American Heart Association
Kids Heart Challenge
During my 6+ years working on the School Engagement Team at the American Heart Association, I saw many changes. In 2018 we retired the 35-year-old, nationally recognized Jump Rope For Heart program, and introduced Kids Heart Challenge.
The school Engagement team works with primarily elementary schools across the nation. In most schools our primary contact is the PE teacher, who implements the AHA programs, conveys our communications and teachings in their PE classes.
Kids Heart Challenge is a fun mix of mission forward messaging and lessons, tied in with fundraising. Students learn basic (age-appropriate) lessons to take care of their hearts, while also learning about children with special hearts (congenital heart defects).
Each school has the opportunity to pick their program dates, length, and how to implement the program in their school, based on what will work the best for their individual school. However, most schools choose to conduct their programs in conjunction with National Heart Month (february) and Valentine’s Day.
Every year the program has a different theme, and a different cast of Heart Heroes that teach the students different actions that they can take to help keep their hearts healthy and strong. These actions are simple messages like “move more,” “choose water (over sugary beverages),” “be Kind,” “say No to tobacco and vaping,” “eat smart,” and “help others.” The students are motivated by the new characters and their messages and usually pick a favorite to collect.
Each student chooses a challenge to do throughout the program (to Move More or Be Kind), and will earn heart heroes as they raise donations to help kids with special hearts.
Our programs were run on a cyclical cycle, that followed the school schedule.
Summer (June - August): planning for the next school year
Fall (September - December): introducing the new cast of Heart Heroes, recruiting schools, planning each school’s specific plans and dates, and implementing fall programs as schools
Winter (January - March): implementing our programs in 90% of participating schools
Spring (April - June): wrapping up the final programs and recruiting schools to participate next year
As we all know, 2020 changed everything. When COVID-19 first hit Seattle in mid-February 2020, no one knew what was coming, and as schools started closing, we had to figure out how to adapt. How could we make the experience similar for kids and keep them engaged?
After the shutdown, we dropped all fundraising goals, and our priority was to engage students and keep them active at home, through a 2 week program we called “KHC - Kick Cabin Fever to the Curb”.
Right off the bat, I created a 2-week guide of daily activities that could be done from the home, with minimal support needed from parents, and kept student’s minds and bodies active. For each school we had to find out how schools communicated with their families, and what we needed to do to provide the best user experience for the students and families (daily emails, weekly communications, printed activities for families without access to internet?)
In the 20-21 school year, we did not know what to expect. Schools in the Northwest stayed closed or if students were on campus no visitors were allowed. So how could we provide the best experience to the schools and families? As with everything, it was a learning process. Pre-pandemic our communications were primarily sent home through paper communications sent home with students to their parents.
These encouraged families to register online, raise money for the American Heart Association, and learn how to take care of their hearts and minds. Every year we adapted these flyers as the school year progressed. We could see pretty quickly which messages were getting through to families, and what was being missed, this allowed us to re-word, re-order, and even re-design our communications to ensure that families knew exactly what we were asking of them.
Each school runs their Kids Heart Challenge Program for about 3 weeks, so we had immediate feedback on if our communications were hitting the mark. For example, a school in the previous year may have raised $4,000, and had 100 students online, but this year 1 week in they only had 10 kids online, and $350 raised. We could see immediately that something we were doing was not providing the user experience that they school and families needed to be successful.
In the fall we realized that our messages were not getting through to families and we quickly needed to adapt, change our messaging, and update our strategies to make the experience as easy as possible for both the schools we were partnered with and the families.
Enter the Classroom Challenge —
This was a strategy that we had started to introduce in the 19-20 school year before the pandemic. We had learned through years of working in schools that messages sent home from the classroom teacher or principal were more likely to be opened than a message from a PE teacher. So, how to capitalize on this? We started running “Classroom Challenges” at our most engaged schools. Our classroom challenges ended up being hugely successful, and became a primary strategy nationwide.
From the 19-20 school year to the 22-23 school year, this was my responsibility. In that time, we increased classroom challenge participation from about 50 schools on my team to over 400. In the 21-22 school year, I implemented classroom challenge communication at over 400 schools that raised over $2.5 million, engaging 36,000 numbers of families online, and increasing the team fundraising revenue over $1.6 million!
Finn’s Mission
Along with the classroom challenges, we also introduced a strategy called “Finn’s Mission” named after our national heart hero Finn. This was accessed on the Kids heart challenge website or app, and consisted of 8 actions displayed like a gameboard for students to take, encompassing both mission (learn the steps to Hands-only CPR) to fundraising (raise a donation) actions. We knew coming into each year that students who registered online, raised on average more than students with only offline donations, and also that students who completed all 8 of the Finn’s Mission tasks, raised over double than those who did not complete Finn’s Mission.
So how could we capitalize on this. What tasks and messages did we need to focus on. First, we wanted kids to register online, and second, we wanted them to complete Finn’s Mission. Year after year our results showed us the same data, online students and students who completed Finn’s Mission raised more money.
Hands-Only CPR
On January 2, 2023, Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills collapsed after making a tackle, and needed CPR and an AED to be resuscitated. You may be wondering how this relates, our Kids Heart Challenge program was already focused on learning the steps to Hands-only CPR. But after Damar’s collapse, he started working with the AHA to promote the importance of knowing CPR. We became laser focused on it, adding a line in every message to families to complete the Hands-only CPR badge on their Kids Heart Challenge website. This, along with completing Finn’s Mission, because the focus of all our emails.
Imagine my surprise when at the end of the, we learned that the Hand-Only CPR badge was one of the least completed badges in Finn’s Mission.
What fascinates me is, how and why, after all the focus on Hands-Only CPR was it’s badge so rarely completed? It is a free badge that requires the student and family to watch a one-minute video and answer a couple questions about what they learned.
If I was still working at the American Heart Association and was a UX researcher/designer for them, I would love to delve into this topic more. I would dive into the metrics (including what is the first item clicked, how many repeat visits there are, and drop rates), conduct a competitive analysis, do user research including interviewing families and teachers running the Kids Heart Challenge programs, and do moderated usability testing.
This would help me to understand the process that families are taking on the current website, and start to strategize and problem solve solutions.
The UX designer in me wants to know:
Was there an issue on the website?
Were families not seeing the badge?
Was the link to watch the video not working?
Was the family completing the quiz but the website was not registering it?
Was there not enough motivation to complete the badge?What could we have done to motivate them more?
What is the first thing the families complete, and which badge is the most completed badge? Why is that badge chosen first and most often?
Could our messaging have been different? what could we change?
Is there an incentive that we could offer than would entice more students to learn the steps to Hands-Only CPR?
And most importantly, what could be changed to make it easier and more obvious for families?