In late 2020 we tested whether we could use the supply side of our marketplace to acquire demand side users with financial compensation. Here’s how we went about validating whether it had any merit.
TLDR;
- 🩴 Flip the incentive: A £100 referral incentives felt disingenuous and wasn’t worth much to families. However, it was big money for our nannies.
- 🖇 Reduce off-platform* behaviour: Linking payment for referrals to payroll allowed us to buffer against off-platforming because there was a more lucrative incentive to remain matched.
- Be open to new acquisition routes: as the test unfolded we found that we might be able to pay ‘nannies’ who weren’t able to match (locality, availability or demand) to acquire families rather than work. We also broadened our idea of referrals to include physical scans as well as links.
- ✨ Bonus; hyper localised marketing & insight: physical marketing materials and local ads allowed us to see which nanny profiles are seen as most attractive on a hyper local scale.
*Off-platform = nannies & families “cutting out the middle man” and working together without using our contract or payroll app.
Aim
Dramatically increase family numbers by leveraging nannies’ desires to find a job and earn a potentially considerable income.
Background
After nearly a year of lockdowns we needed to turn our attention to growing our family base, as the designer looking after matched nannies and families we implemented a classic referral scheme for our families to refer friends and other parents at the school gate (complete with QR code in app as we knew from user interviews that parens often didn’t have each other’s numbers in the casual conversations where they recommended us). However, we weren’t satisfied to stop there. We knew from extensive research and proof points that our nannies were motivated to:
a. Find employment
b. Earn more than working via our platform was offering them
We also knew that our biggest selling point was our nannies themselves.
As such we asked ourselves a question — could we turn their ultimate aim of earning money into a family acquisition source?
It sounds a unintuitive — if our job seeking nannies knew of a family in their area they’d be working for them and they’d have no need of Koru Kids. I won’t disagree — but that’s the thing they don’t know them but what the corner shop noticeboards and bus stop flyers tell us is that they do live within proximity of families who’re likely to have childcare needs. Our existing family growth told us something else again — that family acquisition in a locality followed a snowball effect — we just had to get the ball running.
The existing medium of posters and flyers had another key benefit — nannies were more than three times more likely to apply to with a family within 25 minutes walking distance to their home (or university), for families the relationship was weaker but still more than twice as likely to choose a nanny who lived within a 15 minute walk. There are different causes at play here. For nannies that represented a better salary on short shifts if you include travel time and the absence of travel costs greatly increased their perception of the take home pay, especially when pay came round monthly but the bus fare was daily. Family side it’s likely that the familiarity with the nanny’s address gave them peace of mind about the ‘fit’ of this nanny to their family.
Finally, physical posters are multi-use, don’t get buried down listings and unlike share codes are directed at the public space rather than addressed to a private individual.
Teamwork for the dreamwork
Following an IBM framework the squad and I mapped ideas for using nannies to acquire families and then plotted them on a matrix of risk against certainty.
Of the three ideas that came out higher risk we then mapped the Assumptions & Questions we had for each and thought of a Means to Resolve that risk (i.e. test it). We were able to drop the ‘Bring your own’ (i.e. a nanny bringing a family on platform in order to access payroll benefits, the higher earner incentives, insurance and scheduling tools for those working for multiple families) as when resolving the uncertainty we estimated the size of this market to be very low. From there we were able to design the test.
Proposal
‘Earn hundreds extra a week and land your dream job’
Our proposal was an action plan to mitigate against the risks the squad had identified around nannies sharing their profiles publicly to families in their areas. The top three were:
- Nannies wouldn’t think it’s not their job to recruit families and wouldn’t share/put up collateral. Even with incentives.
- Parents wouldn’t scan the flyers or click through on social media cross-postings.
- Nannies would abuse them for off-platform (by adding contact details).
Each test we ran either targeted the risk the team foresaw or designed to avoid a risk that could not be mitigated against.
For example our initial test saw nannies paid to put up posters on public noticeboards nearby — it tested not how many families would swipe but at what price would they sign up, receive the posters, put them up and post pictures to a google form as proof for us. We were also able to effectively strike out a second lower priority risk here — that nannies wouldn’t know where to put them or would put them in inappropriate places.
TEST 1: Personalised referrals 🤸♀️ 👨👩👦 📲 (Big Question: will families scan them?)
I created a series of six personalised flyers/posters to reach families in my area (a busy area for us but where nannies greatly outnumbered looking families). We looked to target families who hadn’t thought to search out afterschool nannies or weren’t aware of our brand.
I played nanny thrice for this test trialling several formats to gauge which got the most scans, signups and matches respectively:
1. Putting up posters in areas where parents congregates (school gates, leisure centres, cafes near schools, playgrounds)
2. Door dropping double sided (2 nannies in one flyer!) flyers to houses with evidence of kids (easier than you’d think to spot from the street)
3. Waiting by the school gates in person and using the generic poster to see if the in person touch of nannies marketing would do the trick better than either of the previous methods.
Results:
In a nutshell, yes families would scan or click through but not in the numbers we’d hoped for. We were surprised to find that the in person test didn’t outperform door dropping but it was enlightening to hear some of the parents’ experiences with Koru Kids first hand.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the public posters in areas where many parents could scan them performed best. Parents only scanned them if they were interested so the sign up rate was particularly impressive on this test. There were some issues with those on bus stops or near schools being removed fast but others stayed up over a month.
The attractiveness of the nannies’ profile started clearly shining through within days of being posted live with scans mimicking the nannies popularity on our site despite all the nannies coming from a small area.
TEST 2: Generic broadcasting 💰 📣 (Big Question: can we pay nannies enough to actually do anything)
Background: Marketing had previously tried to pay nannies to recruit other nannies and was not very successful. However, here we tested an incentive eight times the size — at £40 per matched family here.
Incentive test:
- Emailed a survey to invite all looking nannies this week to earn £50 to put up 3 generic flyers by Friday 27th 12pm (they prove they’ve done it by showing us a picture).
Of the 50 who responded more than 30 submitted photos. The higher rates of success were also partially attributable to it being a much smaller task to put up posters than convince a friend to sign up for a nannying job.
TEST 3: Digital sharing test — public sharing 📣 🔗 (Big Question: will the links acquire customers?)
For this final test we worked with a nanny to post across sites like Gumtree and childcare.co.uk to see what responses they received. The quality of responses was very poor and it was a clear off-platform risk to have nannies do this for themselves.
Proposal Summary
- Send nannies a pack of 10 posters in their onboarding pack to put up nearby with unique QR codes tracking their referrer codes, stress the big earners here.
- Use real nannies to promote the service in underserved areas — both to distribute materials and to feature as more attractive proposition for families than more generic marketing.
