Fostering Community Engagement:Creating a Learning Management System and robust virtual community for the nonprofit Foster Cooperative

The challenge

Foster Cooperative found itself in an undesirable technical position that directly impacted its ability to flourish as both a community resource and a virtual community hub.

Like many nonprofit organizations, cycles of ad-hoc funding left the organization with a slow, unresponsive website built by multiple independent contractors over time. In an understandable attempt to "make do," the short-term, temporary technical contractors were left largely unsupervised due to Foster Cooperative's lack of a product manager. Working across multiple time zones often exacerbated the difficulty in ensuring effective quality control and implementing standard quality assurance metrics for technical deployments.

Making matters worse, a number of pre-packaged plugins were used to solve problems or function as technical solutions. Unfortunately, they were not subject to technical vetting and frequently did not meet Foster Cooperative's requirements or needs. A mountain of technical debt had built up that needed to be quickly scaled.

Additionally, Foster Cooperative faced declining engagement and an inactive community despite having well over 1,500 community partners and a multitude of educational resources to offer. Few, if any, established metric parameters were in place to assess engagement or develop targeted recruitment and fundraising strategies. Very little strategic marketing, such as specific, targeted social media campaigns or organic promotional opportunities, was in place. Finally, there were no embedded, ongoing donation campaigns or fundraisers, which is potentially fatal for any nonprofit organization.

The platform's educational component also had much room for improvement. An initial assessment made it clear that engagement could be incentivized through certifications, continued learning or education credits. An opportunity also existed to create a more dynamic user experience for learners overall.

Though Foster Cooperative was clear on its heart mission and had the benefit of passionate, engaged leadership, the organization needed to crystallize its vision for who its users were and why they would want to engage in a Foster Cooperative community, either as a community partner and resource or as a foster family community member. Further, they needed to make that engagement enjoyable once a member of the foster community decided to become a part of the Foster Cooperative virtual community.

The solution

Magnolia Development was uniquely positioned to help Foster Cooperative address its issues. Magnolia Development is more than a software development company; its areas of expertise also include digital marketing services and simplified project management.

We approached Foster Cooperative's challenge by dividing it into two main components: Ongoing Engineering Support and Social Engagement. Though there was frequent overlap between the two areas, our work can essentially be discussed within these two contexts.

Engineering & Project Management Support

Internally, Magnolia development created a formal project management structure for all work, including a roadmap and implementing project management tools. Throughout the project, regular updates on work progress and identification of needs and challenges were given.

Additionally, the development team was replaced with local Arizona talent who worked using an iterative cycle cadence. That allowed the acceleration of backend improvements that included an upgraded network host with faster server response times and versioned updates. Automated backups were set up as part of integrated contingency planning.

A video introduction to the organization was created for the home page, clarifying Foster Cooperative's mission and the value it offers users. An interactive map of over 1,600 community resources was designed to improve user experience. The ability to tag resources improved the community member experience and incentivized longer engagement on the platform. Finally, a broken donation page was fixed.

Learning Management System (LMS)

For the learning management system, we created dynamic video and text content. A new system that allows learners to track their progress and receive certifications and credentialing has laid a solid foundation for more impactful partnerships with various state agencies and nonprofit organizations. Additionally, tools that allowed community members to collaborate as formal groups or cohorts were also added.

Community Engagement

To measure the current and future engagement of all users—both community members and resource providers and partners—Magnolia Development defined what metrics would be calculated and implemented Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracking.

Extensive research into the various types of users was conducted. Clearly differentiating each potential community member, such as a resource provider, foster parent, affiliated organization, state agency, or adjacent community representative, enabled platform improvements that include features better suited to each type of user's respective needs.

Automated onboarding email sequences were added to encourage sustained engagement and welcome new community members into the virtual space. Community leaders were given sample posts that could be used on both the Foster Cooperative platform and other social media platforms to encourage interaction with other members and organically promote the Foster Cooperative platform. Organizations and other advocates in the foster care community were given the ability to form virtual groups on the platform based on their respective organizations or functions. These groups are made up of educational directors, state agencies, various support groups, mentors, mental health support organizations, and agencies that facilitate baseline resources, including housing, food, and transportation.

A partnership with LGN Collaborations was established to create and launch a three-month social media campaign and a regular email outreach campaign. Additionally, LGN Collaborations was tasked with researching viable community partners for potential grant opportunities and fundraising initiatives. Analytics were tracked to continually assess the impact of social media and email campaigns.

Results

On January 1, 2024, v2 of Foster Cooperative was officially released.

In addition to the backend improvements mentioned above, community members, partners, and resource providers now enjoy a host of new features and capabilities that increase Foster Cooperative's value to this unique community.

Today, Foster Cooperative includes:

• Over 25 individual, active communities to support specific demographic groups within the larger foster care ecosystem, including groups for dads, LGBTQ+ parents, group home employees and others in the foster care ecosystem
• A thriving community of 54 active users throughout the state of Arizona with approximately 15 new users (on average) joining each month
• A network of organizational partners that host the platform
• A "white glove" onboarding process for new members, partners and resource facilitators
• Scheduled platform posts for specific community leaders help to maintain active community engagement
• Real-time response to user needs and questions
• An improved resource provider experience, specifically:
  • Service providers can now “claim” their organization or resources directly through the platform, enabling them to keep their data up to date
  • Organizational partners have an improved team onboarding experience and additional tools for team management
  • Providers can now add new resources directly on the platform; resources and providers are vetted by site administrators prior to being added.
  • Enhanced resource search capability, including:
    • Resource tagging based on the service type offered is now fully integrated, allowing tagging to be used sitewide
    • An interactive map with clustering markers
• A marketing strategy aligned with developed user personas as a foundation for specific, measurable and targeted future marketing and fundraising initiatives
• Metrics tracking through user-friendly dashboards
  • Implementation of GA4 analytics, which added an audience segmentation dimension to collected data
  • Implementation of Geckoboard dashboard, allowing accessible tracking of fundraising, donations, KPIs and other key organizational metrics.

The technical and marketing foundation established by Magnolia Development has set Foster Cooperative up for future expansion into helping the community meet emergency or short-term housing needs, create in-person events, provide a user-friendly platform to earn certifications and credentialing, and more.