At NeoCloud Marketing, we have the privilege of helping a wide variety of businesses establish and maintain a superior web presence. We especially enjoy working with nonprofit groups, as they add so much value to the lives of those they serve.

A few months ago, members of the NeoCloud Team had the pleasure of meeting Kelcey Liverpool at a networking event in the Greater Chicago area. Kelcey is a mother, a military spouse (Rudy Liverpool, US Navy) and entrepreneur. As we quickly learned, she also has an intense passion for supporting the development of physical, emotional, intellectual and social skills in today’s military children. The military family lives a unique lifestyle. Deployments of a parent overseas, multiple moves for the entire family within a short period of time and days or weeks of not seeing a father or mother due to job duties, are just a few examples of situations that make life more complex for the military child.

Enter KidsRank. Rudy and Kelcey created the concept of KidsRank in 2008. Initially, the goal was to devise a program to assist their young children in adjusting to their fourth duty station within a couple of years. Rudy and Kelcey created a recognition system to reward and encourage behavior in their children that aligned with the five key attributes of Adaptation, Bravery, Courage, Determination and Endurance. As they accomplished specific tasks and activities, the children would earn credit toward colored ribbons that symbolize the aforementioned core attributes.

The idea was an immediate “hit,” as the Liverpool’s children began to immediately look for creative ways to live and demonstrate the five core attributes, thereby elevating their individual KidsRank. Over the next several years, the KidsRank concept consistently evolved and branched out to include additional children and additional families. Beyond helping the military families themselves, with more participation came the ability for the KidsRank Club to conduct elevated charitable functions, most notably their annual “Hero Pack” drive. The Drive encourages donations of items that are meant to help military children with a parents deployment. The items are placed in back packs and sent to military mothers and fathers deployed overseas.

The NeoCloud connection. Rudy and Kelcey knew that in order to take the KidsRank message to the next level, they needed to effectively leverage new media. After conducting a few listening sessions to really understand the background, goals and needs of the organization, NeoCloud created a series of actions steps designed to effectively reestablish and elevate the KidsRank’s presence online. As a placeholder site existed, the first step was to increase KidsRank’s social media presence to include a broader use of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In concert with the improved social strategy, we created a new polished, clean, search engine friendly web site – KidsRank.org – to serve as the online hub or home of the organization. Regardless of the nature of your business, it is highly likely that someone’s first impression of your business will be online. Having an effective, targeted new media strategy, including an optimized web site and social strategy is no longer a nice to have, it is a requirement.

We look forward to continuing to help KidsRank drive increased interest and participation in their organization through the strategic use of new media. We invite you to learn more about them via their new web site:

http://www.kidsrank.org