GogyUp Workplace Literacy Platform

GogyUp (go-jee-up) is a workplace literacy platform designed to solve two problems: provide (1) employer support to confidently train employees who have not acquired English literacy to work safely and efficiently and (2) on-demand, support for 36,000,000 emerging adult readers to acquire and practice skills for workplace literacy.

Please note, we prefer to use the term "student" rather than "disadvantaged youth" or "user".

Low-literacy perpetuates a multitude of harsh conditions (e.g., endemic poverty, incarceration, un- and underemployment, etc), stymies a region’s economic growth and an individual’s ability to obtain economic security.  These effects and their missed opportunity are compounded for youth as they are unable to take advantage of their full potential and greatest asset in terms of growing their personal wealth: time.

Employers, particularly small employers, face increasing competition for employees, especially those who can learn new skills as work changes. This competition creates business uncertainty as employers struggle to ensure employees are trained to work safely, efficiently, and with the ability to learn new work processes.

GogyUp (go-jee-up) is a workplace literacy platform designed to solve two interrelated problems: (1) the ability for employers easily and efficiently train employees with limited English literacy and (2) expand the opportunity for millions to acquire the reading skills to be functionally literate.  

At its core, GogyUp is comprised of two products: the GogyUp Reader and the GogyUp Trainer. With the GogyUp Trainer, employers can:

1. Effortlessly post and send documents to a company’s workforce.

2. Identify key vocabulary and concepts employees need to master.

3. Track progress and mastery across a company’s workforce.

4. Seamlessly update materials and identify areas for additional training.

The freely available companion app, GogyUp Reader, acts as on-demand “training wheels” for literacy.  Available for mobile devices or the web, GogyUp Reader provides anonymous and personalized English reading instruction that automatically embeds in any text. Students master literacy skills as they read a Facebook post, news article, an employer’s training manual or just a single new word a student recently heard or saw.

The GogyUp Reader app is now available for Android devices at: gogyup.net/apps.

The GogyUp platform directly addresses the central problem that prevents disadvantaged youth from thriving and acquiring economic security in the 21st century: limited literacy.  

Our platform solves this problem by addressing its two critical factors:

1. The lack of educational infrastructure and options to “fill the holes” left by an incomplete education background. For example, the US Adult Basic Education system can only provide services that meet 5% of the demand.

2. Employers face increased competition for talent but lack certainty that if they hire workers from “hidden talent pools” that they can understand written instructions to work safely.

Our approach is centered around students. This provides us with clear and novel directions on how we might solve the problem and, equally important, demonstrate how important students themselves are to the solution.

Before writing any code, we invested in months of forging relationships with our intended student population and the agencies that support them. This allowed us to “co-design” with ex-felons, opportunity youth, and New Americans.  

We combined our co-design approach with an extensive review of the workplace literacy, reading pedagogy, and behavioral psychology along with consultation with prison educators, workplace trainers, and social service agencies.

Our primary objective is to exponentially enable millions to expand their reading ability.

Through paying a fee for GogyUp, employers ensure all employees are trained to work safely and efficiently while providing revenue to continuously improve our instructional framework for millions of emerging readers.

We therefore envision a virtuous cycle:

• Employers gain new insight into their workforce’s understanding.

• Emerging readers gain a constantly improving option to learn wherever they are with any text, always available as a free download or web site.

• GogyUp learns from different populations how to enhance our instructional framework, increasing outcomes for employers and our students.

Conduct double-blind study across several industries to review if new hires with limited literacy can master material more efficiently and deeply through the GogyUp instructional model and interface as opposed to reading a normal manual online. - GogyUp instructional model significantly increases understanding, engagement, and confidence in employee’s ability to read and learn new procedures.

Review student data over set periods of time and compare usage when different functions were introduced, the instructional model was updated, or when new content became available. - Students will continue to use GogyUp outside of workplace.

We will administer pre- and post tests using CASAS, TABE or equivalent standardized assessment and then correlate student usage and performance data in GogyUp with those results.

- Students will demonstrate increased phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and acquire greater workplace vocabulary understanding on and off the job.

Our market research confirms there is a wide, addressable market as employers face an ever-shrinking labor pool and the current educational infrastructure has yet to focus on what employers specifically need their employees to know.  

Potential competitors that are nearest to our model either neglect what employers need to know for their specific jobs, do not anticipate that students are stymied by traditional approaches, do not make choice central to their approach nor provide the opportunity to demonstrate prior knowledge or anticipate the logistical hurdles to learning our students face on a daily basis.

As we described under our Theory of Change, we spent months forging relationships with our intended student population and the agencies that support them before writing any code.

These relationships taught us to abandon traditional instructional approaches and anticipate the logistics faced by disadvantaged youth: inconsistent connectivity, interrupted progress, frequent device loss. Student choice within defined boundaries and the opportunity to demonstrate ability to employers were clear to be primary motivators.

The GogyReader app will forever be free to use in a web browser or to download from app stores on to mobile devices.  All a student needs is to create a free GogyUp account.  

For our employers, our pricing is built around a GogyUp Trainer tiered subscription model - about USD $0.23 per labor hour.  We believe this model creates a virtuous cycle for both populations we serve: employers provide the revenue to maintain and improve GogyUp, emerging readers can rely on a stable service to improve their literacy, and the data generated continually improves the product for both.

Our partnership with the Venn Foundation is critical towards raising our initial round of capital.  Our status as semi-finalists in the Minnesota Cup, a broadly followed, statewide competition that attracted 1200 entries this year, has provided significant exposure. That exposure along with our outreach through Minnesota Chamber of Commerce is starting to build traction towards securing our initial customers.

Milestones for the next six months include securing 3 - 5 customers who will also help us pilot our instructional framework in a workplace setting and refine the GogyUp trainer (the employer side of our platform).  

Revenue from these customers and capital raised through the Venn Foundation and other sources will provide traction and buzz to start to establish business with companies desperate for literate workers - specifically clean room manufacturing, slaughterhouses, and janitorial.

According to modest employer subscription goals, we believe revenue we will have self-sustaining cash flow by FY20.

Maintaining motivation to learn to read through an app will be a challenge for an emerging adult, especially when the economic opportunity of tomorrow competes with day-to-day reality.  This is why we begun with co-designing GogyUp’s instruction and functionality with our potential students.

We are mindful of how our customers could use GogyUp to profile employees. We are committed to finding the balance between useful data and privacy.  While our co-designers did not express concern when asked about privacy, we believe it is paramount that we not provide design in opportunity for breaches of our privacy policy and local laws.

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We are eager to join, share with, and learn from Solve’s community how to challenge our assumptions and expand our own thinking.  While we already have experience utilizing pilots for learning how to improve and implement our product, we think Solve’s community and cachet will be immensely helpful in accelerating the connection making to make larger pilots and eventual wide-scale implementation possible. Finally, we anticipate mentorship through Solve will be crucial in avoiding mistakes as we prepare to scale. In short, we believe involvement in Solve will be critical to our product’s long term viability.

GogyUp has a strategic partnership with Walker Reading Technologies, LLC to license the Live Ink technology for formatting text on small screens. EMC Publishing and GemmaMedia Open Doors provide content written explicitly for emerging adult readers.  For capital to continue development, we are partnering with the innovative Venn Foundation.

Since 2010, we have continually monitored for new developments in employer-based education and intel