Welcome to Inclusion Matters a podcast about children's development from the Center for Inclusive Child Care.
Welcome to Inclusion Matters a podcast from the Center for Inclusive Child Care. I'm Priscilla Weigel, the executive director, and I am so happy to be here today with someone who's been on our show before, Shawn Holmes. She is the Help Me Connect Coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Health, the Child and Family Health Division, and Shawn has been leading Help Me Connect and all of the exciting things that are available through that. And they are celebrating their third birthday. Congratulations. Welcome Shawn.
Thank you so much. Priscilla. Yeah, this is wonderful for me to be able to hear more about our work together, but also to share with our audience some of the new things that we've learned and where we're heading into the future here for our third full year and then hopefully celebrating our fourth anniversary. So I do appreciate it.
Oh it's great. And really, when I think about it, so I think Help Me Connect launched back in 2021 which seems like forever ago now. I'm sure you can attest to that, after all the development and all of the processes.
It definitely does. I think, you know, I don't know if people in the day with a Kmart blue special, or you walk in and you get the millionth customer coming into the door. That was an exciting period for us this third year, because I was watching how many pages in Help Me Connect had been clicked on, and we finally reached that million mark. And we've had, yeah, since May of 2021, we've had probably about 600,000 new, unique visitors. Many of them, of course, are coming back. So we have a visitor rate much higher. But it has truly been amazing to watch who has been coming over the past three, three and a half years now, what they're looking for, how we can make Help Me Connect better in order to support what what we know families are hoping to find closest to them at the community level. So it has been fun to be on the on the back end of this, but also to be at the front end, working with partners from a variety of different aspects so that we can learn more about what's available, because we are never going to be exhaustive on Help Me Connect until we continue to have all these relationships, meaning filling in our gaps.
Oh, definitely. And just so really, I was looking at some of the notes for our time together and some of the analytics that I think you have been collecting, I think would be interesting to our listeners to just hear what you've noticed over these last years and what you're seeing as far as trends and needs.
Yes, absolutely. So the analytics are one of the areas that I typically know enough to be dangerous. I go in, I can see where people are coming from in the state. We have border state families, also families moving into Minnesota. I'm able to get a nice, fresh view of who is coming the one area where I wish we had more is I can't actually see how many parents versus professionals are using the site. I can get a flavor, though, because I can look at their IP address. So they might be coming from a healthcare system, or they might be coming from a big one called CenturyLink. So we can get a little bit of an impact of you know, are we, are we at about 50/50 of families versus professionals? The fun areas where are they coming to first at Help Me Connect? Are they coming to the home page? Are they coming off of a Google search or one of the social media posts that we have? And when they do come in, what is their path, their trajectory, of what they are looking for. So I always, typically like to share the top 10 of what those resources are, and that's where we've had a lot of growth over the last three years. I think when I was visiting with you, the first time I mentioned autism was in our top it was usually number one or number two. In the past year, we've seen that actually dip down to number three. And surprisingly, what still sits at number one is diapers. And yeah, when we launched, we had nothing on Help Me Connect for diapers. And so now, with some nice relationships with the Minnesota Diaper Bank, who has also then received more state funding to grow their program into greater Minnesota, I can confidently say we have a good start for diaper resources, diaper distribution organizations in the state. And that's just an example, you know, of what we're we're watching. And then I will typically go and put that keyword in to help me connect myself, and do I like what I see, usually I'm like, no, we can make that better. So the analytics always fuel and push us into new directions and help us maybe see it from the user's perspective of, you know, we look at it every day, and it helps us take a, you know, a step back and to put our feet into families, you know, those of professionals trying to support families in variety of places across the state,
Yeah. And you know, I'm thinking about when you mentioned about the autism search, because the Department of Human Services has their autism portal that was also kind of getting up and running at about the same time, maybe too. So and then what's interesting, too, I feel, I feel like the diaper search is really a big plus for you, because it shows that families are just looking to Help Me Connect for so many things, from basic needs to those more educational needs. Where, maybe in those earlier days, they were thinking, oh, this is just for, you know, this type of a support, whereas now you're really broadening how you can help families get what they need from those basic needs like diapers.
Yeah, absolutely. I probably mentioned this before too. When we launched Help Me Connect, we were very focused on our area of expertise, early childhood development, early childhood programming, services and supports for new parents or expectant parents. As we continue to watch and to respond to families that find our email and ask for help directly from Help Me Connect, it's those basic needs. It is housing. Housing is this looming ask this question by people from all across the state that in many situations I don't have a good answer for. And as well as transportation. That's another one where there's so many gaps in access across the state, where I feel like we we can support telling our policy makers that this is what families are looking for in Minnesota, where there is nothing that exists. But if we can get, you know, down right to some of the core content areas, such as autism, we have a nice relationship with the autism portal, and I want people to go to the autism portal. And so how can we make our search criteria have the autism portal in their top couple of search results, so that they know there is that if they don't already. And I think it's always a little bit of where is where is our lane? We haven't quite identified that yet. We have our population based of expectant families up to age eight, but families don't live in an early childhood bubble, and so we're really trying to make some connections for the variety of different programs that serve a whole family together. And that's that basic needs component,
Definitely. And also just thinking about even some of the needs that they might have before that child is even born with your Doula database. That is very exciting,
Yes And that comes with, be careful what you wish for. It was a wonderful effort to make sure that Doulas across the state, you know, many of them have a certification that will put them on a Department of Health list, but it also costs money to be on that list. And so how can we support the variety of Doulas that are working in the state that may have, you know, beautiful matches from a cultural or racial or language perspective. And so we worked collaboratively with the Department of Health staff in this area to create a fully new database, and that they have a survey that goes out across Doulas in the state to voluntarily add themselves to Help Me Connect, and to give us that information about their areas of specialty. And so I'd say that the the Doula list on Help Me Connect is still relatively new, and it is growing month by month. I can see, you know, 20 getting added in every single month, if not more, it's just probably always going to be growing.
Yes, yeah, oh, that's exciting. And too i thinking about, you know, we're talking a lot about families accessing resources, but there are a lot of things that you do to support professionals who are working with families as well. And so can you just share a few of those things with us?
Definitely. When we launched, we launched with the professionals in mind that Help Me Connect was a tool for professionals. We heard directly from families that that's who they trusted. They trusted their nurse, they trusted their child care provider or their faith community when they didn't know where to start. So we keep that at the core of Help Me Connect, of how we are still supporting those professionals. Yes, we have a bunch of families accessing Help Me Connect now as well, but it may have been because a professional gave them information to explore it, then also knowing that that family would feel comfortable to come back and go, hey, I saw information about early childhood screening. What do you know about that? And they could still have that relationship with the professional. So when I talk about this, it's an area of passion, because we know,professionals have their true and tried toolbox of resources that they use. And how can we make their work easier? And so not only now do we have something as minor as just free materials that professionals can order so they can share. Help Me Connect with parents or families that they think would be most appropriate. Rack cards and posters, etc, that they can feel free to have on display or have on hand to share, but then creating videos so that they can hear directly from another provider that is using Help Me Connect about how they are using it and what areas of Help Me Connect might be most useful. Another one is we created what we call a family support questionnaire, so families are often asked a series of questions from a variety of providers about, are you worried about your food, are you worried about your housing, are you' worried about your child's behavior or development, and how we could put little triggers in those types of questions, so that professionals know, oh I go to the Fed when somebody is looking for food support, because that's where all of the food support is in Help Me Connect so I don't have to try to figure out what to click on and where to go. And so it's really a visual so when families are responding to questions, professionals know which colorful thing to click on and Help Me Connect is going to actually get them to the results much quicker. And how we can, yes, set that up, because every professional probably has this questionnaire, right. They have a form of this type of questionnaire. But this is just giving the colored little icons so that it may help professionals know where they would start if they wanted to use Help Me Connect in that in that sense. Yeah, it's I also hope, I will say this is as an enhancement in the future, is all users have Help Me Connect when they come. It's very colorful. It's very overwhelming. And if you have time on your hands to sit and to click and to explore and read, that's wonderful. Most people don't have that luxury. So what we are hoping is to have this interactive questionnaire be an opportunity right on that home page. If you're not sure where to start, this will take you into an interactive question and answer type of a format, so we can move people right to early childhood screening, or move them right to food supports, if that's what they're looking for. So always thinking about professionals, but it's probably a broad audience enhancement also at this time. The one other one, oh, go ahead. Priscilla, I was going to just mention there's another really fun one that I am excited to share with you for professionals as well,
And is this related to the referrals?
It is.
Okay, perfect. Please tell us. I'm excited about this too.
So honestly, professionals right now, as they're helping families get connected to services they may give them a phone number and cross their fingers, good luck. Hopefully, the next time they talk to that family, something really great came out of that connection. They may also try to, you know, send an email on their own or make connections on their own. So we have created a professional referral system inside of Help Me Connect that's just starting, so that professionals can have an account that they can find resources that they want to refer families to and they can do a secure transfer of information to that referring organization so that not only can they take that burden off of families, they don't have to give them a phone number. They can get the get the approval from the family to make the referral on their behalf, but then they can have a direct back and forth conversation with that organization they made a referral to to really know, did you get to the family? Are they going to start receiving services? There's some confidence there, without having to call the family themselves and go, Hey, I gave you that phone number did you actually get next steps resolved? So we're very excited to create a group of piloting organizations now that want to help us take this off and see what what feedback we can get. Where is it working really well for professionals, are there areas that we can still enhance before we roll it out to all professionals that might be interested in using it on Help Me Connect so over the next couple of months here, we're very much connecting with professionals that we know are holding families for a short period of time at least into a long period of time of making referrals so that we can create this system to work especially well for what their scenario is. It's ready to go right now, but I would perceive that every professional is going to have a different, I want to make referrals to this organization answer. It might be food, it might be school district, it might be mental health, and we want to know what those are so we can create a very positive scenario for them in the process here,
That's that sounds so exciting, and I'm really excited to hear how it all goes and and how those piloting organizations, you know, what they give as far as feedback and useful support and good for you all for being so responsive to really understanding the family's journey and how you know, constantly having to tell your story over and over again to multiple individuals and to be waiting. I was talking to someone the other day who said that she was on hold for five hours for one phone call. And I, you know, it was just the fact that she stuck it out, wow, that's impressive, but not many people would. And so I appreciate what you all are doing to just try to really streamline things so that families can get to what they need in a way, and professionals can direct them there without a lot of extra steps. And I know that with the years passing, there's some new fun things that you want to highlight that Help Me Connect is showcasing. So can we jump into some of those new additions too?
Absolutely. I know one area that we're really looking at is being able to do some community reviews of the current content. So cultural organizations, those that families feel comfortable connecting with at a home basis, where they're going to feel somebody looks like me, somebody talks like me, somebody has my experiences where they can really resonate, so as Help Me Connect is a wonderful electronic platform, how can we build in a human component to it. So we are always looking for ways of having a real life person do chats, so somebody may be able to come in Monday through Friday during business hours, and they can actually respond to families. The opportunity right now is really fragmented, where families might find our email address on the bottom of the website, and they will start asking us questions. And yes, in some cases, we have that expertise, but in others we don't, depending on the question, and so really wanting there to be a connection to a human being is one of our future goals. Whether or not it will be an online chat or are we able to partner and have a toll free phone number with an organization that is really being able to support families from this early childhood or pregnant and expectant families lens. I think that's definitely one of the areas that we're not going to let go, because most of the families that I talk to, they just really would like to talk to a person. So who are the organizations? And I know we have sent several to your organization, Priscilla, because that has always seemed like the next best fit for many of those we're talking to. As we also sit and think about some of our areas where we can have improvement, a search engine. So Help Me Connect is not powered by Google search, and that is what everybody expects. And we are in the middle right now having a wonderful new enhancement so that the search engine features will be more intuitive. It will be more what people would expect from a keyword search today. It's quite frustrating, and I think many of our users are putting in their intuitive words of what they're looking for in our search engine will typically come back with zero results because it's just not working quite right. So come back in December. Decemeber Is our big month for having a new search engine that will be ready to go so that people will be more likely to get what they are looking for.
Oh, that's super exciting. And December is right around the corner, amazingly. So I can't believe I'm saying that, but I know that we have that, we have that issue with our website as well, and it is really a challenge, I think, to find the answers to that for people that are going to really match what they're looking for in a and people are used to getting things quickly, and so if something slow or you get that frustrating no results, then you give up and you might go look somewhere else. So I'm excited for for that to be something that's new and exciting and creating success for families in accessing some of those great resources that are available right there on your website.
Absolutely. I think you had mentioned autism, and that is one example. But when somebody currently does put autism. In Help Me Connect, they get a wide variety of resources from autism assessment, autism therapy. What we hope the search engine will do is plop that autism portal right at the top of the list, so that families can still see all others, but that they know that there is one place in Minnesota that we're really trying to point families too. It's the same thing with child care. We want families to know right away about Parent Aware and the Child Care Aware staff that are really helping from that toll free phone number side of getting families connected to child care services. So I'm excited that our search engine may may not only be more common sense and intuitive, but that we can really support some of those very popular and very well known first points of contact in Minnesota.
Yeah, and I know that you're also doing constant work on really making sure that you're meeting the varied needs of the those living in our state, you know, based on their language needs and resources related to where their family may be, as far as their journey in life. And so those are things that I know you've had on your list as well, and you're constantly thinking of and and moving forward on.
We are. I know, as we probably wrap up here, one of, one of the items that I tell everybody that I talk to is the minute I stop hearing constructive feedback about things that we could do better than I feel like we've lost our audience. I always expect to hear recommendations, suggestions for something that we could do better, organizations that we don't know about yet, that are still missing from Help Me Connect. There's so many wonderful community, homegrown organizations and services that I'd like to make sure we get included. So it is a never ending process of improvement. It is always a wish list and having a fully, fully mapped out priority list of where we can start taking off some of the items that people have actually so thoughtfully shared with us. So it's always an open invitation to tell us what we're getting right, to tell us what we're not getting right, so that we can make improvements and make the right adjustments that people are looking for. Yeah. Thank
Yeah, thank you Shawn. Shawn Holmes from Help Me Connect. Always a treat to talk with you. And truly, if you haven't gathered this from just listening to our conversation, Shawn is so knowledgeable and so approachable. And just when she's saying that they want feedback and want to know, I mean, it's true. And the beautiful thing about that feedback is it doesn't just go and sit somewhere, you take it and you run with it. So I really have to, you know, applaud, Help Me Connect for all the work you've done over these three years, wishing you many more birthdays, and also grateful for the partnership that we have with you, and thank you for sending those folks our way. Because truly, it is hard to navigate everything, and it's hard to know all that's out there, and there's a lot, and I appreciate the fact that you're just the strong and positive voice out there for families and young children who are trying to just get through the day One day at a time. So thank you, Shawn, and look forward to the next conversation we can have together.
That sounds wonderful. And thank you so much for your partnership, too. I appreciate it Priscilla
Our pleasure. All right, thanks for listening. Everyone. If you want more information about Help Me Connect we are going to have a link when we post this to their newsletter, and also just go to our website, and hopefully our search engine will help you find what you need. But if not, we love conversation too and actual human connection, so you can reach out to us so inclusivechildcare.org, that's who we are, and thank you again. Shawn Holmes, Help Me Connect. Have a great day.
Thanks for listening. For more resources visit us at inclusive childcare.org.
