Inceptive Education - Expert-led Workshops for Parents

Problem: Parents want the best for their child, but most of them aren’t experts and rely on their family, friends and (increasingly) the web for advice. Some of this advice, especially online, is irrelevant, biased or simply incorrect; and parents who are already strapped for time, find it challenging to access trustworthy resources.

Solution: Inceptive makes trustworthy resources more accessible for parents by bringing appropriate tools to them, right at their place of work and home. We:

• partner with employers and community organizations to conduct in-person workshops
• conduct online webinars that can be accessed whenever wherever  

Scale: Today over 70% of the world's youth are online and this number continues to increase. As this population matures and turns to the internet for parenting advice, the importance of finding reliable information will only increase. Inceptive's biggest impact will be empowering parents with trusted information, regardless of their socioeconomic status or location.

Traditionally most parents turned to their own parents for advice but increased mobilization has made it difficult to have these frequent interactions. In addition, the information received from family is often outdated due to rapid changes in society driven by technology and globalization. And most offline resources like parenting classes and in-home visits, though reliable, are often unaffordable or inaccessible to many.

Consequently, parents are increasingly relying on the internet for parenting advice. A study found that 98% of parents used the internet to find information about their child’s health, and over 80% of them began their search on search engines. But these results often provided links to sources that resulted in misinformation or information overload. In addition, a survey by Zero to Three found that, “There is a trust gap; parents want advice, but are overwhelmed by sources of help and underwhelmed by the quality of what they’re getting.”

Inceptive aims to eliminate this lack of trust that parents feel due to the over-abundance of low quality information online. With ever increasing data on the web and more than a million Millennials becoming moms each year, the importance of easily accessible, reliable information source like Inceptive will only increase.

First and foremost, Inceptive serves parents globally and across socioeconomic sectors, from pregnancy through when their child is 5 years of age.

Human-centered design is an integral part of Inceptive. We were inspired to start Inceptive because of our conversations with parents while starting a preschool. Through our interactions, we learned about the problems parents faced - primarily the difficulty in finding research-backed, easy to understand information and affordable expert advice. We also conducted an online survey of over 100 parents, interviewed 50 more, and launched our community workshops.

However, we quickly realized that today’s parents are strapped for time- most families have both parents working and consequently they don’t have the bandwidth to attend even the free workshops conducted at the times that they themselves had specified.

Equipped with this feedback, Inceptive launched new programs that bring resources directly to parents, where they work (by partnering with their employers) and live (through online webinars that can be accessed anytime and anywhere). We also realized that low-income families may not have access to our expert-backed resources through their employers. To reach underserved families, we are working on partnering with public housing communities and local community organizations.

Parents are overwhelmed and already strapped for time. So, Inceptive brings trusted information and tools to them, right at their:

• place of work through expert-led, onsite (lunch & learn) workshops; and
• home through expert-led, live and on-demand online webinars

This focused, group-driven approach benefits parents by creating a network of experts and peers that can support them as they strive to be stronger parents, better employees, and healthier individuals –– while helping their children reach their full potential, too.

Our workshops help parents from pregnancy through when their child is 5 years of age and topics range from tactical help ("how to prevent flathead in your baby", “how to support your child's motor skills development”) and emotional support ("postpartum depression”, “dealing with temper tantrums") to career oriented (“work-life balance as a working parent” “breastfeeding at work”).

While Inceptive’s approach centers around giving working parents the support they need to thrive, our reach extends far beyond that. We empower managers and supervisors so that they can effectively back parents and soon-to-be parents on their teams.

Inceptive’s model is set up in order make strides toward supporting working parents everywhere. In addition to working with businesses and individual parents who are able to pay for our workshops, Inceptive conducts one free educational community workshops, for every two paid workshops. Through the community workshops we hope to:

• Help underserved communities
  Currently our free community workshops are online and are open for everyone to participate. However, we are working on forming partnerships with the local community organizations and public housing projects, starting with the Bay Area to bring our resources to underserved families.
• Increase gender equity in the workplace
  Research shows that over 90 percent of American parents, both mothers and fathers, struggle with work-life conflict and about 20 percent of moms and about 5 percent of dads switch their job or leave the workforce around childbirth, frequently creating gender diversity issues in the workplace. Through our workshops and ongoing community support via our online forum, we hope to promote equity in the workplace by reducing new mother attrition rates and help eliminate the 'motherhood penalty' and advance careers for women.

So far, have conducted 12 free workshops and webinars and have supported over 950 parents. In addition, we have conducted 3 pilot sessions at 3 tech companies (Docker, Pinterest and Stripe, 4th is in progress with Airbnb) and have helped additional 150 parents.

We believe that innovation could be as simple as finding a different or better way of solving problems. Inceptive is innovative because of how it solves these two problems faced by millions of young parents around the world: (1) the growing unsuitability and unavailability of advice and support from close family; and (2) the challenge of finding reliable sources of information online while juggling work, raising family and self-care.

Parents used to ask their own parents for support and advice but increased mobilization has made it difficult to have these frequent personal interactions. In addition, the information received from family is often outdated due to rapid changes in society driven by technology and globalization.

Another source of information, the doctors and other specialists is reliable, trusted and personalized. But it is often expensive and fragmented. Thus, today’s parents are forced to find support elsewhere, like on the internet. As discussed before, parenting websites, blogs and social media may not offer unbiased, trusted information.

Inceptive combines the power of technology and expertise of different specialists to bring reliable information to parents through the online webinars. Even our onsite, in-person workshops rely on technology to enable parents in remote locations to participate. Inceptive’s approach is unique because it allows parents to interact with early childhood experts from a variety of professions like teachers, doctors, speech therapist, social workers, etc., from around the world on a single platform and in a way that is easily accessible as well as affordable. 

Technology is an intrinsic part of Inceptive’s solution. Currently we use technology primarily for effectively disseminating trusted information to parents, which is at the core of our mission. Video platforms like Zoom and YouTube, have enabled us to bring high-quality resources to a large number of people at significantly lower costs, in ways that have been elusive in the past. Even for our onsite in-person workshops, streaming and recording the sessions (virtual instruction) has been a key element for supporting the distributed workforce.

Digital marketing is our main, direct to end user, marketing strategy. The global proliferation of social networks has helped us reach parents from diverse backgrounds. Facebook groups like Main Street Mamas (typical member profile: white, educated, urbanites) and The Mommy Grind (typical member profile: African American, mixed education levels, urbanites /suburbanites), have tens of thousands of members. We are working with such groups as well as using our own social media pages to reach a large number of parents at much lower costs than the traditional marketing channels like direct mail, flyers and brochures.

As Inceptive grows, we plan to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning, to better define our impact metrics and develop targeted approaches. For instance, adaptive-learning technology could be used to recommend workshops to parents based on their past engagement. AI could also help us automate the recognition of emotions and provide help to parents struggling with postpartum depression or parents of kids with special needs. 

Families: Every parent wants the best for their child. However, between work, kids and self-care, parents’ lives can quickly become a stressful juggling act. Unfortunately, overwhelming parental stress isn’t just tiresome on parents –– it’s also detrimental to child development. 

When parents are overwhelmed, they turn to family, friends, or the internet for advice. And while there’s no shortage of opinions available, there’s little busy moms and dads can do to ensure they’re getting the best information possible.

We believe that equipped with the right tools and information, parents can promote their family’s health and wellbeing as well as fulfill their own career aspirations. We aim to make trustworthy resources more accessible for parents by bringing research-backed tools to them, right at their place of work and home.

Managers: Our survey of over 100 parents showed that managerial support is crucial in reducing parental stress. Managers play a crucial role in creating conditions that are conducive to success for both employers and employees. They are on the front lines of implementing company benefits policies. 

However, many managers may not know how to support parent-employees on their teams. They may not be aware that they harbor biases like mothers are incompetent or men who are actively involved in their family lives are not adequately committed to their work. Such biases increase the likelihood of parent-employees leaving their job and results into unsupportive work environment. And therefore we believe that empowering managers with the appropriate and adequate resources, support and training is vital.

• Current: So far Inceptive has conducted twelve free workshops/webinars and seven paid (fee-based) webinars. With almost no marketing, we have supported over 280 parents through live sessions and over 870 parents through on-demand webinars. In addition, we have conducted three pilot sessions at three tech companies and have helped additional 150 parents (the on-demand participation rates at these companies are unavailable, 4th pilot is in progress). Over 80% of participants in the pilot sessions found our sessions extremely useful while remaining were neutral.
  
  Our Monthly newsletter with curated resources supported 250 parents. In addition, we have distributed over $7,000 to experts who are preschool teachers, social workers, and lactation consultants. These professionals provide valuable services but don't earn enough income -- we believe income redistribution is another benefit of Inceptive's programs.   

• In one year, Inceptive hopes to more than double the number of parents supported to 3,000 (~1,000 (33%) through live and ~2,000 (67%)) through on-demand sessions) parents. 
• Over the next five years, Inceptive aspires to raise awareness and educate at least 15,000 (~7,000 (45%) through live and ~8,000 (55%) through on-demand sessions) parents. 

We believe that these numbers are achievable because of the current trends like:

• continued rise in the number of families with both parents working
• ever increasing data (good & bad) on the internet 
• more companies wanting to support parents (the gender diversity issues in the workplace, competition to attract and retain talent, and increase in the discrimination law suits by pregnant and new moms)

1. Over the next year Inceptive will focus mainly on corporate partnerships and scaling. We plan to convert companies in our pilot program (Stripe, Docker, Pinterest and Airbnb) into paid partnerships and reach significant number of parents globally. In addition, we are planning an internal marketing campaign at Salesforce, our existing partner, to get front and center of their parent-employees.  

We also plan to scale organically through day-to-day marketing and sales efforts using social media. We have been developing our digital marketing plan that relies on our existing users to help spread the word using testimonials and blog posts. 

2. In the next five years, we will continue to expand our corporate partnerships and build a strong revenue stream. In the next three years, we plan to reach companies outside of the tech sector as well as outside of the Bay Area. But our main focus would be on collaborating with public housing and community organizations to reach underserved populations. 

In addition to marketing and scaling, our other goal is to build robust model to measure impact and continue to adjust our programming to best serve the needs of parents with young children. We hope to work with organizations like DataKind to help us design, build and analyze insights from the data we collect. 

Enterprise sales: The long enterprise sales cycle (8-12 months) is one of our major challenges to accomplish our corporate partnerships goal, particularly over the next year. It takes a concerted effort and understanding of each company’s unique needs, workforce demographics and culture to move the deal forward through multiple stakeholders and multiple stages.

Experts with experience working with underserved populations: From our early conversations with the Hamilton Families, an organization that is working to end family homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area, we were informed that our experts, while highly trained and experienced, have little experience working with the underserved or homeless population. Therefore, finding professionals who combine the subject matter expertise with the prior experience of working with the underserved population could pose a challenge in achieving our goal of collaborating with public housing and community organizations to reach underserved populations.

Compliance: Inceptive is currently bootstrapped, with the founder being the only major donor. This could become an issue over the next five years if she continues to be the sole significant contributor. Inceptive is a 501(c)(3) public charity and public support is measured using a 5-year computation period that includes the current and 4 prior tax years (including short years). After 5 years, a public support test will be computed. The simplest definition of the IRS public support test states that at least 1/3 (33.3%) of donations must be given by donors who give less than 2% of the nonprofit’s overall receipts.

Enterprise sales: Though enterprise sales would continue to be resource heavy, it would become less of a challenge over the next five years as we start gaining experience working with the corporations and leverage our early partnerships. In the short term, we are working with an enterprise sales consultant to navigate long sales cycles, identify the right stakeholders to connect to within organizations and pre-selling through pilots.

Experts with experience working with underserved populations: We’ve reached out to the Pediatric Advocacy Program at Stanford to connect with the residents and medical students who are already participating in their community outreach programs. We plan to reach out to similar programs in the near future. In addition, many of our corporate partners support local communities and we could leverage their existing relationships to give the much needed exposure to our experts.

Compliance: At this point, Inceptive is just on its second year, so it's still too early to determine the computation of public support percentage. Unless an organization has reached the 5-year period, it still has the same status as a public charity. However, we have been working on planning annual fund-raising drives. We are also looking at the apps like ALMA to connect us with donors. We have also started requesting small donations for our free, community webinars. 

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Currently Inceptive has one full-time staff (founder). In addition to the Board responsibilities, our five Board members volunteer on an as needed basis and according to their skillset (technical, marketing, strategy, nonprofit).

We also work with an enterprise sales coach on an on-going basis and have recently started working with a social media consultant on a project basis. We have outsourced (1) accounting and bookkeeping and (2) nonprofit compliance.

We are best-placed to deliver our solution because of our passion, experience and agility.

Our founder’s (Purva) passion for early learning stems from her experiences growing up in India. Frustrated by the scarcity of support and educational opportunities in their native village, Purva's parents moved to a city when she was about three. However, many in her extended family were not as fortunate -- they did not have access to the right resources and ended up dropping out of school and forgoing their childhood ambitions. This shaped Purva's views on the importance of high quality early experiences. She started her work in the field by volunteering with education nonprofits and eventually switched careers to pursue her passion by cofounding a Montessori preschool.

While marketing the preschool, Purva had many interactions with parents and learned about the problems they face, namely –  the lack of time and overwhelming amount of information online. Based on this feedback, Inceptive started as a content curation platform. As we continued to engage with our end users, we launched community workshops and live online webinars. However, it became clear soon that parents’ may not be available for live sessions, especially, those who are based in different time zones, consequently we launched on-demand sessions.

This ability to listen to our users, distill their feedback and take concrete actions quickly as well as our passion makes us uniquely suited to deliver this solution. 

Currently Inceptive has several partnerships that fall in one of three categories:

• Subject-matter experts who lead our workshops and webinars:
  • The Work-Life Law Center at UC Hastings
  • Hand-in-Hand - The Domestic Employers Network
  • The Institute for Families and Nannies
  • The Lotus Method
  • Symbio-SF
  • Connected Kidz
  • Several individual experts like Anna Glezer, MD (UCSF/Harvard trained), Monica Josten, MD (Stanford trained), Katie Howser, IBCLC, and so forth.

• Corporate partners who help us with parent outreach:
  • Salesforce
  • Airbnb (pilot program)
  • Docker (pilot program)
  • Pinterest (pilot program)
  • Stripe (pilot program)
    
• Community partners who help us with reach underserved families:
  • Working on it (speaking with the Hamilton Families & Potrero Public Housing)

In a nutshell, Inceptive employs a not-for-profit model to offer educational workshops for parents from diverse racial, cultural and economic backgrounds, by combining net income from workshop fees and corporate partnerships, supplemented with contributions from a few committed individuals and foundation donors to fund the free workshops for the underserved families.

Inceptive uses a ‘fee-for-service’ model to reach middle and high income families by selling workshops:

• Directly to them
• To their employers

As we grow, these workshop fees would allow us to achieve financial self-sufficiency by reimbursing costs such as expert’s fees and overheads; while reaching a significant portion of our target population (middle and high income families). Eventually, we would be able to use any surpluses (net revenue) to fund our free community workshops.

To reach the rest of our target population who need our resources the most -- the underserved families, we are looking to partner with local community organizations and public housing projects, and bring our workshops to them for free. At this startup phase our venture though, the workshop fees are insufficient to cover the costs of free workshops and consequently, we are relying on donations and grants.  

Though Inceptive is currently funded by its founder, our financial model is setup to reduce the reliance on donations; and our other revenue sources have started to materialize. Inceptive relies on the combination of four major revenue sources to fund its operations and offer free community programs.

1. Earned income: We plan to use this earned income to support our operations. Our net income is generated through:

• Beneficiaries as customers: workshop registration fees generated from middle and high income parents who benefit directly from our workshops. We plan to use this earned income to support our operations.
• Corporate partnerships: fees reimbursed by businesses for the workshops conducted for their parent-employees. These workshops also benefit businesses by helping them reduce absenteeism and attrition rates.

2. Donations and grants: We plan to use this philanthropic support in its entirety to fund free community programs. We raise funds through:

• Major donations and grants: Currently Inceptive’s primary donor is also its founder, who wants to tackle an issue that is deeply personal to her. However, we plan to work with other like-minded individual donors as well foundations and use this philanthropic support in its entirety to fund free community programs.  
• Public support: We believe that our mission resonates with the existing concerns of large numbers of parents at all income levels and consequently, we have started to see small contributions ($10-$50) from parents who believe in our mission.

Inceptive aspires to become a world class nonprofit that improves the lives of millions of families across the globe regardless of their socioeconomic status. But we can’t do this alone, in isolation. As Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving woman in the history of the United States Congress said, “Each one of us can make a difference. Together we make change”. And that’s why we are applying to Solve: to form partnerships that would help us overcome the barriers, accelerate our growth, and expand our social impact.

We’d like to network with and learn from the members of Solve’s community, specifically:

• Corporate members such as Google, General Motors, Starbucks and understand how we can effectively navigate the long enterprise sales cycles.  
• Nonprofits like Save the Children and collaborate to reach parents of children in their Early Steps and Early Head Start programs.
• Funders and grant makers like the Vodafone Americas Foundation not only to gain financial support and work towards eliminating our compliance challenges but also learn from their existing partners like InterNews about working with local organizations to provide high quality information to those who need it the most.

Finally, MIT’s own initiatives like the MIT OpenCourseware and edX are great examples of the use of technology to provide education and increase awareness in an affordable and accessible way. We are striving to do the same. So, the possibility of learning from the brightest minds behind these initiatives, is in fact the greatest motivator for us.

In addition to the categories listed above, we would like to collaborate with renowned early childhood development researchers like Dr. Laura E. Schulz and her team at the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT. This would help us bring new, cutting-edge research-based tips and tools to parents.

Inceptive would like to partner with: 

• Early childhood experts at universities, research centers, and government organizations. For example, the MIT Early Childhood Cognition Lab to produce on-demand or live webinars like 'Measuring your child's number-knower level' (content/subject matter expertise).
• Nonprofits like Save the Children to reach underserved families that they work with through their Early Childhood Development programs around the globe (distribution).
• Medtronic Foundation and its community health workers (CHW) advocacy and training programs, to give experts in Inceptive's network the much needed exposure to working with the undeserved families (professional development).
• Big businesses that employs a large number of low and middle income families, e.g. General Motors, and support underserved families through their employers (distribution).
• edX to better understand how people use their platform and improve Inceptive's online learning experience (distribution and technology).  

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If selected for the Innovation for Women Prize, Inceptive would utilize the prize to focus on understanding the needs and identifying the ways to support a particular segment of our target population – single mothers and their children in the underserved communities.    

Research shows that low-income parents, especially single mothers, have higher rates of depression and depressive symptoms than their higher-income counterparts. It is well-known that among others things depressed mothers invest less time with their children on activities like reading and are less likely to breastfeed. This lack of adult attention and interactions can have negative impacts of child development.

And this problem is on the rise -- according to a New York Times analysis of Current Population Survey data, since 2015 the share of young single mothers in the workforce has increased by about 4 percent and those without a college degree account for almost all of this increase.

Inceptive would like to do an in-depth needs assessment of these families and understand barriers to providing them the help they need – they may not have a someone to watch children while in treatment or may not have the means of transport. Then we would like to design delivery methods of our educational workshops – could it be through the heart start programs or pediatric urgent care facilities? We’d like to utilize the prize to explore the issues faced by the low income single mother households.

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