My Kids Turn: First Draft Live and Kicking
We've finally decided to start heavy duty promotion of our videos-for-parents site, My Kids Turn. This is a project that has been several months in the making, and while there are still a ton of improvements I want for the site, it's in a place where I'm excited to see if we can build an audience for what we're offering.
At the moment, the site hosts more than 80 short videos intended to give parents tools to help their kids succeed in school. We're trying to focus on giving parents what they need, not a lot of jargon and fluff -- but make sure the ideas are useful and will help kids. The site has six different channels of video right now -- everything from video games to math and early childhood education. New channels are coming, soon, including a science channel. We even have our first blooper reel.
The site is using my usual cocktail of Drupal modules -- the Acquia package of vetted contributed modules, in addition to Bad Behavior and Antispam to try to control the low down dirty rats out there in the internet world.
The centerpiece of the site is, of course, the videos, and for those we're using the CCK embedded media field module. We have our own servers, but decided that the Youtube analytics for evaluating video are simply too cool to pass up. This did, however, present a problem for us.
Ooops.
Youtube is great -- really a powerful tool, and the addition of analytics makes it very hard to move away from. MyKidsTurn is trying to reach a general parent audience, which isn't a problem, but most of our contacts and avenues for word-of-mouth marketing are the teachers and educators we work with on a daily basis -- and the vast majority of them get their internet behind firewalls and can't see Youtube. So, if we ask these teachers to promote the site, they'll go to the site, the video will be blocked, and all they'll see is big empty spaces with a one or two sentence description of what they're missing.
So, ooops. That's not going to work.
At the same time, we don't want to give up on the Youtube tools. Since our target audience CAN see embedded youtube videos, and we want to have everything that goes with youtube, giving up on Youtube is not a good option.
Solution (?)
The solution we're trying (and I'll have to let you know if it works) is to provide an alternative for each video. This adds some work to our process -- we're hosting a version of each video on a podcasting server in our own stack, and using the fieldgroup module (packaged with CCK) to bundle the video field with a link to the alternative version on our own, school firewall "safe" video.
All in all, I'm excited about the potential of the site -- and the role MyKidsTurn is going to play in our overall web program for the coming years. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
