Early Childhood Ventures & COVID-19
FAQ & Resource Guide


This is an overwhelming time. As a high impact organization in ECD, you are likely thinking about this crisis on several levels:

  • You and your family’s physical and mental health
  • The impact on your team and organization
  • The needs of your community and how your organization can help

We don’t want to offer you yet another resource list. The Promise team is here to help you synthesize key takeaways and figure out how they apply to your organization. Take a look at the materials below, and reach out to team@promisestudio.org with questions, ideas or to schedule a time to talk.

No matter what your specific concerns are, we thought this short piece - What 9/11 Taught Us About Leadership in a Crisis - offered a particularly valuable perspective:

“Leaders must be visible with their plans, honest with their words and adaptable with their actions — all while maintaining compassion...” (by Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell).

Please visit the CDC or WHO for medical guidance.

How do I transition my in-person service to virtual?-

To make this switch, you’ll need to think about your program delivery and your program content in tandem.

For example, if you offer workshops, your first instinct might be to move them to Zoom. But what if your users don’t have reliable Internet access? You could help them connect and offer tech support - or you could explore supplementary learning through text messaging.

Start by exploring partnership opportunities. Who already offers a program like yours digitally? Can you use their materials or otherwise work with them? If your program is child-facing, you can find curated distance learning resources here. For other kinds of programs, check out our searchable Venture Index. The Promise team can also help you identify partners.

While the guidance below is comprehensive, this process does not need to be overwhelming. Start small, and acknowledge that the transition won’t be perfect. Your users will value your efforts to connect, and you can learn together on how to implement as the situation evolves.

For example, The GIANT Room, an in-person, supplemental learning center sent this note to families in their network.

For more ideas and best practices on topics like engagement and accessibility check out Promise’s Checklist for Transitioning to Online Program Delivery.

Here are some products and tools that our team uses. If you’re…

  • Creating a resource database: AirTable (example)
  • Hosting meetings: Zoom (HIPAA-compliant version available)
  • Creating videos:
    • Recording: smartphone or webcam
    • Hosting and simple editing: YouTube
    • More complex editing: iMovie
  • Creating virtual community: Slack, Facebook Groups, WhatsApp

How do I transition my team to remote work?+

Most importantly, keep in mind that these are challenging times for all of us. We are anxious and many of us have new burdens to deal with such as elderly parents to care for, children at home, increased risk due to health problems, and more. Ultimately, we cannot know what our employees are coping with.

How you communicate and support your team right now matters beyond this difficult time. Speaking from a place of empathy (for yourself and others) and the assumption of good intent is a helpful way to ensure you will look back and be proud of the choices you make.

We found the resources and tips in these short articles particularly valuable:

  • 5 Tips for Managing Remotely During COVID-19 from The Management Center, which supports social change organizations: “...Disruptions in life and work are par for the course during challenging times. Here’s the hard truth: even if everyone on your team becomes a Slack wizard or finally figures out how to use the mute button on a conference call, it will not be business as usual.”
  • People First: Wikimedia’s Response to COVID-19: “We believe in every human, and we believe in what we as humanity can do together. We’re taking every step we can to protect our communities, our colleagues, our families, while meeting our vision’s commitment. You can take these steps too. We’re asking you to join us.”
  • “A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers” from the Harvard Business Review: “Fortunately, there are specific, research-based steps that managers can take without great effort to improve the engagement and productivity of remote employees, even when there is little time to prepare.”

It’s likely that you and many of your colleagues are working with children at home. Our caregiver resources are designed to help manage that situation and include free activities.

As a geographically distributed team, we’ve identified a few best practices for our own work:

  • Over-communicate: frequent, informal status updates and check ins are better than saving up discussions for formal meetings.
  • Focus on deliverables: be clear on desired outcomes and timelines, while giving employees wide latitude on how they get there.
  • Video chat: always turn on your video. There is no substitute for in person communication, but video chat is leaps and bounds better than phone (or email) for clear, nuanced communication.

What are best practices for crisis communication? What templates can I use? +

As you work to quickly communicate your crisis response to employees, beneficiaries, funders and the general public, we want to share some resources to make this easy.

The Communications Network’s Coronavirus Crisis Comms Triage Kit offers key principles, alongside many examples and templates. Their key ingredients for effective crisis communication: “Brevity. Facts. Clarity. Calm. Perspective.”

The network offers links to many templates and best practice examples here. We particularly liked this short, values-driven note from LL Bean.

How will this crisis affect my fundraising? What rapid response funds (grants, loans, etc.) should I know about? +

First, you should know that many philanthropic funders are adding flexibility to existing grant agreements and reducing reporting requirements. Discuss this with your funder(s) if you haven’t heard from them directly.

There are also many new rapid response funds, which you may be eligible for.

Second, take some time to learn more about how funders see their role in the COVID response and how they are approaching decisionmaking with these guides:

Third, you may be working to transition your fundraising efforts away from events and in person meetings. This post from classy.org on virtual fundraising tactics has some specific ideas to help you make that shift.

Fourth, you should revisit your fundraising message. How can you communicate the continued value and importance of your work in this new context? As always, make sure that your communications lead with your values and the positive effects that you have in your community - not your organization or product.

This message from Darren Walker--a philanthropic funder--strikes the right tone about the critical role organizations like yours may be playing in this moment of crisis:

“Meanwhile, as funders play a modest short-term role in ameliorating this crisis, our grantees are providing the pathways to long-term solutions with powerful policy ideas and innovation. [They] are championing bold ideas—once considered marginal—like paid sick leave, increases to the minimum wage, and even cash transfers to low-income households. As funders, we must continue to provide support... so they are prepared to work with the private sector and government over the long term.”

In these challenging times, we want to remind you that your work is more crucial than ever. As frontline workers search for emergency child care, as parents scramble to home school young children, and as social services struggle to communicate with the most vulnerable, the challenges of our non-system in early childhood are evident. Innovation is already happening as part of this crisis response, and it is essential for achieving impact at scale in both the short and long term.

I serve a community that is particularly vulnerable to the effects of this crisis. How can I help them? +

You know the communities you serve best. However, this is a time of significant change and high-need. Here are some general suggestions as well as valuable resources to further support your community.

Ideas for Increasing Your Impact

  • In times of crisis the assets, strengths, resilience, and social capital of communities can be summoned to overcome new obstacles. Do what you can to help your community members help one another.
  • Using channels that others might not reach, like community groups, faith organizations, social services, provider networks and more.
  • Ensuring that guidance is shared in plain language using words that will mean something to your audience.
  • Translating official communications into accessible languages for your community (See this example from ChildCare Aware)
  • Communicating the unique needs of your community to policymakers and advocating for these needs to be reflected in the crisis response.

Resources to Share with Your Community

How should my strategy change in this new environment? +

This is a big question, and there’s no one size fits all answer. We’re here to help you think it through in the weeks and months to come.

Right now, you are likely dealing with the immediate implications of the crisis, including reduced revenue and fundraising opportunities and the need to cut your spending quickly. These are challenging issues.

Even as you may feel overwhelmed with near-term crisis response, we suggest you take a step back and analyze the new strategic landscape. It’s time to revisit startup frameworks like your value proposition and business model canvas and ask yourself questions like:

  • How have my end users’ daily lives changed, and how does that impact the value of my work to them?
  • Which aspects of my program, product or strategy need to be accelerated in the current environment?
  • Am I uniquely ready to address any of the challenges that come with this public health crisis?
  • Given the changes brought by this crisis, should I pivot to new opportunities or a new category entirely?

Some resources that might help you think through these questions include:

Some examples of crisis response from ventures in the ECD space include:

Some additional perspectives on managing during a crisis include:

  • How to Steer a Startup Through a Major Downturn (Mark Selcow, Costanoa Ventures): “This is a time to make hard decisions about priorities, projects, lines of business, and even staffing that perhaps didn’t seem worth discussion before but definitely should be now.”
  • Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis (HBR):"Your empathy will be as essential for success as the strategic decisions you make about what elements of the organizational DNA to discard. That is because you will need people’s help—not their blind loyalty as they follow you on a path to the future but their enthusiastic help in discovering that path"
  • Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 (Sequoia Capital): “It will take considerable time — perhaps several quarters — before we can be confident that the virus has been contained. It will take even longer for the global economy to recover its footing.”

What other resources should I be aware of? +

Some resources that we’re using to stay on top of this crisis include:

Policy

Guidance from Systems & States

Employment Regulations

Small Businesses

Human Services Organizations

How can I connect with Promise and others in the early childhood community?

This is a quickly developing situation, and you can learn, help, and connect with others in early childhood (as well as Promise) by:

  • Reaching out to us ( team@promisestudio.org ) for support, to offer help to others, to share new resources, or for anything else.
  • Sharing in the slack community. If you're part of the Promise Network hop on slack to share and connect here. If you're an early childhood organization, but not in the network, reach out to kate@promisestudio.org to get connected.
  • Joining other early childhood communities such as the Early Childhood Connector, from the Ounce of Prevention.

Whatever you need. We’re here to help.