Unexpected Opportunities: How building a parent-focused website led to a prevention messaging brand
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
11:00 AM - 11:45 AM
Before 2020 and the pandemic, Children’s Trust kept a narrow focus on its core audiences: policymakers, child-serving professionals, funders and funded partner organizations delivering evidence-based prevention programs. While we centered parents and caregivers on program impact, they were not a primary communication audience. In 2020, Children’s Trust adopted a strategic framework focused on three pillars: leading the agenda, strengthening the network and changing the narrative. We set a key performance indicator to build capacity and support partners and stakeholders in mobilizing their communities in primary prevention efforts. With the opportunity to lean into messaging as prevention and expand our audiences to parents and caregivers, we faced the communication challenge of making that fit under our Children’s Trust brand. Concurrently, we were coping with the global pandemic and working to help parents and caregivers connect to help in their communities. In response, Children’s Trust quickly launched a parent-focused website at scParents.org centered on the search functionality of findhelp, formerly Aunt Bertha. Recognizing that our first iteration was temporary, we dedicated staff and CBCAP resources to partnering with digital experts, scanning the competitive landscape, talking to parents and caregivers, understanding the challenges of community-based partners, and testing assumptions with lived experts. We recognized we had a unique prevention messaging opportunity, which was much bigger than imagined and big enough to be its own brand. This session will explore how we significantly expanded a website and built a prevention messaging brand by dramatically expanding our content strategy, findhelp functionality, promotional messaging, search engine optimization, partner outreach, community-based support and promotion. We will explore our current promotional campaign – “You’ve Got This”- and how we measure success and cope with the challenges of this significant prevention messaging expansion.