Sara Mauskopf
Sara Mauskopf is the co-founder and CEO of Winnie. She’s also the mom of three young children and vocal advocate for high quality child care and early education for all.
One of the early features of Winnie was our community – a way for parents and providers to ask questions and get advice from other caregivers on Winnie. Early on, we saw an overwhelming number of questions and posts related to childcare, leading us to create a comprehensive database of over 250,000 child care providers across the United States. It’s an understatement to say that this community helped make Winnie what it is today.
Today Winnie is used by millions of families to find everything from preschool and daycare to drop-in childcare, Head Start programs, after-school care, and more.
Sunsetting our community
Now that Winnie is focused on helping parents find care and education and helping providers grow their businesses, we took a look at our community posting features to see if they were best serving our mission right now. What we realized is that most of the questions parents and providers now ask on Winnie would be best answered by vetted resources rather than many commenters, some of which are anonymous. There are plenty of other places on the Internet to go to connect with others and be entertained, but Winnie can uniquely be the place to find trusted, high quality information just like we have for the childcare providers listed on our platform.
Moving forward, we’re no longer supporting the ability for users to post questions or comment on existing posts. Parents can still review child care and education providers on Winnie (and those reviews will still be moderated), but other user-generated content posts will no longer be supported outside of reviews.
New vetted resources for parents and providers
Instead of spending our time and effort moderating these posts, we’re focusing on building out our new resources section. Like the rest of Winnie, we want the information we provide to be verified and trustworthy.
In addition to providing resources for parents, we also want to continue to support childcare providers in running their businesses. Our team of childcare experts will continue to develop content for childcare providers to help them run their businesses more efficiently, whether that means offering advice on marketing their services, hiring high-quality staff, or managing their finances. We believe that by supporting childcare providers, we can help ensure families have access to high-quality care for their children.
We still think it’s really important to give parents and providers a channel to ask questions and get advice on all things caregiving and education. To that end, you can email us at hello@winnie.com with your questions. We’ll do our best to answer these questions for you and everyone who could benefit from curated resources.
Thank you for helping make Winnie the destination for childcare and education that it is today. It’s been 7 years on this journey and we feel like we are just getting started!
