“Nearly 8% of school-aged children in the U.S. have received a diagnosis of AD/HD and nearly 1 in 5 U.S. school-aged children have some form of dyslexia.” According to Joan Brennan, creator of the patented Reading Focus Card, there’s a growing segment of our population, both children and adults, who are dealing with these kinds of issues and struggle to read. In 2009, she developed a low-tech tool to help people focus their eyes on just one or two lines of text, and block out all of the surrounding text so that they can concentrate on the words they’re trying to read and digest them.
Take one glance at Joan’s Pinterest boards (http://pinterest.com/brennajn2000/), and you can see how dedicated she is, not just at selling her product and building her business, but also at providing resources and educational information that people and parents will appreciate.
Joan joined Pinterest abut a year ago and started to organize her boards into various topics like “Help for Struggling Readers” or “AD/HD Resources & Support” or “Sensory Ideas.” She has boards specifically for AD/HD, Dyslexia, Autism/Aspergers, Low Vision, Stroke, Brain Injury, Special Needs, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, Dyspraxia, Down Syndrome, Tourette, Parkinsons, Dementia and Alzheimers. She has over 4,600 pins spread out over 80 different boards!
Joan is doing exactly what a small business needs to do with social media: share great, interesting content and be a resource to other users.
To date, Joan has attracted hundreds of followers on Pinterest, and her activity is generating a lot of interest and connections.
In looking at her main Pinterest Board, Help for Struggling Readers, you’ll find a great mix of links specifically from Joan’s business, along with links, articles and images from a huge variety of other sources. She has discovered through her Pinterest activity that there is a huge interest and need for help and information, specifically on AD/HD and Dyslexia. Joan monitors her website analytics and Pinterest analytics and sees the greatest activity on pins regarding those topics.
Joan has been teaching for over 15 years, and developed this product to help the kids she saw coming through her classrooms year after year. She has made an effort to use social media to not only promote her product, but also to help educate kids and parents, and she is doing an outstanding job. Businesses and organizations alike would do well to follow her example.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Reading Focus Card, here’s a video that demonstrates how it works:
Joan is now working on a digital version of her tool which would apply to e-readers, tablets and more.
What should you do next?
- Check out Joan’s Pinterest boards and look for inspiration on how you can use your own Pinterest account to provide valuable information and resources to your own clients about your business and industry.
- Take a moment to like and repin one or two of the pins Joan has curated. We all know people experiencing one of these issues.
If you have any questions, or would like to recommend additional resources for these issues, please do so in the comments below.