Product Idea: News Site for the Elderly

I want to create a nonprofit news site and accompanying newsletter focused on issues affecting seniors and their caregivers. As Americans continue to age they’re becoming increasingly more tech savvy and I’d like to serve this particular audience with a news site dedicated to them. I believe we can inform seniors and their potentially younger caregivers through a website and weekly newsletter. I don’t believe we would need a large social media presence outside Facebook and Instagram, which we could leverage to do profiles on notable seniors or those doing good work for an often neglected community. The website’s name is TBD.

I hypothesis there is an opportunity to redesign the senior news experience by using updated technology. Often times finding information on health care, social security or seasonal scams has been difficult in my experience so we’d like to simplify this process. We’d have sections that highlight the main areas of news, like domestic and international, as well as healthy living and financial news. I believe the value add will be for the curated content geared specifically for our older audience while providing their caregivers with the necessary resources to succeed in their aim to help the seniors in their lives.

I’d like to get back to the basics of web design without the 90’s HTML experience. I believe we can host a simple website on WordPress using larger/bolder font, Headline lists and large images. Our site would leverage open source accessibility tools like aXe and the Accessibility DevTools extension in Chrome to ensure those that have trouble reading content have additional methods of consumption.

We would power the weekly newsletter using MailChimp and would collect signups on our WP site using the MC4WP plugin as both platforms have a free tier that could be used to get the newsletter off the ground. Should the newsletter grow above 2,000 subscribers we would need to move to a paid platform. MailChimp offers 15% discounts to nonprofits which would help save money in operating costs. We would send newsletters weekly to provide recaps of the week’s news.

Should we gain an engaged audience, I believe we can continue to build the community by self hosting a discussion forum from Discourse.org so caregivers can discuss potential scenarios and solutions to better help one another. I believe that tribal knowledge is the best knowledge and learning from others who want to provide the best care for their loved ones will be incredibly valuable.