Objective

Less than 2% of investment funding goes to black or women-led startups. Welfie is BOTH Black and women-led. We created Booster Troop for The VaxUp Challenge, sponsored by the Children’s Hospital of LA and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, receiving a small sum to create and test a prototype that had the promise of increasing vaccinations. But we also created it to distinguish ourselves, while driving sales, grants, and investors to our business. 

VaxUp Research showed: 

• Black and Latinx families don’t trust doctors/scientists because they don’t look or sound like them
• children in underserved communities often translate for non-English-speaking relatives
• Black and Latinx families found COVID and health info and doctors: 
  • boring
  • impossible to understand 
  • unrelatable 
  • complicated 
  • aloof

The combination fueled misinformation. 

Since bad information was coming bottom-up through children, we wanted to create a fun, representative vehicle for good information to come up the same way. 

While this particular effort was around COVID vaccination, our goals for the project were to create the pilot for a video-based series that we could use to:   

• deliver health information to Black and Latinx families that they would trust
• secure funding for more content, preferably from within the health ecosystem (payor or hospital)  to cover more health and mental health topics 
• secure school pilot partners for our school-based products  
• secure and use in meetings with investors 
• let underserved families see themselves represented in healthcare information and  medical professionals   
• satisfy the prototype requirements (and then some!) of the VaxUp! challenge

Strategy

Our strategy boiled down to consultation and representation. 

Consultation:

We conducted interviews with 27 Black and Brown children (90 percent Hispanic, 10 percent black), ages 5-11, who live and go to school in LA County, 22 parents of 5-11-year-olds, two 13-year-olds and their parents, 2 additional parents of 13-year-olds and 1 x 10-year-old, 1 District Assistant Supervisor, 1 District Operations Manager,  two after school program administrators, 1 person in charge of content creation, and 7 teachers, 2 grade 11 classes and many experts. 

We talked to: 

• families about their feelings towards the information they received about COVID, the vaccine, and health, along with their screen habits and how they learned English  
• teachers about how to teach sensitive and politicized subjects like, sigh, science 
• experts, including Misinformation Scientists and psychologists 
• Kids, getting their health show wishlist:   
  • a talking animal
  • set in space
  • kids doing good and helping 
  • a real kid giving advice 
  • a robot or spaceship 
  • characters who were kids who looked and sounded like them 
  • doctors who looked like them that they understood 

Representation:

Kids and families told us they didn’t trust most doctors and scientists because they didn’t look or sound familiar. The materials they gave them felt foreign and removed from them. 

So we created Booster Troop with Black and Latinx characters and experts, starting with our very own team, and in close consultation with the community, leading us to:    

• create videos in English and Spanish  
• create animated characters who look like the kids of LA County 
• cast actors who could sound like LA kids  
• worked with Latinx animators
• feature Black and Latinx doctors/scientists 
• feature a Latinx student from KIPP SoCal
• get feedback from the community at every step of the way to ensure authenticity 

Challenges: 

Our long-time Executive Producer and beloved friend, Leo Eaton, died unexpectedly during the VaxUp! Challenge, and we had to go on, trying to imagine what he would have said about a creative or technical choice. It sometimes felt like he spoke to us from the beyond.   

When CHLA was unable to let us film their Dr. Nneka Edwards on campus, we asked The Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto for help, and they stepped up.  

We had very little money but did as much as we could in-house and called in favors.  

We faced some opposition because the COVID vaccine became political, but we chose to uphold science and avoided getting pulled down any rabbit holes.  

Execution: 

We created, wrote, and produced Booster Troop from the input we received from SoCal kids, families, and educators, along with health, and expert advisors. Funded to create a prototype, we created an 8-minute episode, a 1-minute trailer, and a lesson plan, doing much of the work in-house. When we DID hire, we tried to hire from the communities we serve. 

We strove to be what underserved families needed but weren’t getting from existing health education and information. We also hoped that hospitals, schools, grantors, and investors would see the difference too. They sure did.      

Results

We met our objectives by: 

• successfully creating an animated video, lesson plan, and trailer that our test audience loved, telling us they felt seen and heard and wanted more. They even asked us to create Booster Troop episodes around math and reading.  

• using Booster Troop to help secure and enliven pitch meetings, which has resulted in: 
  • a commitment to underwrite an hour-long season of Booster Troop from a major pediatric hospital that plans to partner with a large school district to distribute it (100,000 students) 
  • currently papering deals with 2 school districts and several individual schools with a combined reach of more than 15000 students. Last year, we had no school customers.       
  • Put into due diligence by investors  
  • 10x our income from the year before through grants, accelerators, and VC investment secured with the help of Booster Troop. 
• satisfying the prototype requirements of the VaxUp challenge
• inspiring Booster Troop fans to want to be doctors and scientists 
• while few in our audience were vaccine skeptics, 100 percent of skeptical families said they would reconsider their position because of Booster Troop. 

We believe Booster Troop was a success because people changed their minds about the vaccine, we brought in 10 times the revenue in 2023 as we did in 2022, and kids and families told us how much they loved it. They wanted more Booster Troop around a variety of other subjects, saying it was the first time they were given health or education information that really spoke to them.   

Media