With the temporary closure of schools, parents are faced with a challenge on how to keep their kids occupied at home, while they manage their own workload. QiDZ, a family-friendly application created by mothers recently launched a sub-product called QiDZ at Home to solve this very challenge. The product offers free indoor activities that can keep kids occupied. Communicate spoke with Simona Agolini, CEO and co-founder of Qidz to understand more about the product.

How did this new product come about?

Qidz was created to empower parents to make the right choices for their children. The brand provides real-time, up-to-date and accurate information about family-friendly activities, and entertainment happening in the city. This inspires parents to make good choices for the entire family. Qidz at home was always part of our vision and is in line with our goal of empowering parents and giving them options to find good activities for their children.

However, with the current environment, and kids being asked to stay at home, we wanted to alleviate some of the stress [parents] are probably going through- so we launched this range/category now.

How has the response been so far?

We have seen really good engagement with the product and great active participation from our customers, partners, and vendors. We are receiving lots of inputs and ideas [from them]. This is a perfect way to build the community and help each other in the current environment. Today, Qidz reaches more than 300,000 families and since our launch, we saw double the customer activity on the application on any given day – which is a clear sign that the product is meeting a current need.

What is the market like for this type of product?

Since the product is a content-based product and with content being in high demand right now, there will always be a market for it. There are so many instances where kids are stuck at home; whether they’re ill, school holidays, bad weather, etc. So the product provides them content to engage with during their spare time and keeps them engaged. So, we envisage this to have a very long shelf life.

What kind of content is showcased on the product?

We have split the Qidz at Home content into four categories – Do it yourself (DIY) crafts, games & play, cooking, and online resources (that are educational). The content is generated through a variety of sources. A lot of it is made in-house by the Qidz team, for the DIY crafts category. We are also getting a lot of content from our users. For the baking section – it’s a mix of our own recipes and recipes from [our customers], and all recipes have the credits listed beside them. For the online resources, these are resources that we as parents use and that other users have recommended as well. We review all the suggestions, and it goes through a quality control process before being listed on the app.

What is your communication strategy for the product? How are you making sure your communications do not sound like you’re leveraging off a crisis?

We utilize a mix of online tools to reach our customers. We’re sending regular newsletters to our users with the Qidz at home ideas summarized in them. We have a very loyal customer base who are very active on the application. In addition, we engage with them through push notifications, social media and blog posts with our partners from different industries, to educate and inspire them.

At Qidz, our objective has always been to empower parents to make the right decisions for their families. Qidz at home continues to support this strategy and provides parents with options and ideas to [help them] navigate the current situation. We genuinely care about our users and this whole idea was developed to help make their lives easier. And we’re all in the same boat right now.  The product gives inspiration on how to entertain the kids and get them crafting again with very simple, cheap, and readily available home materials. Equally, we even included games kids used to play before the onset of online games such as hopscotch, blanket forts, etc. So we have incorporated these into the product so that parents can find easy inspiration for some simple games. We are seeing a real community effort to support one another. Our partners, vendors, and parents are all contributing to make this product a valuable resource for all.

Where do you see the genre of edutainment ( Education + Entertainment) content heading?

Edutainment has been rapidly growing in popularity and we believe that it will continue into the future. As we see the world of digital evolving daily, having access to the right kind of online content for kids is really important.