A Better World Learning Journey Story: Pricing, Sustainability, and Alignment

A Better World Learning Journey Story: Pricing, Sustainability, and Alignment better world sustainability

If you’re looking for our pricing for memberships, here is our memberships page. In this blog post, learn how, when, and why we went from fully-free content to our current pricing approach, and why we believe it could be one of the most important moves we make on this mission we’re on together: the mission to reweave social, emotional, academic, and global learning in a captivating way. The better world sustainability story.

 

The mission to help you(th) love learning about self, others, and our world — with compassion. To help you(th) on the journey from head to heart. To create the better world story content that truly opens our hearts and minds.

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A Better World Learning Journey Story: Pricing, Sustainability, and Alignment

If you’re wondering about how and why we went from fully-free Social Emotional Learning (SEL) content to our current pricing approach, you’re in the right place. We believe this switch could be one of the most important strategic moves we make on this mission to reweave social, emotional, academic, and global learning.

 

Before we begin this better world sustainability story, I think it’s really important to note that this journey didn’t start with some magical idea. Often we hear people share thoughts like “Wow, what an amazing idea this was! How did you come up with it?”

 

There was never an a-ha moment. This mission and product and vision, just like the evolution of our pricing, has been a constant exploration and evolution for more than a decade. In many ways, more like two decades.

 

The only magic a-ha moment that really happened was a realization in college (after being told this throughout childhood, when I’d try to decide my own way of doing things) that actually listening and learning alongside educators and students is the key to making this mission happen. It’s a WE thing. Building a better world relies on WE.

 

Global Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Stories Better World Education Teaching Resources Wordless Videos Authentic Human Stories. Better World Sustainability.

 

 

 

the early experiments on the better world sustainability journey

 

In 2010, I took a year during college to experiment with a social entrepreneurship program at my former K-12 school. Students loved the learning and the concepts, but the program wasn’t sustainable and it definitely wasn’t yet replicable. At the time, the curriculum was a curation of things we were doing at the college level where I was studying social entrepreneurship, cultural anthropology, and some mix of international affairs and education stuff.

 

In curating content and now in hindsight, it’s clear that there were significant content challenges we needed to overcome:

 

  • Deep Engagement: What we were curating was mostly social enterprise case study type video content. They didn’t have the highest production value, but more importantly they weren’t human, and they weren’t designed for classroom use. They weren’t stories. I saw a few students, the ones who were most passionate about social change, dozing off during some of the videos. The videos just had too much talking. No whoa factor. No magic sparking. It wasn’t something that could be used early in life, and it wasn’t something that could adapt for learners who weren’t already deeply passionate about the topic.

 

  • Academic Integration: Teachers weren’t able to use this content. It was a blast for our group, but wasn’t something other teachers were able to join in with. After all, they had actual academic content matter to teach. “How in the world will farming in India or clean water in South Africa fit in to math class?” How would a teacher use this curated content every day? Where can SEL and academics integrate through content? Through story?

 

  • Accidental Prescription: If we want a more empathetic, compassionate, beautiful, and better world, we’ve got to listen and seek understanding in all aspects of our life and our learning. The content we were curating was important, but it was also sharing a very specific narrative in a very cognitive and rather prescriptive way (which unfortunately tends to happen with so many educational videos). We wanted to encourage deep wonder and desire for understanding, not “knowing”. Curiosity before judgment. Heart based feeling and thinking. We wanted (and always want) to move from this accidental prescription towards intentionally prescribing deep curiosity and desire for understanding.
 

 

 

attempting to curate content and stories

 

There’s a lot more story in the middle — like our team fundraising by starting a marketplace for socially, environmentally, and ethically responsibly sourced goods, and selling magical milky-way infused cookies to raise funds — but that’s for another set of posts.

 

2014.

 

I moved to India with this deep feeling, almost a calling: “We have to make this kind of curriculum something that can work for anyone, anywhere. The only way to know we’re doing that is to actually test the content in very different environments. In person.”

 

A lot of people told me I was nuts. I’ve gotten very used to hearing that, and it still happens today. I’m also very allergic to tree nuts, so I giggle a bit each time I hear it. I’m giggling now, too. Maybe you are now as well.

 

We started that summer by creating what we called content modules (like this or this, though on our first early early platform, and with a different vibe). In college, we always asked this question of “why did it take until now to start learning about the world in this deeper, structured, social change focused way!?”. These curated content modules were our attempt to start making the concepts K-12 ready. Better World Story ready. Content that could work in any learning environment, especially for younger ages.

 

Curated videos with our own ideas for lesson plans, discussion ideas, writing exercises, and more. We curated because we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, and thought there were so many people creating content — let’s just curate it well. Let’s find the better world stories out there.

 

We started experimenting in all kinds of classrooms with all kinds of teachers. It was a blast, because we were so tiny that we could focus on one teacher at a time and really deeply listen and learn. As teachers and kids tried things, we got feedback, turned around a new edit, and tried again. Over and over. Sometimes during class.

 

Eventually this led to the creation of all kinds of lesson plans. We eventually landed on 1 page lesson plans: short lesson plans that acted as guidance for how to use various parts of the modules in everyday classroom learning, without being a burdensome activity to read it. Something you could read with your morning cup of tea or coffee.

 

 

moments of better world story magic

 

One day, a teacher shared that their students were so curious about the people in the story they saw.

 

“abhi, what about the farmer’s story? It’s great to learn about the organization and broader topics, but what about the people? How can we learn about them?”

 

What magical feedback. This struck a deep chord, as it’s what mattered most to us, too. It’s what brought meaning to our learning: having the opportunity to live with and learn directly alongside humans around our community and around the world. 

 

The classroom case studies were great for our cognitive understanding, but the real passion and connection and desire for more learning came when we learned through people’s real stories. We had been trying to find content to curate like this for quite some time. Better world stories, if you will.

 

We had also recently created a little experiment in one of our content modules called an “empathy challenge”. So we created and shared a few more fictional “based on a real person” stories like this with teachers, to see if this might help bring more meaning to student learning. Through meaningful story content.

 

These turned out to be an instant hit. It was really the first time we had ever had consistently “YESSS” feedback. We grew a set of fictional stories that teachers were trying, and the feedback was always so inspiring. And it was extra fun for classrooms because there were math and literacy problems woven into the stories. Students could now practice “real world math”, and teachers loved that the math could be discovered by students along the way. In an organic, seamless story focused way. Not forced. 

 

 

creating original story content

We kept rolling along, listening and learning. The feedback kept coming as we dug in. Here’s what started coming in next:

 

How might we make the videos more engaging, too? These written stories are cool, but could we do this with videos, too?

 

What about real stories? Like, the real people who these stories represent?

 

Our students can’t understand the words in the curated video content. The person talks too much, or too fast. What can we do about it?

 

Oof. The learnings from 2010 and all of college started coming back fast. We HAD to figure out a way to make all of this more real. And we simply couldn’t find these kinds of stories, especially that were designed for the classroom. We were going to have to make them. Somehow.

 

So we did. Eventually — after talking to dozens of storytellers — we met a videographer crazy enough (Odi is amazing) to give this assignment a shot. The story assignment was essentially:

 

“We’re going to make human narrative stories. But without any words. No narration. No talking. Just content full of visuals and sound. We want to ignite curiosity and connection and compassion and desire for understanding, and we don’t want to tell kids what to think. We want to help them feel. To experience. We want deep conversations to start and to come from the heart, not the head.”

 

Then came the first Better World Ed story, I Am Ghani.

 

 

I cried when I watched the final story cut for the first time while sipping chai in Pune, and still do sometimes now. The magic: so did teachers. And some 80 or so other educators and content creators we showed. We paired his video with three stories and three lesson plans that we created. The whole time the team storyboarded and created, we brought our ethnographic mindset to the table. We often were having conversations something like this:

 

It had to be real story. Can’t be scripted. Has to be actual data and real moments from his life. Has to be real questions. Has to be meaningful. Has to not only feel real, but be real. A true story for a better world.

 

It has to be a way for people to — as one of our educator pioneers Sue Totaro says today — “walk alongside” the person. To really connect at a deeper, emotional level. This has to be the content that can really open our hearts and minds to ourselves, to one another, and to our environment. That helps us on the journey from head to heart. Story. Real, beautiful story.

 

 

and then there were 45 better world stories

The feedback on this story of Ghani wove together well into the big picture vision: it is possible to create a world where we all practice empathy, critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, understanding, and other important magic from a super early age, every single day, and everywhere.

 

It is possible to create story content for a better world that inspires this kind of desire and deep commitment to learning about ourselves, one another, and our world in a way that leads us to make positive change with our hearts and heads guiding us together.

 

Between I Am Ghani in 2015 and March 2018, we created 45 (ish) videos paired with 3-4 stories and lesson plans each. We learned a TON or two, we asked endless questions, we iterated, we drank chai, we played football (soccer) in our apartment, we worked on sleeper buses overnight, we learned from lots of teachers and students, and we worked with diverse world class storytellers and truly amazing writers.

 

The people we brought together along the way are lifelong learners — people who really just wanted to build the most useful, inspiring, amazing story content possible.

 

 

Because, well… kids. Youth!

You(th) are the future. And are our best bet to really guide us all to a better world. To a better story. They deserve the best. So we poured ourselves and our donors’ money into making the best stuff we could imagine. Today I found this note to myself from back then:

 

Enough with the mindset that we should make story content cheaper and more efficiently for classrooms. That we should prioritize efficiency over quality. We are talking about humans here. Little ones. Impressionable ones. Humans who are flooded with high production value “garbage” (arguably) all day.

 

We need to SHOW young people that there is a beautiful world of potential out there and that we can come together to pave a new path forward. We need to make AMAZING better world story content that has them at the edge of their seats in school and eager to discuss at the dinner table at home. Inspiring parents to dive into this kind of learning too, and inspiring us all to untangle the knots within and between us to reweave a better way forward.

 

That is the fire we have to light in humanity, and if and when we do, these youth will lead us to the world we all dream of deep inside of us — far beyond our cognitive awareness can imagine. Youth will lead us to a world where our societal structures reshape and reweave to make beautiful change possible where we thought only slow-moving bureaucracy could exist. When we all feel and connect with our hearts and our heads, we make anything possible.

 

 

and making great better world stories costs money

Between 2014 and now ish (at time of writing), we’ve fundraised just about 250k trying to make all of the above and more happen. It’s a whole lot of money (and we’re deeeeeply grateful for everyone’s support). Though it’s also not that much when you zoom out and think about creating 45 high quality videos and a whole lot of stories and lessons in 10+ countries for 4 years while engaging and learning from over 1000 teachers. We’ve made modules, lesson plans, stories, videos, and videos showcasing classrooms in action. All original, and all with tons of perspectives and types of humans inputting their energy and love.

 

We’ve been scrappy.

 

Very, very scrappy.

 

Why: We’ve wanted to make Better World Ed’s story content “free forever”.. since, well.. forever.

 

Personally, I’d just love it if we could have kept this story content free for everyone for eternity. My heart says that feels right. I believe education is a fundamental human need and desire, and when education is truly pure it is not only a right, but also something that should absolutely be free so that anyone anywhere can access the stuff that helps us deeply open our hearts and minds. Someday, I do hope this is possible for Better World Ed.

 

But I’ve had hard reality checks along the way. In the moment, I and we often thought these things were fun and even magical beyond the stresses they added on us (I have lost most of my hair in the past 4 years). Though it’s obviously not sustainable, and obviously not the best way for us to do our best work and contribute our whole selves and our potential.

 

And to really make the vision possible, it’s going to take so many more stories, so many more classrooms engaging with this content, and so many more aspects to our website. AND so much more depth and breadth and quality upgrading for the content, too.

 

It’s not just a marketing phrase we use when we say early in life, every day, and everywhere. We see these three layers as essential to really make this movement happen in the deep and wide way we believe is possible.

 

Simply put, we need to sustainably move beyond facing the kinds of challenges we have lived through in the past. Examples (short versions of long stories):

  • We’ve run out of money before. More than once.
  • We’ve had to borrow money. A few times.
  • We’ve had to part ways with great people because we couldn’t pay them well enough.
  • We’ve had to not hire incredibly talented and inspiring people more than a dozen times because we couldn’t pay them even 2k/month. (I still make 0-1000 right now depending on the month.)
  • We’ve had opportunities to accept donations that would steer us away from our core mission a bit, which we don’t want to do and then chose not to do.
  • I’ve slept on easily more than a hundred different couches and floors (and a closet, once, sometimes backyards, and at least a few hallways) in dozens of cities across the world for the past 4-5 years both because I’m stubborn and don’t like spending money, and because we didn’t have the funding to rationalize renting something in the expensive cities we often need to be in. (Note: I have had the privilege to even be able to take this path, and to be able to take these kinds of leaps. I didn’t realize how challenging and draining this kind of approach would be, as I didn’t stay in one city for more than a couple weeks for more than 5 years straight.)
  • We’ve taken calls in bathrooms, gym studios we aren’t members of, bus stations, alleyways in busy cities, balconies of buildings we found our way onto, and basically anywhere you can imagine.
  • We’ve worked on overnight buses or red eyes to try to save money on housing while saving time to output a story.
  • We sold fair trade chocolate and tea and jewelry and awesome laptop sleeves from Ghana and toys from Honduras to try to build a revenue stream.
  • We sold cookies with milky ways in them to raise money. (And because they’re incredibly tasty. We ate a lot of them. And our friend Gabrielle just makes magic in kitchens.)
  • We dumpster dove for bagels and juice. Mostly out of choice, I guess, but it saved money too.
  • We’ve worked out of way too many offices with free snacks to skip spending on meals. A lot of those meals were really, really good, too. 

 

The list goes on. It goes on for quite some time. Oof. If you’re ever curious about more of the story behind the scenes from our past, or want to connect on your experiences, please reach out anytime. This stuff is incredibly fun and I am committed for good, though it also has been incredibly hard and still remains challenging. Connecting on these kinds of challenges is always helpful and so meaningful to me. And I share all of this with recognition that I have had some serious privilege to even be able to take these kinds of leaps and live like this.

 

 

money is necessary fuel for this movement.

When I was 20, I wrote a business plan to raise $3.1MM to build a social entrepreneurship center at my former K-12 school. I was going to drop out and build an amazing community for social entrepreneurship at the K-12 level in and with my school and in Buffalo.

 

We didn’t raise the money. Raising money is hard. It stayed hard through the years. I’m not great at asking for money for something that isn’t super tangible and easy to understand. I loved selling chocolate, because you’re about to eat what you just handed us money for. But it’s hard for a funder to trust a young and inexperienced team to make a vision happen that is really, really hard to pull off. They need to see we’re committed, we’re not going anywhere, we’re ridiculously persistent, and that we simply won’t give up on this no matter what.

 

It’s also hard to raise money that we love.

 

What does that mean? Often money steers people and things. Steers story and content. We want to know the money we raise is for the exact work we do and the things we learn teachers, parents, kids, and schools really need. For story content that matters. We don’t want to find ourselves in mission drift someday making other kinds of content or focusing on some side programs or secretly advertising some massive company selling X thing because that’s part of the deal we made to access some source of grant funding.

 

We want to stay pure to our mission and super focused. In short, we want to focus on the needs of teachers and students, not donors. When those things align, it’s a beautiful thing. We’re grateful that the funding we have raised to date was from humans who are very aligned with what we do — people who trust our care for learning and adapting as we grow.

 

In not raising money over the past years in the way we dreamed of for Better World Ed, my mindset moved more and more to “how much awesome can we do with a scarce amount of funding!?”

 

That worked out until March 2018. We learned a ton that we wouldn’t have learned had we not scrapped, and we had a community of over 1000 teachers sign up to use the story content over those years. It was all free story content, and we had amazing donors sponsoring our lives and flights and food to create all of these stories and to learn with teachers. It was a beautiful thing, really.

 

 

this movement relies on WE. so the more money that comes from WE, the better. the more powerful story content we can create.

 

Several mentors and advisors and peers have said to me over the years (each section is paraphrased from my notes):

 

abhi, my dream for this thing is that someday the globally minded teachers and schools of the world are not only using and loving this stuff, but are the ones backing you. Alongside you, reaching the rest of the teachers and youth in every corner of the world. If you have people putting their money down, especially in a profession where they are severely underpaid, it’s a statement to the world that Better World Educators want to see change in education. That they believe in this stuff.

 

Schools and teachers contributing to use this story content also holds you focused and accountable. It gives you a new level of focus. You get to focus on the needs of those you care most about, especially because their money is now on the table. You don’t have to fly around meeting potential donors and worrying about if any of them are going to try to steer this away from what you’re learning is the core key direction. You get to stay laser focused on creating better world story content.

 

You get to laser focus your efforts on building the dream product — higher quality story content, more variations of content, the mobile experience, the interwoven better world stories with a really fun user experience. The everything — not just a spreadsheet of stories that grows at a few stories per year. You get to truly build this together alongside the teachers and students and schools you care about. You get to build the thing that truly captivates kids in and out of school.. to win over their time every day. And you get to move fast, without spending time focused on fundraising from folks who might not actually understand what classrooms really want (amazing better world stories). And if you meet those funders who see this vision, even better! 

 

 

BeWE pricing comes to life. Finally. After a bunch of resistance (from me, because everyone else thought it was smart already)

After lots of simmering and lots of learning (and looooots of resistance from me!), this advice turned into our model. In April 2018, we piloted pricing and kept iterating on how we would create plans that felt aligned to our values.

 

That iteration lives here, and we always love feedback. We’re more interested in making sure every classroom has access than we are in a specific exact pricing structure. (Yes, we’re ready to provide huge discounts depending on the situation of whoever is signing up. Reach out if you’re curious.)

 

As we launch our new product experience (it’s going to be way cooler than what you’ll see now) in April/May 2019 (update in May: it’s launched now and you’re currently on the new platform as you read this!), it will be because of and thanks to teachers and schools paying to use this content. We’re already seeing the fruits of our advisors’ advice (special thanks to Jordan Kassalow for pushing on this hard).

 

And as more teachers and schools and parents contribute, we get to do more. And we means WE, not a few people in a room making better world story content for you. WE means you get to share your perspectives, your dreams, your feedback, and our team takes all of that in to try to make the most useful content in a high quality, effective way. It means WE get to learn from classrooms, learn what works well, what needs to improve, and how we can iterate to reach more and more classrooms in a meaningful way with increasingly amazing content.

 

 

The content and experience on BetterWorldEd.org today is still only 5% of what we want to do. We’re really only just getting started.

 

Really. This mission is massive, so we’re going step by step together instead of trying to take on everything all at once.

 

We already tried the latter. It’s hard and pretty counter-productive to our mission: learning on the journey is what’s helping us make sure these stories are as good as can be.

 

WE are working towards a world in which millions of students, educators, and parents experience powerful storytelling content that inextricably weaves together academic learning with Social Emotional Learning (SEL) — through a global immersion across diverse cultures. Imagine bite size chunks of our content woven together that help students learn direct connections between their fractions practice problems and a farmer’s challenges and dreams.

 

Imagine a storytelling experience where you are able to search “fractions”, engaging with a list of amazing videos, photos, and word problems that are real world and even higher quality, and then choosing whether to keep learning about that country, topic, or academic concept or to move on to another one through another story in another part of the world.

 

An endless learning experience that’s seamless and weaves classrooms throughout the world — zooming in and out of big picture topics (think social justice topics and “SDGs”) and people’s stories. All in experiences of a few minutes or for hours, online or offline, and aligned to each specific user’s curriculum, approach, language, and age/learning level across a web and mobile app experience that can be led by a teacher or student.

 

Where you can make a playlist for whatever you need to teach, choosing the countries and topics you want to focus on along the journey. It’s like Spotify and Netflix for SEL and education — for kids to learn about deeply meaningful stories whenever they choose.

 

Imagine a world where youth grow up learning to see all human lives as equally beautiful and important. Where all youth grow up engaged, inspired, and curious, learning to change our world for the better. With global, social, and emotional awareness guiding their local and global engagement. To learn to be loving and kind — starting even in math class. Through powerful story content.

 

Learning to change the world can’t simply be a student’s “extra credit project”. We must weave the practices of empathy, global understanding, and civic engagement right into the heart of where youth are: school. Early in life, every day, and everywhere. As we crack this through better world stories, the possibilities are endless for the widespread systemic change we dream of.

 

With open minds and open, connected hearts, we can create an incredibly beautiful story of our world together. A better world story.

 

 

to a better world,

abhi

 

 

 

 

 

One last reason for our pricing and this Be WE approach to our story content design and better world sustainability work:

 

Together, we can help youth execute on Lao Tzu’s advice: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

 

WE got this, humans.

A Better World Learning Journey Story: Pricing, Sustainability, and Alignment

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