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There are many organizations doing great work to make the world a better place to live. Through our CleverTap4Good initiative, we partner with these organizations so that philanthropy is boosted by technology — particularly when it comes to engaging and empowering their network of users with our advanced user insights and personalized digital experience.
One organization we partner with is Central Square Foundation (CSF), an eight-year-old nonprofit organization that works to ensure quality school education for all children in India, especially those from low-income communities.
CSF partners with other organizations to bring innovative solutions to the educational system, as well as research and create effective systems in the areas of early learning, technology in education, classroom instruction methods, and system governance.
Predominantly, CSF’s work expands across three broad categories:
We spoke with Sashwati Banarjee, Entrepreneur in Residence at Central Square Foundation, to understand how they turn their vision into reality.
Early childhood development (ECD) has been a highly neglected area in India. It’s always taken the backseat to higher education. But evidence says 90% of brain development happens at an early age. ECD encompasses physical, socio-emotional, cognitive, and motor development between 0-8 years of age.
While the Anganwadi rural child care centers continue to do great work, the focus has always been on nutrition rather than early childhood education. As a result, many children enter the formal school system with no readiness for education — no basic math and reading skills until the age of 5.
For this age group of children, most of the time is spent at home. In low resource countries like India and particularly low resource populations, parents feel they are not empowered to facilitate their child’s early development. They struggle to provide direction as they themselves are not literate or have a low level of literacy.
For the early years, mediation and facilitation is important in education. When a kid is at school or at Anganwadi, the teacher is the mediator, but nowadays parents need to play that part.
To address this challenge, CSF works with and supports a technology-based solution — namely the Top Parent app, led by Sashwati.
Top Parent is an easy-to-use, parent-facing app to empower and equip parents to teach their children.
During its launch this year, it saw a lot of endorsements from the state government especially from members of Parliament. It was launched in April 2020 under the Digi Lap program at a critical time when homeschooling became a mandate and it was essential to build programs to support parents.
The app is designed as both a progressive web app and an Android app in order to reach people who do not have advanced smartphones and who do not have enough storage capacity on their phones. The app is purposely light in size, but with an appealing UX and UI that adds value.
Top Parent tries to support and cater to all parent’s needs when it comes to early childhood development while using feedback in the app for continuous improvement.
The app itself has two sections: one for the parents and another for the child.
The parent section consists of videos to provide knowledge and information about early childhood domain areas beyond numbers and letters, to include social and emotional learning, nutrition, well-being, child protection, and more.
The child section of the Top Parent app has a number of other apps and resources that can be used by children to improve their language, literacy, and math skills: Chimple, Math Masti and Google’s Read Along. CSF conducted primary and secondary research to identify EdTech solutions that are proven to be effective around the world.
Top Parent provides a bridge between a child’s learning and keeping parents involved and engaged in that process. The app showcases a child’s skills through a dashboard that allows parents to understand how their child is progressing on their learning curve.
The parent section on Top Parent app showing a video on ‘how to resolve fights between kids during lockdown’ followed by the action buttons for Top Quiz, Scoreboard and Prize. In the last section their recommended app, Chimple is shown.
User engagement in this sector is tough. It’s difficult to understand what appeals to users and what doesn’t.
Our platform enables the Top Parent team to understand user behavior, user journeys, how customers are navigating in the app, and a lot more. Real-time data helps them build concrete user insights that can be used to keep parents active in the app.
The Top Parent team segments and engages users based on behavior — such as what videos they’re watching, how active they are on the app, whether they’ve downloaded the quiz or not, and so on.
For example, when their data showed high drop-offs on the Top Quiz, the team dug deeper into why it was happening. Between analytics data and user feedback, they discovered that users wanted more categories and did not want to be limited to only two categories per day. This led to them changing the way users interact with the quiz by expanding and constantly refreshing their quiz question bank.
Screenshot showing a question from the Top Quiz – ‘How many words does a child know by the age of 4?’ followed by 4 choices for the answer — 500, 1500, 180, none of the above.
Furthermore, our analytics functionality helps them make their engagement campaigns more personalized. By mapping out behavior trends over time, Top Parent is able to take a more human-centric approach to their campaigns.
Moving forward, Top Parent wants to keep engagement high and refine their messaging to be more unique to each user.
Overall, CSF as an organization looks forward to building strong partnerships and expanding within geographies to non-Hindi speaking areas.
Know an organization working hard to make the world a better place? Learn more about CleverTap4Good and how we support organizations that make a difference.
