45 Conversations Media & Education Ltd.

Early Learning & Child Care Consulting + Online ECE Workshops

Extended Family Matters

by Leave a Comment

 

Families come in all shapes and sizes. Some families have lots of extended family members. Some have few. Yet — understand this — extended family matters. They matter when they are part of a child’s life. And they matter when they are far away too.

Find ways to embrace the extended family in the early learning and care program you work in.

Welcome them into your program.

Encourage them to be part of things.

Support families to maintain relationships with extended family members who are far away.

And — for the families that truly have no extended family members — think about what they might be feeling or missing.

Help them find ways to build relationships and a strong support network.

All families matter. And extended families are a valuable asset — to children, to their parents — and — as part of early learning and care programs.

Words & Branding

by Leave a Comment

A recent post from my friends at Change Agents in Ireland got me thinking even more about my online branding. The post suggested using the online tool Wordleto see the words that  are used frequently on a website.   I have used Wordle for various client projects in the past. I decided to give it a try on a few of my own sites. Below are the results, along with some brief thoughts as well.

This is what the Wordle for this website (www.boydjane.ca) looks like.

My thoughts on the results:

  • My main intent for this site is that it provide an overview of the different types of work that I do.  I see various components of this – but I’m not sure it is the total picture.
  • The word relist shows up so much because of the amount of times I use List.ly to share lists of items. This really has nothing to do with my branding.
  • I see the names of several others that I often write quite often.  Clearly there are certain people that I seem to consistently write about.
  • My own name stands out; this makes sense given I have built a lot of my branding around my name.
  • The Wordle above is with 150 words.  I decided to see what would happen if I expanded it to 400.  Here are the results:

This is what the Wordle for 45 Conversations looks like:

My thoughts on the results:

  • My main intent for this site is that it provide an overview of the services available through 45 Conversations and that it promote the various conversations that we hold.
  • Some of the events that we have been working on seem to show up.
  • I don’t see enough words related to the actual service offerings. I need to build this area out further.

This is what the Wordle for Early Learning Canada looks like:

My thoughts on the results:

  • My main intent for this site is that it provide an overview of the services available through Early Learning Canada and to provide general information for ECE’s.
  • This site is still very new, so there is not a lot of content to draw from.
  • I like a lot of what I see – to me it seems fairly clear that there is a very specific target audience for this site.
  • I would like to see more words showing up related to our product offerings.  I think this will happen as that section of the site is built out further.

This is what the Wordle for Getting to Intentional looks like:

 

My thoughts on the results:

  • My main intent for this site is that it provide a space for me to write my thoughts related to work, life and being intentional.
  • I see many words that are common to my thinking; though I feel like there are some things still missing.
  • This site is more personal and it seems that those are the types of words that are standing out.

So…how about you?  What do the words on your website say about your branding?