Better ways to communicate, what I learned from Non Verbal Autism.

My work schedule gave me some free time on Fridays, so I decided to get out and trade some skills for experience. A friend put me in touch with Enda Dodd and his startup company Animated Language Learning. Enda and his wife Valerie have created an online system to help severely Autistic children acquire language. Based on their own experience with their sons Conor and Eoin. The Dodds are on an amazing journey of parenthood with their twin boys, both of whom were born deaf and with a severe form of Autism.

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...the things myself and the Dodds have done together have been the most rewarding.

Walking in to meet Enda on the first day was a little daunting, I had little knowledge of Autism, I was unprepared for meeting Conor and Eoin and had no idea how to interact with them. However Enda put me at ease straight away, his enthusiasm is infectious. Conor ignored me, probably because he was too busy working. That first day we sat and spoke for about 3 hours. Enda told me all about his family and their journey. How he gave up a high level Medical Engineering role to help his sons full time. The family moved to the US to seek the best schools, and professional help the could find. He soaked up all this learning to better understand how to reach his boys. As an engineer Enda’s ability to grasp and solve problems was a huge factor in ultimately developing the Animated Language Learning Program. You can read more about it here.

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Website redesign and metrics

I was open to anything, primarily I was seeking a real world online project, something that I could look to improve from a user perspective. Also Enda was keenly interested in my situation and helping me progress my skills and career. From the start it was clear that there was a mutual benefit to our collaboration. To begin I focused on the ALL website. It was live, but not functioning as well as it could, and the social media strategy was dormant.

The first place we started was to do a Usability Review of the site. There were some simple non conforming usability aspects of the layout, information architecture and content. This was a great starting point and give us a few easy wins. Engagement and page views improved steadily. While we worked I was soaking up as much insights as I could, as Enda’s own story closely matched that of his target users.

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Identifying those needing help

After a while it became clear that there was a larger more intriguing project here. Enda encouraged me to look at A.L.L. in its entirety, and to collaborate with him on a wider strategy to restate the business goals, and to develop a plan to reach more families they could help.

We knew that the parents coming to the site would be at various stages on their Autism journey. From our discussions we began to describe two distinct types of families that we encountered. Those who engaged with Enda and those that didn’t.

Despite their kids having similar Autism related conditions these two groups are very different. One afternoon we took some pens and post-it notes and wrote down all we know about these different families. We looked at their characteristics, traits, circumstances, income, education, location etc. We explored Enda’s knowledge of the many parents he had met, their motivations, personalities and abilities.

At the end of the day we had a wall of notes that represented our new shared understanding of both these distinct groups. Now we could both clearly describe the people, we could engage with, and also those that we could not. This gave us a superb platform to base our strategic decisions on.

We set about refining our strategy to reach the parents who we could help, but to also offer guidance to those families who ultimately would never join the program. Everyone gets advice regardless of their circumstances.  We profiled families and explored their motivations and circumstance.

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Telling the Dodd story and reaching out

It was clear to us that the most compelling aspect of ALL was not the development of the product, but was the amazing progress Conor and Eoin have made. The family journey would be what appealed to people most of all.

We focused on the family journey, and developed a narrative to tell this story better. Enda had developed a way of teaching his sons to understand language using Disney animation, notably the Toy Story movies. He realised that once the boys understood how language worked, he and they could work out a way to communicate. And in turn this connection opened the door and took them from a closed world of Autism, into reading, learning, sports and social interaction. Conor and Eoin are two wonderful young men. They both work full time alongside Enda programming and building out the ALL system, helping hundreds of kids around the world. You can read more about their story here.

Now we know who we were trying to reach and also the message we have for them. It was down to the detail off our process.
I took on a role of managing the AdWords strategy, connecting with media and PR, and starting a Social Media rollout. We created an overall plan for all this, and implemented this over the next while. With this we greatly increased the visitors to the site, but importantly those people reaching us were now families in need of intervention. Enda was now able to easily triage the families who contacted him, and identify those suitable and who would engage with him.

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"To infinity and beyond"

ALL is going from strength to strength, the company has secured some funding and is establishing relationships with organisations such as Google, Adobe and Microsoft.

We have increased all our key metrics, site visitors, submitted forms, etc, and have doubled the monthly revenue. More importantly our strategic plan is now getting quality leads to Enda, families in real trouble, who he can help. With the support of NUIG, Enda has also have a scientific study of the ALL data. This shows clearly that the Kids on the program are progressing much better in their language development that they otherwise would. Armed with this the ALL hopes to scale and reach into the US and beyond in the coming months.

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Learning from each other

The time I spent with Enda and his boys has been amazing, I had totally underestimated the value our collaboration could have. Enda has become a mentor to me, giving me amazing insights into not only the startup world, he is now in, but also the corporate world he use to be part of. I’ve help him define better his users, and how to reach them. Conor and Eoin have shown me the value of language and communication, something I had taken for granted. The boys pack more into their average week that most. They work programming alongside their dad every day, as well as running, sailing and playing tennis.

My career has progressed a lot in the past few years, I’ve put in some hard work, but the things myself and the Dodds have done together have been the most rewarding and the single most important factor in my development.

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