| Notes |
So in Zamzee, the idea was really around physical activity. It started with a desire to work on obesity, type 2 diabetes, that whole big area of need. Physical activity was seen as one of the real keys that we could potentially impact. So with physical activity, there was a long process of engaging kids… trying to understand what got them excited about physical activity. With teen girls, it was dancing. With different groups, it was different things. It wasn’t a team sport for everybody. It wasn’t soccer for everybody. So we really needed to think about ways to capture activity among lots of kinds of kids. And then basically, a game was created. Think of it as like a Fitbit or a tracker for kids, combined with what we call an experience or a gaming layer. So they’d have an avatar; their avatar would be given challenges, and they would get points and badges and a variety of things once they had accomplished different things within the game.
So Zamzee, like Re-Mission, was developed with young people… heavy engagement from young people. We call it “young people as the co-designers,” and then we tested it.
Denver: Very smart!
Margaret: They definitely had a lot to teach us, and they continue to. And then, we took that through randomized control trials as well. And again, in randomized control trials, the kids who were using the Zamzee were shown to have a 57% increase in exercise and physical activity. And so Zamzee basically was working in these randomized control trials, and then the effort for HopeLab was really to think about: how could we get Zamzee out into the market.
Denver: Absolutely! I really admire how thoughtful you’ve been about your core competency that you uphold, and then seeking partners who have complementary competencies – like distribution – to achieve that optimal impact. And perhaps there is no better example of that than the relationship you forged with Welltok. How did that partnership work? And how did it come about?
Margaret: That’s a great question. It’s a real challenge. You talked at the beginning of this interview about combining these disparate worlds of philanthropy and business and technology – not an easy set of things to do. When I got to HopeLab, Zamzee had been in the nonprofit form. There had been an attempt to spin it out as a business; there had been some challenges in getting it into the market. You might argue that the market wasn’t quite ready for it yet, or that it wasn’t meeting–
Denver: It was before Fitbit, right?
Margaret: Yes, it was before Fitbit. It was early. And I’ll get to this theme several times during this discussion – kids are not the expensive part of the healthcare market. So when you’re thinking about new innovations coming into the market, it’s often difficult to get them in with kids first unless it’s something that is unique to kids, because the cost that the system sees is much more in adults than kids.
And so with Zamzee, we looked for a partner. At the time that we were looking, there were a few platforms that you might call wellness platforms out there – Welltok is one of them. And these platforms where smoking cessation, diet and exercise, mental and behavioral health interventions can all be offered to employees or to people in insurance plan. And Welltok was one that we thought was particularly interesting, and it was interested actually in bringing on a physical activity solution for young people. One of their interests was they had physical activity opportunities for adults and for parents, but having a solution that could work for the whole family was something that was appealing.
Denver: That’s what they want. They want to reach the family.
Margaret: So we sold Zamzee to Welltok. Zamzee has now been incorporated as part of Welltok’s CaféWell platform. It’s actually, just as we’re speaking, going out to market as part of a set of solutions that Welltok is taking out in the employee benefit and wellness space. And so, we’re looking forward to seeing how that partnership plays out, but we have been really excited about finding a place where Zamzee could sit as part of a broader wellness solution for kids and families.
Denver: Well, that’s great! Because sometimes when you create something… and you own something, it’s hard to give it up. But if you have your eye on the prize– getting kids to get more physically active– you really don’t care whether it’s under your umbrella or somebody else is doing it. You want it used, and you want that end result. After these first two– Re-Mission and Zamzee– and the organization seemed really focused with a laser focus around one project at a time– you’ve kind of become a catalyst or a launch pad. You’re now doing a bunch of things simultaneously. Would that be correct?
Margaret: I think it’s a good way to describe it. The strategy that evolved afterZamzee–and this is still before my time, but it’s something that has carried forward into my tenure–was to take one more step back. So we took a step back from Re-Mission to create Zamzee. We took one step back from Zamzee and Re-Mission to look at: what do they have in common? What are the things that these solutions are doing that is helping people with positive behavior change? And the commonality was the concept of resilience.
And so, HopeLab developed a resilience framework, looking at resilience as sort of three-pronged – as purpose, connection, and control. And so, there are elements under each of those: purpose, a sense of something bigger than yourself; connection, really deep connections to others – one or more other people; and control, really a sense of self-efficacy, a sense that you have some power to create positive behavior change over your life and your future. Those elements really played out in Re-Mission and Zamzee.
And so what HopeLab has been trying to do is to take those resilience elements and the psychology of resilience, and really use that as the foundation for technology solutions and interventions. And so, there was an effort to look at a number of different ways that these concepts of resilience could play out in interventions or solutions that would be helpful to kids and young adults.
Denver: And one of the products you’ve introduced to deal with that issue directly is something called The Mood Meter. Tell us about that.
Margaret: The Mood Meter was a really interesting experiment. It was a collaboration with Marc Brackett, Director at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. And it was taking a program that Marc had been us |