Home > Uncategorized > Interview with Ariel Kleckner Ford of CareSquare

Interview with Ariel Kleckner Ford of CareSquare

“CareSquare”:http://www.caresquare.com connects parents and caregivers in a social network, allowing for peer-review, feedback, and real-time booking of care.

Ariel is a serial entrepreneur, a geek, and the mother of a two-year old boy with another one on the way this spring. She has been passionately involved in all things internet since the early 90’s and is driven to build community wherever she can. More on Ariel “here.”:http://www.caresquare.com/about/team

What strategies are you employing to increase the number of users on CareSquare?

CareSquare is by nature a word-of-mouth operation. If we cannot make this succeed virally, it won’t succeed. We rely heavily on the recommendations of our community to spread the word, primarily through our caregivers. We believe we have an advantage over many other social networking sites out there in the family space because it behooves our caregivers to invite families into the system in order to increase their ratings, thereby enjoying more job opportunities. We are constantly trying to address new ways to incent and allow our members to spread the word.

What have been the biggest obstacles to moving online caregiver advertising into the web 2.0 realm? How did you address them?

Childcare is a very hands-on job, and it is of tantamount importance that a parent feels totally comfortable with a caregiver before allowing them to meet and care for their children. Our challenge is to continually re-assure parents that finding caregivers online is a safe and trusted method of making this hire, especially since they are all coming from recommendations within their community. Sometimes transactions on the web can be a bit impersonal, and we always encourage parents to take the connections they make online with CareSquare offline before the caregiver begins to work for them.

Are there any new features in development stages? What do you hope to do next?

We are hard at work porting our existing application onto a much broader social networking platform for release this coming spring. Some key features will include job boards, areas for share-care postings, better community building featuers, translation of the whole service to cater to the Spanish-speaking market, and discussion boards.

Bonus: What’s your number one qualification for a caregiver?

Passion for kids – not all of us are born with the innate ability to communicate well with children. Caregivers who are able to communicate this skill effectively on their profiles are enjoying the maximum benefits of CareSquare.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

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