WEEK 5: Exploring Trust, Training, and Audiences
Revisiting Service Proposition, Value Flow & Journey Maps
Building Trust & The Need For Training
An interesting opportunity that came out of our journey mapping exercise was one of building trust between parents, the child and the mentor. As the mediator of these relationships, especially at the early stages, our service has to facilitate trust right from the onset.
Both Molly and Francis encouraged us to look at summer camps and other mentorship programs, such as Asthma Buddy, Camp Kesem and Tenacity, to see how they build trust and train their mentors/counsellors.
They also encouraged us to partner with exisiting organizations. For example, could we partner with asthma-related organizations to provide training and certification for mentors? Doing so could help assure parents that their child is in good hands.
Training mentors both in asthma-related knowledge and beyond would further bolster our value proposition for mentors. The chance to gain skills that could serve them outside the program would be a great incentive to attract mentors.
Expanding Target Audiences (Mentors)
We had some interesting conversations this week about the target audiences that the service would recruit as mentors. Initially, we wanted to focus on only bringing older children with asthma on board as mentors. While this would ensure all mentors had first-hand experience dealing with asthma in some form, it would limit the pool of people we could draw from when building our mentor base.
Does the mentor need to be asthmatic? What if they had a sibling who had asthma, would that count? We decided to expand our target audience for mentors to include teenagers with experience dealing with asthma directly (they have asthma) or indirectly (someone close to them has asthma). What we really valued was having mentors that could empathize with the children. This way, we could still do this while having larger group of pool of potential mentors.
We also saw scope for targeting pre-med students as well as those pursuing related courses, such as nursing, mental health and psychology. It would give them a chance to gain hands-on experience and build inter-personal skills that are crucial in such fields.
Revisiting Service Proposition
As a result of our conversations this week, we realized that the thing we’re really interested in is building the relationship between mentors and their mentees. Sure, asthma care and physical fitness is a part of it, but there’s an opportunity for a more holistic approach to mentorship. Exercise and other activities are only the means for the mentor-mentee relationship to be nurtured.
Our service is a mentorship program that provides children with asthma with the support to stay physically and mentally healthy through activity-based experiences and mentorship from young adults with experience dealing with asthma (either directly or indirectly).
Additionally, the service provides teenagers with experience dealing with asthma and pre-med students an opportunity to mentor and build leadership and inter-personal skills through training and hands-on experience.
Stakeholder Value Flow
To help us visualize the value flow, we decided to do a bit of role-playing. Each of us took on the role of a different key stakeholder while the water bottle was the service. This helped us quickly ideate the interactions between the stakeholders and helped us identify gaps in our value flow diagram.
When revisiting our value flow, we tweaked a couple of things:
- Removed the fitness experts and replaced them with stakeholders, like UPMC and University of Pittsburgh’s Asthma Centre, who can assist in asthma-related training for mentors.
- Added the appropriate FBI and government authorities responsible for background checks of both mentors and families wanting to subscribe to this service.
- Included educational institutes, like CMU and UPitt, to help us recruit students studying courses related to medicine and therapy as mentors.
Next Step / Questions
- Should we focus on monetizing our service?
