Online Community Helping Older Adults Live Happy, Healthy, Connected Lives [Podcast Series]
[:55] Dr. Bantham introduces her guest, Lawrence Kosick
Lawrence Kosick is the Co-Founder and President of GetSetUp.
[1:08] GetSetUp inspiration
“Why is there not a platform that focuses specifically on this demographic, that helps them learn new things, socialize and connect with others? There's one for every other demographic and age group, why not this one? And so we set out to launch GetSetUp and be that place where older adults could come learn new things, socialize and connect with others.”
[2:15] Addressing ageism
“And so when you think about these two trends—fastest growing portion of the audience yet most underserved—it's sort of the perfect storm. And I think it's important we think about this when we're figuring out how to provide sort of the best service possible.”
[4:31] Helping older adults live happy, healthy, connected lives
“The approach we wanted to take was to reskill and upskill older adults, then have them teach other older adults the things they wanted or needed to learn to live happy, healthy, more connected lives.”
[7:00] Older adults as instructors
“They could teach them whatever it is they wanted to learn. This was actually really interesting for us because it did sort of disarm and remove the fear and concern around trying or learning something new. So in terms of getting people to try this and removing some of that friction, that actually did work in sort of helping us accelerate and onboard more older adults initially.”
[8:46] Creating community
“And then we saw a really interesting statistic where, on average, a learner would make five new friends on the platform each and every month. We realized that once you're making friends and coming back and taking classes together, you've evolved from more than just a class platform to a bit of a community.”
[11:44] Last mile vision
“We just truly believe that a person's last 20 or 30 years of their life—which is a really significant amount of time—it can be their best years. But in order to do that, there needs to be a place and a community that empowers them. And however we get there, that'll continue to be our goal.”
[14:18] Addressing mental and physical health and well-being
“And health and wellness is a huge category for us, because it's anything from healthy cooking, exercising at home, managing anxiety, managing chronic illnesses, fall prevention, but a lot of fun things around mental enrichment, because there's obviously physical, and then there's mental. And we see a lot of folks really interested in sort of just staying engaged on a daily basis, and getting into a rhythm where they might come to the site and exercise in the morning. They might take something more academic midday, and they might do something fun later in the day, like play a game or something that's more entertainment related.”
[17:35] Measuring success
“We think the answer is around retention and engagement, meaning how often are they coming? Are they spending lots of time? Are they booking additional classes? Are they inviting others? Are they bringing their friends, their family, their church group to the platform? And so measuring all of that, at least preliminarily, is how we think we can measure ourselves.”
[19:43] Leveraging partners to raise awareness
“So we work a lot with local organizations, like the area agencies for aging, the YMCAs, a lot of the states at the Health and Human Services level—each state has a Department of Aging and they think about how to provide services to their older adults. We were able to raise our hand and say, we can provide this in a virtual manner with some level of scale if you'll help us promote it through your channels.”
[21:09] COVID-19 pandemic impact
“And I think a lot of it is driven by the fact that this population was not using a lot of tech and products and services that were available to them because they simply weren't being provided in—how shall I say—sort of a friendly, a senior- specific, friendly manner. What the pandemic has actually done is it has changed behavior and, in many cases, forced folks and older adults to sort of have to go and figure out how to access things virtually, that they didn't have to before.”
[23:02] Addressing the social determinants of health
“And so without having sort of an appropriate way to help everybody get basic access to important information, you can't truly affect the social determinants of health, right? And to do that one of the first things we all need to think about is how do we create the ability to access whatever this important information is for all of us—older adults included—to get access to, to live happy, healthy, more connected lives.”
[24:46] Building trusted partnerships
“And so we quickly looked for companies, where we could step in and say, Listen, you use to service this demographic, in a physical way, there's obviously going to be some difficulty doing that here short term, let us help you virtually, sort of maintain that connection with your users in your members in your audience.”
[28:14] Increasing accessibility
“The answers will always be some level of I want to be healthier. I want to be more comfortable. I want to live at home longer. I want to communicate with my grandchildren, I want to be able to have fun and stay healthy at home. And those are all things that if we solve that first mile problem, we can solve the middle and the last mile problem.”
