The science of digital communication

We’re proud to be a child welfare organization that brings communications expertise to meet the varied needs of families and child welfare professionals:

• Potential parents exploring how they might step up for kids in care need information and inspiration to take the next step on a path that can be logistically and emotionally fraught.
• Families with placements need additional training, access to credible resources, and support.
• Caseworkers tell us they want quick tips and tools to make their jobs easier—to bridge the gap between what they learned in school and what the system demands of them every day.

We design sophisticated digital strategies that meet these audiences where they are, with content that is highly relevant and timely, so that our websites and channels become their trusted source for information.

Our websites, blogs, and libraries connect people with information and resources, stories of real families, and the voices of youth with lived experience. We pair these digital communications with search and AI summary optimization, online advertising campaigns, social media channels, and email series campaigns.

Built with, not just for

Empathy and equity shape our content and process. We seek out ideas and topics from youth in foster care, adults with foster care experience, and adoptive and foster families—and we hire, contract with, and compensate people with lived experience to help create what we publish. The result is content that reflects and uplifts the people we serve.

Storytelling as best practice

We use storytelling to help potential parents understand youth in foster care, their needs, and real families’ experiences. Stories are how humans evolved to learn and the best way to reach audiences emotionally. For potential parents making important life decisions, hearing from a family that has been there before does more than any fact sheet could.

Authoritative content

Everything we publish—training, parenting resources, caseworker toolkits—is created or curated by foster care and permanency experts. Our youth engagement toolkit, for example, draws on our staff’s decades of permanency-planning experience, offering bite-sized and practical advice that caseworkers can quickly digest and use right away.

Personalization at scale

Automated email series, triggered by specific audience actions, deliver weeks of tailored content that meets people’s information needs based on where they are on their journey—consistently outperforming industry benchmarks for open and click-through rates.

Continuous testing and optimization

Our communication strategies are grounded in audience research, including journey mapping, and refined using website testing, analytics, A/B testing of content and messaging, and feedback from the people we serve, including youth in foster care.