Online Service Development

At Grunwald Associates, our goal is to not only provide you with valuable research insights, but also to help you leverage those insights to develop new products, programs or content. In particular, we have unique expertise in the development of interactive services and marketing programs.

Grunwald Associates’ online development work is led by Tom de Boor, founder of AOL’s education, parenting and kids channels. These channels were the fastest growing at AOL for six years running and were among the first signature elements of AOL’s content and service offerings. Products Tom has launched or played a key role in developing have won numerous industry awards, including eight Webbys, a New York Film and Video Festival Gold Medal, a CNDY, Parent’s and District Choice citations, and Special Achievement awards from the IIA and NEA, among others.

Our web development work focuses on:

• Community Development
• Online Marketing, including viral and affiliate marketing
• Creative Differentiation, through rigorous competitive analysis and subsequent concept generation
• Production Strategy, such as site focus, management, and growth path creation

Examples of Recent Work

National Park Service

The National Park Service wanted assistance to better reach kids around the country through innovative services on the NPS website. Working with the National Park Foundation, Grunwald Associates developed a number of innovative approaches to involve kids in new ways, such as allowing kids to:

• Use an “online telescope” to remotely observe real-time activity in national parks and monuments.
• Band virtual birds and track them as they migrate through cyberspace.
• Build virtual trails together using photos they’ve taken in their favorite parks.

Currently, we’re working with the Park Service to implement these service concepts.

Leading Consumer Packaged Food Company

Grunwald Associates is working with this major consumer brand to help the company create a stronger value-added relationship with its online users. We’ve applied our research and experience to suggest a number of improvements to their current sites and generated many additional, research-based concepts that align with their current branding goals. Examples include:

• A service designed to help parents of overweight children manage their nutritional and exercise activity.
• A game environment for parents and kids in which winning and losing depends on nutritional knowledge and behavior.
• A service that enables teen influencers to communicate and be recognized for their “finds” on the Net or related new media.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)

As part of a new initiative to fund sites designed for kids 9-12 in the home, known as “Where Fun And Learning Click,” we helped CPB select which sites to fund and then provided extensive concept, production, management, and marketing assistance to the organizations whose concepts were chosen. Highlights of our involvement include:

• Over 30 million page views in the first year of the initiative, without paid consumer advertising.
• Numerous awards won by the individual sites. Each site was honored by major kids and school portals, such as Yahooligans and Proquest/Bigchalk.
• One service awarded the Webby for Best Youth Site. The first public broadcasting offering for kids to receive this honor.

IBM/World Book

IBM and World Book asked us to analyze the education space, propose strategic directions, and then provide specific concepts and business recommendations. The resulting analysis was groundbreaking in its strong advocacy of premium services. Our work led, among other effects, to the development of “Surf The Ages,” a signature element of World Book’s offering today, which allows kids to visit websites as they might have been created during different periods of world history.

HotWired & Turner Brodcasting

Grunwald Associates developed and co-produced “Campaign Dispatch” with HotWired. Campaign Dispatch was a major part of HotWired’s presidential campaign coverage several campaign cycles ago. In addition, we’ve developed FaxLine and other innovative political information services for clients such as Turner Educational Services.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you leverage your research insights to develop high-level, innovative online concepts and services.