Why Every Edtech Company Should Have a Buy-1-Give-1 Program
As an edtech founder living in Silicon Valley, I hear a lot of this from wealthy parents:
“Oh, we’re so glad to have discovered your app! We must have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to help our son with his reading, and now we’ve finally found something that helps!”
Hearing comments like these is simultaneously heartening and concerning. On the one hand, it’s great to hear that the tools we’ve built are helping students who struggle with reading. At the same time, it made us wonder: what about all those kids out there who have difficulty reading, but don’t have parents who can go to the ends of the earth (traveling first class, apparently) to help them reach their potential?
It was then that we realized that our highly-effective literacy tools might end up exacerbating the opportunity gap—giving yet another advantage to the “haves,” and leaving the “have nots” out in the cold. To ensure that didn’t happen, we created a buy-1-give-5 (that’s right, five!) program that benefits students in low-income schools.
Our program is simple: instead of joining our basic Worker Bee plan (which is less than a buck a month), a user can instead opt for our Honey Bee plan (which is still only $2.50 — or one latte — a month). For every Honey Bee member, we turn around and give five free licenses to students in low-income schools. We’re grateful that so many parents have opted to join this program (and to read about what kind of parents are the most likely to join, read this blog post).
Creating a program like this is easy, and it’s the right thing to do. After all, education is supposed to be the great equalizer, which means we have to do our part to make sure we’re helping to balance the scales — not skew them even further.
Do you have another idea about how to shrink the opportunity gap in education? Share in the comments or via twitter!
For more info on BeeLine Reader’s mission-driven philosophy, check out the video below, courtesy of The Tech Museum of Innovation.
