The way consumers pay for things is changing.

Despite being available for years, mobile payments have yet to become the favored way to pay, with about a quarter of U.S. smartphone users using a mobile phone to pay for something at a physical point of sale at least once every six months this year, according to eMarketer.

It’s still easy to pay with cash, credit or debit card with an engrained behavior that’s tough to change.

However, new payment methods continue to evolve. For example, scanning codes is commonplace in Asia, facial recognition is becoming mainstream in parts of China, owners of later-model smartphones use fingerprint scanning to unlock and approve things and many phones are using facial recognition.

Add to that voice purchasing, via devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home, and non-tradition paying methods are becoming significant.

One recent forecast by Juniper Research estimates that $2 trillion in mobile payment transactions will be made via mobile biometrics by 2023.

Nearly a third (32%) of consumers will use mobile payments by 2022, according to eMarketer. Traditional mobile payment methods may be left in the dust by more IoT-related models. Pulling out a phone and tapping a terminal may seem tedious compared to just looking at something, or saying a few words.

In this interview, Vita Coco's executive vice president of global brand strategy and development discusses how the brand's entrepreneurial environment and strategy are enabling the coconut-centric beverage brand to cultivate a mass consumer following

In an ever-expanding world of options, consumers increasingly are looking to find meaning in their experiences and purchases. They seem to buy based on how products make them feel and how brands enable them to engage with their offers. Particularly suited for experiential marketing and shopping are wellness brands, who are moving to design interactive stores and products that fit with consumers’ desires for retail with meaning. To this end, coconut beverage brand Vita Coco is focusing on cultivating inclusivity, community, authenticity and transparency in its brand experience.

The company’s vice president of global brand strategy and development, Jane Prior, spoke with PSFK about how the business is enabling its consumer base to engage with the brand through fitness classes, wellness events and “Instagramable” spaces, embodied in its recent NYC pop-up this July 20-22.  Jane explains Vita Coco’s mission to enable consumers to seamlessly integrate healthy habits into their daily routines, as well as describes how a modern beverage brand can cultivate a wide-reaching, engaged consumer base. Finally, Jane also discusses the new Vita Coco Sparkling drink, with which the brand plans to disrupt the sparkling beverage market.

PSFK:  How have you seen your consumer base transition from the fashion and lifestyle niche to a larger mass-customer market? 

Jane Prior: I think in our early days, fashion was one of the core influencer-communities that adopted the brand. In the early days, we relied on influence marketing to build a brand. Brand awareness through word of mouth is so important to us—people telling others why and when they consume Vita Coco. Understanding why they love the brand is vital to our success.

We have been around for 15 years. We’ve been growing exponentially, especially for the last 10. Our brand’s consumer base of yoga influences, fashion influences, music influences is evolving to encompass a much more mainstream consumer base. Now, basically, any consumer who’s interested in health and wellness is our target customer for our coconut water. Our brand’s ethos lies in our consumers being able to live balanced lifestyles. We believe that we can help in any part of your life. This core value makes us a very accessible brand and line of products for a wide array of consumers.

How do you appeal to a more mass consumer? 

It’s a couple of things. Taste can be a barrier for us. Coconut water can have an acquired taste for someone who’s never had it before. We like to joke that sometimes it takes three times to fall in love with the product and fall in love with the brand. You just give a try a couple times. Then eventually you fall in love with it, and then you’re addicted. For a more mainstream consumer, we have other product offerings such as our pressed coconut one. It’s coconut water with the pressed meat from a coconut. It gives the beverage a real traditional coconut taste.

People are sometimes surprised when they try coconut water first because it doesn’t taste like coconut or the coconut that they historically know—taste of a candy or a piña colada. This product actually has that coconut taste. It’s helping us to appeal to a more mainstream consumer and, maybe, someone who’s previously has been more skeptical of coconut water.

Our Sparkling product is another one. We’ve had a number of consumers say, “I’m not a huge fan of coconut water, but I’m a big fan of Sparkling.” It’s a way to get the benefits of coconut water with a slightly different taste profile, for a different part of the day, and a different experience. 

Everyone today speaks about the importance of authenticity. How do you think the simplicity of coconut water relates to this prevailing modern consumer ideology?

For consumers these days, some of the most important things, on a product level, are clean ingredients and simplicity. In our case, we have these naturally occurring functional benefits, which I think is so unique. That’s why Vita Coco plays so well with the way that consumers are thinking today, how they’re selecting their brands, and then making their product choices. I think we’re very lucky to be starting with an ingredient that is so special. Really for our core base product, we don’t have to do much—it’s such an amazing product.

I think that consumers appreciate that. From a brand perspective, authenticity and transparency are also so important to a consumer. That’s why we’re very, very transparent with our consumers about all our product—what’s in them, how we make them—because, again, that’s what consumers want. They want to understand what they’re consuming.

They don’t want ingredients that they can’t pronounce. They want to be able to say, “Hey. I can read this ingredient panel. It’s super straightforward. I get it. I understand carbonated water. I understand coconut water. I understand grapefruit juice. I understand what’s in this product, and I feel good about putting it in my body.” That’s very important to us as a brand and when we develop products. It fits with the ideology of the consumer these days.

How do you keep that niche feel when you’re appealing to a mass market?

Like I mentioned, in the early days, we definitely had a very niche consumer in that we appealed to a much wider consumer base. I think it’s just about maintaining the credibility and authenticity that has made us who we are.  It’s our baby. That’s how we treat it, and that’s how we want to convey it to consumers, whether it’s our early-adopting niche consumer, or whether it’s a more mainstream consumer. We believe that everyone deserves the right to have great products and to have great experiences with them and the brand.

Do you believe your digital channels create an ideology for your brand rather than a line of products in themselves?

Absolutely. I think these days consumers expect more from brands. It’s not enough just to be a product. That’s really important to us and important that we can build that to consumers. That’s why experiences like this help to convey that through all of our digital. They give customers a reason to follow and engage with us.

I can see your brand doing DJ yoga sessions.

We’re actually doing the morning rave this fall. That’s a great place. It’s such a perfect occasion for us. It takes place the first thing in the morning. You’re working out. You’re having fun. It’s a perfect place to get your daily dose of Vita Coco.

When communicating to all these audiences, how do you integrate your social channels with your real-life experiences?

That’s the beautiful part. It’s like social and digital give us an opportunity to be so targeted. Whether it’s through online or offline channels, we have an opportunity to be very targeted to make sure we have the right message to engage a new consumer who, maybe, doesn’t understand the benefits of coconut water.

Then, for someone who’s more familiar with the brand and has tried our products, we can get a little deeper with that person and talk about some of our other initiatives. We have a corporate social responsibility program that we don’t talk too often about but we do a lot of partnerships on the ground—in the Philippines, in particular, where we source our coconuts from.

That’s a story that resonates with someone who understands coconut water and has been consuming it for a long time. Their knowing that we also do good for the communities that we source from adds credibility to the brand beyond the great product that we offer them. By connecting this experience with social media, we create the most immersive experience for both consumers and influencers.

For influencers, obviously, we have very targeted, curated content this week that’s a little bit special for them. Then we give that more mass experience to the rest of our consumers who can enjoy the space. Then, hopefully, they share the moment that they have with their fans through their social channels.

Do you believe that occasion marketing better enables consumers to link the different areas of their lives with one cohesive and fluid brand?

Believe it or not, a lot of people, especially outside New York, have never tried coconut water and don’t necessarily understand the benefits. For us, occasion-based marketing is a great way to help someone understand how to make it fit into their life. When you get into the technical aspects of the product, it contains electrolytes, potassium, and natural sugars. Consumers don’t necessarily understand that. They think it’s good for me and something great to help me replenish post-workout. I get it. That’s for me.

That’s the role that occasion-based marketing plays for us. You may be a consumer who has a great interest in health and wellness, but you’re not a super-big fan of working out. Then there’s another place for your products for you. Occasion-based marketing enables us to segment the consumer. It also helps to educate people on why and when to use the brand.

Do you think that providing experiences or education is more important for consumers?

Ultimately, experiences. However,  with a product like ours, education is very important. Consumers have so much choice. There are so many alternatives out there. Coconut water is unique. There are not many products that have naturally-occurring benefits. There’s no science to this product. This has existed for thousands of years. People all over the tropics have been drinking coconut water forever. It’s such a simple concept. It’s so intuitive when you tell someone.

At the end of the day, oftentimes people say, “Coconut water. What is that? How does it fit into my lifestyle?” Education is important. The experience is so key to bringing people into brands and helping them fall in love with brands. People don’t fall in love with products. They fall in love with brands. For us, it’s an important combo, but ultimately experience wins out.

For younger consumers, products like milk and soda are falling out of favor. With its wellness-oriented consumption patterns in mind, do you see Vita Coco making itself into a lifestyle beverage brand like a healthful Coke, for example?

Absolutely. Ultimately that’s our ambition as a brand—we’re a beverage platform. We’re not just one product of coconut water. We have multiple products for multiple occasions. We see ourselves as a better-for-you brand across multiple categories in the same way. There are so many categories that are open to disruption. You have carbonated soft drinks, which have obviously been falling out of favor for a long time now. Sparkling water [is] a big part of the trend of people looking for sparkling but wanting something better, and that’s where Vita Coco comes in. Sparkling is such a key player.

People just want that effervescent sparkling experience, but they don’t want all the bad stuff. Then with milk, it’s the same thing. Dairy milk is also getting a bit of a hard time these days. People are concerned about the GMOs, about hormones in dairy milk and looking for plant-based alternatives. We have a great coconut milk that’s a plant-based alternative that gives consumers another reason to come into the brand.

Ultimately, we do see ourselves as a platform similar to a Coke or a Pepsi. The beautiful part for us is we’re starting with good-for-you products and good-for-you ingredients. We won’t and will never compromise on that. We’ll always be about products that provide real nutritional benefits to consumers with clean ingredients. Our brand’s mission is to enhance your life, not negatively affect it.  

Do you think that your various products enable consumers to associate your brand with a variety of different spaces and occasions in their lives?

That’s the idea. It’s like we can fit into your life in any part of the day. Our portfolio allows us to do that—whether it’s cooking with our coconut oil, making cocktails with our Sparkling, recovering with a Vita Coco pure coconut water in the morning when you’re hungover or when making a smoothie before running to a workout. We have a product for almost every occasion. That’s really unique as a brand to be able to fit into people’s lives in so many ways.

How have you created your product extensions? 

Many of our product inspirations are from our internal teams. We’re a very passion-led company. We don’t necessarily rely on massive consumer research or insights to develop our products. We have very intuitive feelings about what our consumers want.

I meant to do an amazing base product and base ingredient with coconut. There are so many things that you can do with a coconut. That’s usually where our inspiration starts. We’re like, “What can we do with a coconut that’s going to bring benefit to our consumers?” That’s how we got to our coconut milk product, which is unique.

Most of the non-dairy products on the market have added sugar and are very watery. Because we use coconut water and coconut cream as the base, it’s rich, creamy, almost dairy-like experience but with no added sugar and none of the negative stuff of dairy and all of the good stuff of a plant-based alternative. 

I’d like to say that we do tons of consumer research and have a lot of insights to inform our innovation. The truth is we’re a very entrepreneurial, founder-led organization. Many of our innovations come from our passions, our insights and our intuition about what consumers are looking for and understanding those trends. So far, it’s made us pretty successful. I think our new sparkling beverage product is going to be a big moment for the brand. Our milk and our oil products are already quite a big success.

Besides the product itself, how do you think the packaging influences consumers’ perception of the brand?

The packaging has been really important to the brand. It’s super disruptive, especially on our core product. It’s not very polished the way a lot of brands are in terms of how they communicate. I think with our Tetra coconut water, the packaging has always been very telegraphic of coconut water. When people think of coconut water, they think the tropics. Many people have tried it, whether they’ve been on vacation in Brazil or whatnot. I think the packaging is very evocative of that. It’s been an important disruptor for us. When you see us on-shelf, you can pick us out.

Do you have any type of membership programs?

We have a VIC community, which is our influencer community that’s managed by our team in New York. Many of the influencers who will be here this week are part of that community. They’re people whom our consumers aspire to be as far as their wellness, or workout, or mindfulness choices are concerned. They play a very important role in driving that word of mouth about the brand and helping to educate consumers, frankly, about when and why to use coconut water.

The next big space that we plan to disrupt is the energy category. We recently, as Vita Coco, have made our first acquisition of RUNA Natural Energy, which is an energy drink made from guayusa leaves. It has a ton of naturally occurring caffeine. There are 150 milligrams of caffeine in a 12-ounce can. With that product, we are planning to take on another big commercial beverage category, energy drinks, and disrupt the current market space with a natural alternative. Our brand’s value proposition is to disrupt conventional categories with better-for-you alternatives.

How does that influence the spaces that you’re in?

We always are asking ourselves the question: “What’s a conventional category that has been very established and is ripe for disruption?” Many beverage categories are composed of products that have a lot of artificial ingredients or sweeteners and the like. We know that we can potentially create better-for-you alternatives. That’s a big part of how we identify opportunities for the brand.

With the pop-up space being so saturated, how do you differentiate yourselves?

Consumers still love immersive brand experiences, if you can make it fun and interesting. That’s why this content is so important. Partnering with other wellness experts and wellness brands to give consumers something unique and something special is what the expectation is, and also the only way that we’re going to break through.

Developing mass appeal while staying true to the brand’s ethos and image allows Vita Coco to compete in the beverage market, engaging a consumer base around health and wellness qualities. For more on strategies and tactics that allow brands to grow their appeal and business, see PSFK’s recently released report, the Occassion-Based Marketing Debrief.

Reuters has launched a new app that focuses on “utility” to help business professionals “make better decisions,” according to the media company.

The app focuses on topic-based feeds. Reuters believes it will give business professionals fast and relevant information to help inform their decisions across industries, interests, markets and countries.

The emphasis on this target audience is part of Reuters’ focus on its professional readers.

“We were hearing our content is used in decision-making. So this 'utility' approach is about finding how we could provide them with a more efficient way to get the news they find most valuable," a Reuters spokesperson told Publishers Daily.

Reuters is also looking at user engagement as a metric of success for the app and its content, rather than traditional metrics like clicks, the spokesperson said.

Reuters has thousands of topic feeds available in the app. The feeds can be customized to give users a personalized news service.

“In building the new app, we wanted to make it easier for users to access quality news and data across the thousands of specialist topics we cover,” stated Isaac Showman, managing director of Reuters Consumer.

It also has features like customized alerts, “market watchlists” and analysis of stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.

The “Editor’s Highlights” feature provides a summary of major stories in each feed. A personalized news bulletin from Reuters TV lets users select their program length. The app can also be accessed offline.

Available on iOS devices, the app will get an Android version in the coming weeks.

Reuters also operates personalized video news app Reuters TV.

The United States has lost its footing in innovation. In fact, the U.S. dropped out of the top 10 ranking in the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index, released earlier this year, for the first time in the past six years, since the report was compiled.

Some blame government funding. Numerous governments, from China to Singapore to the United Arab Emirates, have poured money and resources into developing their high-tech sectors, as some U.S. presidents pulled back and cut funding.

Others like Rex Wong, Aivon founder and CEO, believe that mobile drove the wedge. “Asia is a mobile-first world,” he said, speaking with MediaPost from China. “About 75% of all videos are viewed on mobile. We're seeing a 57% click-through rate. You can click on images and objects to get more information about them.”

Aivon created an exchange where companies can share content worldwide. It powers about 50 video platforms in 20 countries, with television stations and newspapers, reaching about 500 million users.

In addition to Aivon, Wong also cofounded Applied Semantics, which Google acquired in 2003. The technology became the advertising platform AdSense to support publishers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) enables Aivon to support metadata that makes content searchable within videos for movies, commercials and any other video content. The AI is not 100% accurate -- it’s only 90% accurate, Wong said -- so the business model also uses humans and blockchain technology.

Aivon houses about 1 million cataloged videos that now live on a blockchain. A token gives users an incentive to provide additional resources. Freelancers, content providers, service providers, advertisers, AI providers and others can use the tokens to power up to fifteen key features for decentralized applications.

These include better search, monetization with AI-driven contextual ad tech, rights management, content creation clipping, brand safety, digital fingerprint and forensics, tagging and indexing, ad search, content matching and recommendation engine, and analytics.

From there, Aivon’s engineers created a protocol to build a series of decentralized video applications. The first to launch will be an open-source video search engine.

“Most people think YouTube is a search engine, but it’s not,” he said. “It’s a hosting and streaming platform … and it only catalogs and indexes videos. Not the content within them. You can only find the videos people upload to it.”

The benefits for advertisers are far-reaching. Most of this is being done across Asia, but not in the U.S. Computing resources are required that were not available in the past. The ability to search the index of videos gives the technology scale.

Wong showed me an example of how a brand could create a video and then use the metadata and technology to swap out a product in the video similar to product placement, but personalize the product and the message per viewer based on the advertiser and the location.   

It’s technology like this that will change advertising for the U.S., but consumers need to accept the change and innovation.

Sandro Catanzaro, founder and Chief Innovation Officer of DataXu, describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. He was one of the co-inventers of Dataxu’s real-time optimization algorithm, based on research he did at MIT. Here’s an overview of his company, the world of advanced and addressable television and the data work being done in the industry.

Charlene Weisler: What is your definition of advanced TV? Is it the same as addressable?

Sandro Catanzaro: Advanced TV is TV advertising purchased on an impression basis using advanced audience data and software automation, creating additional value for both the buy and sell sides of the transaction.

Addressable TV is a form of advanced TV where households are targeted on a one-to-one basis via cable and satellite set-top boxes, smart TVs and OTT devices, but not all advanced TV is necessarily addressable. Other forms of advanced TV may be based solely on automating the purchase process, but still display ads on a one-to-many broadcast basis.

Weisler: What are the challenges of advanced TV?

Catanzaro: One of the primary challenges in advanced TV right now is the ability to target and provide attribution for OTT campaigns. This form of TV is accessed by the viewer via internet-enabled televisions, and streamed either live or on-demand. The connected nature of OTT makes it very similar to digital video, but as these ads run on actual TV screens and not traditional digital devices (PCs and mobile phones), the typical digital markers (cookies and mobile IDs) are not available for identification, making advanced targeting difficult.

Weisler: How can these challenges be overcome?

Catanzaro: This issue can be overcome through new forms of identity management made possible by cross-device graph technology. A device graph is the unification of several otherwise separate devices, such as a laptop, mobile phone, tablet and smart TV under one unique household. In the real world, these devices don’t exist in a vacuum; they are linked through ownership and usage and can be used to understand the full context of a person’s digital footprint.
By including smart TVs and OTT devices in a device graph, marketers are able to leverage advanced audience data, built using legacy digital IDs, to enable addressable targeting on televisions, even though these legacy IDs are not present.

Weisler: What metrics do you use?

Catanzaro: Advanced TV is typically purchased on an impression basis as opposed to ratings, but it is possible to provide traditional TV metrics such as GRP. However, we find that marketing professionals are also frequently leveraging more detailed metrics to prove success, such as lift studies which compare conversion rates of exposed populations versus control groups. This is made possible through addressable forms of advanced TV and device graph technology, where specific viewers are directly targeted and others are intentionally excluded, in order to compare their actions across all devices — and, in the real world, after having viewed the ad.

Weisler: What is Dataxu?

Catanzaro: Dataxu is a software company that helps marketing and media professionals use data to improve their advertising, using AI to optimize ROI on marketing investments. Dataxu ingests first-party data (e.g., customer purchase information), matches it up with many other kinds of data across devices and identifiers and creates a customer machine learning classifier for each campaign that invests more budget into what’s driving acquisition and less into what isn’t.

Weisler: What will the future of TV buying look like three to five years from now?

Catanzaro: We expect that in this time period all major TV programmers will have made their content available via connected devices and most will be providing marketers access to this advertising via programmatic channels. The largest portion of TV buying will still operate through legacy methods, such as upfronts, but advanced TV will soon constitute a much larger piece of that pie in the near future.

Cheetah Digital, a global provider of cross-channel marketing software, has acquired Stellar Loyalty, a specialist in cloud-based B2C engagement software. Terms were not disclosed. 

Peter Lim, CTO and co-founder of Stellar Loyalty, will serve as Cheetah Digital’s SVP of engineering innovation and will continue to run Stellar’s services, support and product teams.   

Stellar Loyalty handles digital messaging via email, mobile, web, social and point-of-sale, utilizing demographic, behavioral transactional and contextual data, Cheetah says. The objective is to help brands deliver “relevant and personalized experiences,” Lim states.  

The company’s first-party data platform uses batch and streaming capabilities to incorporate consumer engagement data, according to Cheetah Digital.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Europe and Asia, Stellar Loyalty serves such clients as Yankee Candle, Cayman Airways, CraftWorks, and Harlequin. Its team includes veterans from Siebel Systems, Oracle, SAP, and Marketo.   

Cheetah Digital works with such brands as Williams-Sonoma, American Express and Hilton. It has 25 offices in 13 countries. 

Sprint customers, new or existing, now can get an iPhone 8 for $8 a month with a Sprint Flex lease, but it requires an 18-month-long lease and offers a one-time $21.17 credit. New customers get that deal; existing customers get it only by adding a line.

The new promotion starts today and lasts only until Aug. 9 by applying online or over Sprint’s toll-free number. 

The new phone, with 64GB, is a lease, meaning that after the contract period, consumers will give back the phone or buy it outright. The phone listed for $700 when it was released last year. 

Previously, Sprint and other carriers were discounting the iPhone 8 for $22.91 over 24 months. 

And currently, Sprint’s website is still offering an 18-month lease on the most advanced iPhone X, for $20 a month, with its own strings attached, and other deals. 

The new offer is called Sprint’s Flash Sale, and the wireless company is promoting it with a YouTube video showing two people “flashing” passersby by opening their overcoats to reveal details of the deal. 

Spring “is delivering a fast, simple and convenient online shopping experience, something we know consumers crave," said Dow Draper, Sprint chief commercial officer. 

In April, T-Mobile announced a $26 billion merger and in arguments at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, Sprint has pointed out that, without it, neither company will have the horses to upgrade to 5G services by themselves.

Sprint has been aggressively trying to add to its customer base and improve coverage. Earlier this month, it added a batch of new “unlimited” service plans that, in fact, seemed to be cutting back on $15-a-month deal that was so good, it was discontinued after just seven days.

Samsung has appointed Leo Burnett as global creative AOR for the brand's Visual Display division (TVs). Adam&EveDDB previously handled creative for the U.S. and UK.

Led by the agency's Chicago office, the 75 market remit will include global brand positioning, integrated communications strategy and creative. The first work under this new partnership will support Samsung's QLED TVs and launch in early 2019.

Starcom will also provide media planning and buying expertise for this business, given its role as Samsung's global media agency of record. 

Samsung and Publicis Groupe have a long-standing relationship. Leo Burnett joined the Samsung roster in 2004 and has worked across much of the business since that time, notably the Mobile Division (phones) and Global Marketing Center, as well as focusing on individual markets around the world.

In an interview with PSFK, working in collaboration with Verizon, Sixto Cancel discusses how he is using technology for good with his work for Think of Us

In a special series brought to you with the help of our partner Verizon, The Pioneers of Humanability is directing the spotlight onto the people, organizations, and companies who are using technology to do more new and do more good in the world.

Many U.S. youth who are in the foster care system will “age out” of the system at 18 or 21 and automatically be left without a family or the skills to make it on their own. Sixto Cancel, Founder and CEO of Think of Us and one of the Pioneers of Humanability, is using technology to give these youth the tools they need to successfully navigate adulthood. In this interview, Sixto describes how Think of Us created an app-based platform to connect youth with a support network of adults from non-profit and government agencies who can help coach them in their journey towards self-sufficiency.  

PSFK:  What are the ways in which you think technology has the potential to impact humanity, and make a positive social difference?

Sixto Cancel: The way that I’ve seen technology making a difference in human services—and for humanity—is when technology really focuses on connecting us humans more than ever before in the moments of need. It’s not to automate and replace human connection with an online platform, but I think the technology can play a stronger role in actually coaching folks through situations.

We can use technology to say, “Hey, I’m going through this,” and a person will say, “Hey, I want to support, and I want to be there with you.” Technology can do the work of saying, “Hey, as you think about supporting this person, here’s what you can do. You can hold space with them. You can show up.” Technology can help you actually walk through with someone in need, and help them process what their need is, and then get to the next level of healing.

I think technology can play a role in making a difference because of how it prompts, how it engages, and how it actually facilitates more in person human connection.

PSFK: Could you give us a specific example of how your platform on Think of Us is facilitating this connection?

Sixto:  Absolutely. One example that comes to mind is when a young person using our platform says that they need help creating a résumé. They could shoot it back and forth a couple of times on email or hop on the phone with someone, and be able to accomplish a goal, but there’s nothing like being able to actually show up and say, “Let’s do this together, and let’s sit side by side, and work on it.”

We want to go to the next form of connection where the technology is actually coaching adults to be able to show up in person. We want to be able to show them how they can help and coach the young person through completing their résumé instead of just saying, “Let me give you feedback. Let me review what you’ve done.” The way we use technology is helping guide the support of people to build their capabilities to do things differently.

PSFK:  How does your platform help guide people through this process?

Sixto:  On our platform, young people can create their goals and then create action steps to achieve those goals. Their goal might be to go get a job, and so action step number one is that they need to create a résumé. When they say they need to create a résumé, we have video content and articles that are then shared with a supportive adult and the young person to help them do that.

PSFK: How is Think of Us working to do more new and do more good?

Sixto:  Young people age out of a foster care at 18 or 21, depending on the state. We are working with young people who are aging out and not getting adopted or returning to their biological families and have to figure out how they’re going to be completely self-sufficient.

Where are you going to live? Where are you going to be able to get a job? Where is it that you might want to go to school? How do you take care of your own mental health? How do you take care of all the things that adulthood requires you to do? Our platform helps young people build their own personal advisory board to help them create that transition plan, and then to execute that plan.

PSFK:  What inspired your work to focus on supporting youth within the foster care system?

Sixto:  I myself grew up in the foster care system and aged out of it, as did some of my colleagues. My work very much comes from that experience of having to navigate those experiences on my own.

PSFK: What are some of the biggest challenges that your organization has to overcome?

Sixto:  I think the biggest challenge is, just like many nonprofits, fundraising. However, I look at it as having the capital to actually do the work. Tech companies work in a way where they are infused with a round of capital. Then they hit certain milestones and get another round of capital based on their successes. Whereas, in the non-profit field, you have a three-year work plan. You get a grant to accomplish the work, then you evaluate that work and show that you’re making a difference.

We’re at an interesting intersection with Think of Us, because we need to function like a tech company, but we have the social mission of a non-profit. It becomes complex in how we actually navigate those things.

PSFK: What would you say makes your organization different from other support networks?

Sixto:  I think it’s the fact that we put the young person at the center, giving them voice and choice. We really want young people to start surviving and really start to be able to own their destiny and have a life where they’re actually living. When you come into foster care, it’s because of abuse, neglect or because your parents can’t take care of you. Those are all reasons that you had nothing to do with. Our platform and our work is about making sure that every young person has the same opportunities that any of their peers would have had.

PSFK: What types of tools does your organization provide and who stands to benefit from them?

Sixto:  Our main tool is a life coaching-platform where young people are able to create goals. They’re able to tag members of their personal advisory board to support them in accomplishing and executing the tasks within that goal. We also have content on the platform to help them.

PSFK: What are some of the biggest success stories that the platform has had so far?

Sixto:  I would say some of the biggest success stories that we’ve had so far was when we did a soft launch in Nebraska where we had 70 young people get onto the platform in the first 90 minutes. They created 67 goals. What was so enlightening and what made us really happy was that out of the 67 goals, 62% of those goals had to do with financial literacy or purchasing some type of asset, such as a car or housing. What it showed was that the group of 19- and 20‑year‑olds that we had in that room all had a strong grasp of what they needed to do in terms of managing their money to be able be self‑sufficient.

There are a lot of different opinions that people may have about adolescents and Millennials can do, but what we saw on our platform was that young people, who could have chosen any goals in the world, chose goals that were directly related to something that had to do with being a hard worker or learning a new skill around money. That really gave us an insight on what is it that top of mind for young people who have aged out of foster care.

PSFK: Was there else that you wanted to share about Think of Us that we forgot to ask?

Sixto:  What I love about our work is that we’re not here trying to create a new program for young people in foster care. We’re here to work with the existing programs and partner with them, bringing technology and data to the table.

We can show them how they might be able to use real‑time data that they’re learning about young people’s goals, young people’s wants and young people’s needs and then be able to utilize that data to do their work better.

I really enjoy helping organizations. Our team of 15 people really enjoys being the thing that lifts up the good work that’s being done by others, so we can make sure that young people are being served in a holistic way.

Addressing the challenges facing youth who are aging out of foster care is possible with technology platforms like the one Think of Us has built. For more about how innovators like Sixto are using technology to serve progressive goals and better the community for all, see the Pioneers of Humanability, brought to you by PSFK with Verizon.

Verizon’s Pioneers of Humanability list honors the people, organizations and companies that are using technological innovations to bring about good things for the world. These are the pioneers, keeping food safe and water clean, cutting pollution, saving energy and enabling doctors to treat patients a county or a country away. They’ve stopped asking “What if?” or “Why isn’t?” and started doing and leading. These are the people, organizations and companies you need to know about now—because they’re building the future.