Supporting America's hardworking dads

Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Family Assistance, the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse’s (NRFC) mission is to use relevant research and data to engage the public in evidence-based principles related to responsible fatherhood. It seeks to build fathers’ capacity to be financially and emotionally involved in their children and families’ lives and by being loving, compassionate, and involved parents. The NRFC equips practitioners and stakeholders with applicable information to provide effective support and services.

Challenge

Our challenge was to help solidify the NRFC’s position as the authority on resources for fatherhood in the U.S., primarily by driving fathers toward a rearchitected Fatherhood.gov website for content, programs, and educational materials. We needed to accommodate shifting perspectives on fatherhood, with an increased emphasis on minority fathers, single fathers, and stay-at-home fathers. We also needed to collaborate with the corporate sector to raise the critical importance of parental inclusion and child health and welfare and encourage collaboration. In doing all this, we had to maintain the NRFC’s politically neutral stance; above all, the focus had to be solely on serving the interests of all parents and children.

The NRFC tasked us with delivering a fully redesigned website, managing a system upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, migrating information to the Amazon Web Services cloud, and securing operational authorization.

Working closely with the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Administration for Children and Families, our team completed a nine-month risk management framework process to migrate the NRFC’s rearchitected website to the Amazon Web Services environment. The redesigned Fatherhood.gov site required the repurposing of all existing site content, the construction of searchable product and service catalogs available through a virtual library of over 4,000 resources, and the incorporation of Google Maps API into a searchable map and database.

Our team helped launch various campaigns and partnerships to promote the NRFC’s website and mission to public channels featuring families. These partnerships included the NFL, NBA, and NASCAR, as well as top television studios and Hollywood movie producers. They encompassed inspirational #Dadication videos, targeted media tours, and billboards—all designed to influence a nationwide commitment to changing the existing cultural mindset about fathers and fatherhood.

Results

As a result of this project, the NRFC is now the first entry to appear after a Google search for the term “fatherhood.” In addition, fathers who saw or heard at least one of our campaign PSAs were significantly more likely to act to learn more about spending quality time with their children than those who did not (69% vs. 30%). Ad-aware fathers were also three times more likely to have danced with their kids (44% vs. 16%).

Our close collaboration with the Ad Council, which secured millions of dollars in donated media, resulted in more than 1 billion impressions. Metrics for the rearchitected and redesigned Fatherhood.gov site included a session duration of 1.1 minutes, an average of 2.2 page views per session, and a total of more than 1.4 million page views.

Currently, our team is at work on additional tasks, including monitoring analytics through Google Studio Dashboard, performing social media listening analysis, migrating the website to Drupal 9, conducting ongoing operations and maintenance, and monitoring and implementing security requirements.