your feedback. Please email or call us with any questions or concerns you have. We are always excited interested to hear from you.
Yours,
Ralph “Bud” Fry and Dr. Roger Morgan
