Big Word Club

Vocabulary is the singe best predictor of success in school and life. However, the vocabularies of children from different socioeconomic groups vary greatly. 

Research indicates that by the time a poor child is three years-old, he or she may have heard as many as 30 million fewer words than children from more affluent families resulting in a “gap” in the vocabularies between rich and poor of between 400-700 words. 

Every year, millions of kids in America enter preschool and kindergarten knowing hundreds of fewer words than their more privileged classmates. Because kids who start behind tend to stay behind, these kids never catch up; they never reach their potential. 

Big Word Club can significantly improve the vocabularies of millions of English-speaking children around the world from birth-to-five years-old, especially children from low socioeconomic homes. 

The size of a child’s vocabulary at kindergarten is the best predictor of his or her ability to read by third grade yet every year, millions of children from low socioeconomic homes enter preschool and kindergarten knowing 400-700 fewer words than their more privileged classmates. 

The primary contributing factor to the creation of this "gap" in the vocabularies between rich and poor is the amount (and quality) of the words spoken by parents and caregivers from low socioeconomic homes to their children from birth to three years-old compared to the amount (and quality) of the words spoken by parents and caregivers of children from higher socioeconomic homes to their children from birth to three.  

The number of children in the U.S. impacted by this problem is significant:

• 44% of all U.S. children come from low-income families                        
• 51% of students across the nation’s public schools are low income

Big Word Club has developed an interactive, evidence-based vocabulary intervention for parents and teachers that has been shown in a randomized evaluation to improve the vocabularies of preschool and kindergarten children by as much as 13 percentile points in as little as 17 weeks.

Big Word Club is working to improve the vocabularies of all English-speaking children, especially children from low socioeconomic homes. Though children from low income homes and communities can benefit the most from Big Word Club, they are often the least able to afford the intervention, even though the cost is low; $59.99/year for a classroom or home subscription. 

Because of this, philanthropy is built into our business model. 

With every Big Word Club classroom, school or district subscription we sell, we give one away to a Title 1 classroom, school or district. 

We are also exploring strategic partnerships with large publishers, such as Scholastic and non-profits in this space, such as First Book, so that we are able to increase distribution and serve a much larger population that can benefit from Big Word Club in their classrooms, schools, daycare centers, Head Start programs and homes.

Big Word Club is a subscription-based business model that provides parents, teachers, and kids with access to over 300 videos full of things kids love; animated books, songs, and dances (including a "how-to" dance tutorial) that creatively introduces kids to a new "BIG" word every day of the school year. 

Our propriety content engages as it educates, introducing children to new words (and new worlds) providing parents and teachers with numerous conversational "springboards" that inspires increased and meaningful dialogue between parent/caregiver and child and teacher and child. 

The foundation of Big Word Club are our BIG WORD OF THE DAY animated videos. In less than one minute, children are introduced to the "BIG" word of the day. They see (and hear) that day's "BIG" word, spelled correctly and phonetically, see (and hear) it defined, and used in a sentence. 

Each week, these 5 “BIG” words are presented again in a new animated book, song, dance, and review video providing kids with an interactive learning experience incorporating auditory, visual and kinesthetic modalities.

At the end of the week, the 5 "BIG" words from that week's 5 BIG WORD OF THE DAY videos are reprised in the BIG WORD CLUB REVIEW, a short, 3-5 minute video review that further reinforces the sound, look and definition of that week's 5 "BIG" words.  

Unlike other evidence-based vocabulary interventions that are expensive and require hundreds of hours in teacher training and classroom time to implement, Big Word Club can deliver similar results in an extremely low-cost intervention (only $6.99/month) that requires no teacher (or parent) training. On average, the vocabularies of preschool and kindergarten children  with access to Big Word Club in the classroom with improve by as much as 13 percentile points in as little as 17 weeks. 

The results of the Big Word Club evaluation are similar to other interventions that have been shown to improve the receptive and expressive vocabulary of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children with two major exceptions;

Unlike other vocabulary interventions that are much more expensive and demanding of teacher time, the Big Word Club program is low-cost and requires no teacher training. 

This observation suggests that Big Word Club can be an effective and cost-effective program to improve preschool and kindergarten children's vocabularies faster and at much less cost than comparable interventions, especially when used regularly.

The Big Word Club web app is written on Ruby on Rails, or Rails, a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages.

Because many of the Big Word Club users are between the ages of 3-5 and most do not read, Ruby on Rails works especially well for Big Word Club because it enables us to offer a large number of video video files organized in highly visual and intuitive ways.

From 11/17 to 11/18, Big Word Club was the focus of a randomized evaluation funded by J-PAL, a leading research center based at MIT, and implemented by the University of Chicago to measure the impact of its program on the vocabularies of preschool and kindergarten children.

Highlights from the results of the evaluation include:

• In percentile terms, results show that a child at the 50th percentile would experience up to a 13% gain on average, jumping to the 63rd percentile after having access to Big Word Club after 17 weeks.

• A child at the 80th percentile would experience up to a 7% gain on average, jumping to the 87th percentile after having access to Big Word Club after 17 weeks.

• Unlike other vocabulary interventions that are expensive and require significant teacher training, Big Word Club is low-cost and requires no teacher training.

Here is a link to the Executive Summary of the Big Word Club Evaluation from the University of Chicago: http://bit.ly/323tPot

8,487 Total Users to Date

25,000 Projected Users in 2019 

1,000,000+ Users in Five Years

Our Primary Goals for 2019 are to: 

• Secure a publishing and distribution deal for our Big Word Club digital book series designed for children from birth to five years-old
• Secure strategic partnerships with leading for-profit and non-profit publishing and distribution companies to publish and distribute Big Word Club in the U.S. and all English-speaking countries
• Close on $500K in equity or Convertible Debt funding

Our Five Year Goals include..

• Deepening and expanding distribution of Big Word Club into new markets 
• Development of new content that will provide children, parents and teachers with up to two additional years of new Big Word Club content

According to a landmark study by Hart and Risley in 1995, children’s vocabulary skills are linked to their economic backgrounds. According to Hart and Risley, children from lower socioeconomic homes may hear as many as 30 million fewer words than children from higher socioeconomic homes by the time they are 3 years old. This is commonly called the “word gap.” Because kids learn by hearing, they don’t learn what they don’t hear. This translates into a gap of 400-700 words in the vocabularies of low-income kids and their more privileged classmates.

It has taken 24 years since that seminal publication by Hart and Risley for a company, organization or government program to create a highly scalable, low-cost, evidence-based and easy-to-implement intervention that can improve children's vocabularies quickly and effectively; yet this is exactly what Big Word Club has been proven to do.

Nonetheless, our struggles are far from over. We must now do the things necessary for an edtech start-up to succeed in the marketplace. They include:

• Fundraising
• Staffing
• Sales & Marketing
• Advertising & PR
• Distribution
• Overcoming Barriers of Selling into Education Market
• Overcoming Barriers of Selling Directly to Consumers (Mom market)
• Customer Service

We have have begun to put all of the above into play, but currently find ourselves limited by both bandwidth and funding.

Overcoming the barriers facing our company can be divided into three buckets:

Financial: By raising $500K in equity financing or Convertible Debt will allow us to hire the staff that has helped us get to where we’re at as well as implement the company’s sales, marketing, advertising, PR, distribution and customer service efforts that will bring us to sustainability. 

Strategic: We believe continuing to work towards securing distribution partnerships  

with publishers in the education market, such as Scholastic, and non-profits, such as First Book, will position the company for increased revenue and allow Big Word Club to reach a much bigger audience, including children from poor schools and communities that can benefit most from Big Word Club. 

Tactical: From a tactical perspective, Big Word Club will continue improve our company’s organic SEO, grow, build and monetize our Big Word Club YouTube Channel (currently over 40K subscribers and over 86 million views), implement our podcast outreach program, and implement our outbound and inbound customer acquisition program.  

We have 3 full-time staff, 3 part-time staff and 12 part-time independent contractors on the team.

I believe I have the necessary combination of creativity, drive, and business acumen necessary to lead and build a successful content-driven company for kids that seeks to address a large, unmet need in society.

As a children's book author and serial entrepreneur in the children's educational content space, I co-founded an international toy company (World POG Federation) in the mid-nineties with sales of over $175 million, served as the president of Random House Entertainment, have sold over two million children's books and have produced hundreds of animated videos that have received over 86 million views on YouTube. I have created and produced three original children's preschool educational television series and have won 11 Emmys along the way. I am passionately committed to working with people who are committed to doing great things that improve the lives of children and better prepare them for a happy and successful life.

I am passionately committed to this cause and have assembled a staff of talented professionals uniquely qualified to help solve this problem. 

My full time staff are each specialists in their fields; digital marketing, education, and community outreach. Together, we manage a team of 12 independent contractors ranging from singer/songwriters, composers, graphic designers, puppeteers, animators, directors, editors, and sound engineers.

We love the idea of partnering with companies and organizations to further our collective missions. We are currently in conversation with Scholastic and Brookes Publishing to explore a publishing and distribution partnership for Big Word Club as well as exploring a distribution partnership with First Book to increase distribution of Big Word Club into schools and communities where it is needed most. These talks are ongoing and have not yet closed but we are optimistic about their potential.

Big Word Club is a subscription-based business model organized as a for-profit Colorado LLC.

Consistent with our mission to improve the vocabularies of all English speaking children, especially those who may not be able to afford the cost of the program, Big Word Club has developed a philanthropic program called "From One to Many," as part of our business model. 

For every classroom, school, or district Big Word Club subscription we sell, we give a classroom, school or district subscription away to a Title 1 classroom, school or district.

As a subscription-based business model, our path to sustainability is through the sales of classroom, school, district and home subscriptions to Big Word Club.

Having invested the time and money in a randomized evaluation, Big Word Club now has the proof that our program is effective in improving the vocabularies of preschool and kindergarten children. As an evidence-based intervention, Big Word Club stands out from its competition in four ways:  

• Low-cost
• Requires no teacher training
• Easy-to-implement
• Highly engaging and popular with children

To help scale, we are exploring partnerships with existing print and digital publishers with strong distribution in the education market.

In the meantime, we are raising money through equity financing and Convertible Debt.

We are applying to Solve because we have developed an evidence-based, low-cost and highly scalable solution that can improve the lives of millions of children around the world, especially children from low socioeconomic homes. Yet we are a small company with very limited resources, both human and financial. We realize that to be able to help the millions of children we envision helping, we need help, support and introductions that we currently do not have. We need help building partnerships and developing relationships with existing networks and organizations that can help get Big Word Club into the heads and hearts of those who need it most so that collectively, we can do more good faster.

The companies and organizations we would like to partner with include Scholastic, First Book, Head Start, Early Head Start, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt‎, Penguin Random House, Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill Education,