6 Ways To Partner With FamZoo And What It Costs

Would you like to partner with us to deliver innovative, effective youth financial education to your audience? Would you like to grow your audience and your sales along the way?

FamZoo offers a variety of ways to partner, a spectrum of price points (including free), and multiple revenue generation options. The following table (nice PDF version here) summarizes 6 different partnering scenarios based on two dimensions: family sponsorship level (none, partial, or full) and branding option (FamZoo brand or co-branded).

			BRANDING OPTION
			FamZoo Brand	Co-Branded
			No co-branded look No in-app cross-selling No Partner Setup Fee No Partner Admin Fee	Co-branded look Builtin cross-selling platform Partner Pays Setup Fee [3] Partner Pays Annual Admin Fee [4]
FAMILY SPONSOR LEVEL	None	Partner does not pay for any family membership fees. Family pays for all membership fees after free trial. FamZoo pays partner a share of family subscription and ongoing renewal revenue. [1]	Option 1 You tell your families about teaching good money habits with FamZoo. We share initial family subscription and ongoing renewal revenue with you.	Option 4 Everything to the left, plus... >>>	Co-Brand You connect with the next generation. You keep your brand in front of parents for years while you help them teach their kids — your future members, clients, customers — good personal finance habits through hands-on practice. You bolster your brand. You associate your brand with effective youth financial education, social responsibility, innovation, and a good ’ole warm family feeling. You increase cross-selling opportunities. You present your related content, products, and services to just the right audience at just the right time.
	Partial	Partner pays for discounted initial family subscription. [2] Family pays for any renewals after initial sponsored subscription. FamZoo pays partner a share of ongoing family renewal revenue. [1]	Option 2 You help families get started with good money habits by sponsoring their initial subscription. We share FamZoo renewal revenue with you.	Option 5 Everything to the left, plus... >>>
	Full	Partner pays for discounted family subscription and renewals. [2] Family subscribes and renews annually for free. FamZoo/Partner revenue sharing is not applicable.	Option 3 You help families develop and sustain good money habits by sponsoring their FamZoo membership for as long as they need it.	Option 6 Everything to the left, plus... >>>
[1] FamZoo shares 25% of family subscription and/or renewal revenue with partner.
[2] Discounted bulk family subscription/renewal pricing starts at $15/family/year (50% off best list price). Discounts increase with volume.
[3] Setup fee is proportional to partner size and ranges from $250 to $5,000
[4] Annual admin fee is proportional to partner size and ranges from $200 to $3,000. NOTE: Annual admin fee can be eliminated with our “static branding” option.
All prices mentioned here are for general informational purposes only and are subject to change at any time. To obtain formal pricing for your specific situation, please contact us.

Option 1: FamZoo Brand, No Family Sponsorship

This is a very popular choice for bloggers, and it’s completely free for you, the partner. Just surround FamZoo with relevant, compelling content — like blog posts, videos, podcasts or curriculum that describe how your niche audience can get the most mileage out of our Virtual Family Bank. Embed our affiliate links in your content to direct your audience to our site for registration. If a family converts to paid after our standard free trial, you share in 25% of the initial subscription revenue as well as 25% of any ongoing renewal revenue down the road. Those renewals can turn into a nice little annuity (with no extra effort), because most families use FamZoo for several years.

Family finance blogger Suzanne Parker sets a great example. Her top notch content over at GrowingRichKids.com includes detailed online allowance site comparisons and FamZoo best practices drawn from her own genuine experiences with our product. Suzanne’s families know exactly what to expect when they sign up for FamZoo, and they trust her judgement. As a result, Suzanne yields an impressive 38.3% conversion rate of free trial families to paid subscribers. That’s better than the conversion rate we see on our own site, and it’s a testimonial to the power of a well-targeted and well-informed audience.

Option 2: FamZoo Brand, Partial Family Sponsorship

If you’d like to take it to the next level of value for your audience, consider sponsoring the initial subscription period for your target families — or perhaps just a segment of them. How? You can purchase a discounted basket of prepaid subscriptions from us to hand out to your audience in the form of custom coupon codes. For example, you might run a special promotion during April to commemorate National Financial Literacy Month. You could hand out a coupon code called MYFINLITPROMO that’s redeemable by up to 100 different families for one free year of FamZoo membership.

After the sponsored term is up, each family has the option of renewing as a paid subscriber. You share 25% of any such renewals, just like in Option 1.

Option 3: FamZoo Brand, Full Family Sponsorship

Taking it up one more notch on the value scale for your families, you might even choose to fully sponsor their memberships — perhaps as part of a non-profit educational initiative. In this case, you pick up the (discounted) fees for the initial subscriptions as well as any subsequent renewals. Note: families must explicitly renew each year by clicking through an acknowledgement screen; this prevents you from continuing to pick up costs for a family who has since graduated from FamZoo.

Option 4: Co-Brand, No Family Sponsorship

Option 4 is just like Option 1, where we share all the family membership revenue with you, but you also get co-branding and cross-selling capabilities.

The Co-Branding Option allows you to infuse FamZoo with your brand and your targeted content — ads, special offers, social media streams, educational material, you name it. You customize the look of our application with your brand, schedule your targeted content, and monitor the activity of your families through your own private administrative console. The administrative console is completely self-service, so you maintain full control over your marketing initiatives — no waiting for our intervention. That said, we’re always available to give you any help or guidance you might need along the way.

To gain access to your administrative console, you pay us a one-time setup fee and an annual admin subscription fee. Both of those fees are proportional to the size of your organization. If you’d just like to set up your co-branding and targeted content once and forget about it — and if you’re happy to forgo access to your administrative console — we’ll drop the annual admin subscription fee. We call that the “Static Co-Branding Option”, and you only pay the one-time setup fee.

Most partners who have their own products and services to sell choose the Co-Branding with either this option, Option 5, or Option 6, depending on how important revenue sharing is for their youth financial education business model.

Option 5: Co-Brand, Partial Family Sponsorship

Option 5 is just like Option 2, where we share the family renewal revenue with you and the initial family subscription is your treat, but you’re also promoting your brand and cross-selling your offerings with the Co-Branding Option described in Option 4.

Most financial institutions pick either this option, or the next one.

Option 6: Co-Brand, Full Family Sponsorship

And lastly, Option 6 is just like Option 3, where you’re treating your families to FamZoo subscriptions and renewals, but you’re also promoting your brand and cross-selling your offerings with the Co-Branding Option described in Option 4.

What’s The Best Option For You?

Need help deciding which option makes the most sense for your situation? Need a private online demo? Just contact us and we’ll walk you through it.

Need a formal pricing quote good for 30 days? Contact us.

Related links:

• Schedule a private online demo/discussion of Partner Edition
• How to Deliver Youth Financial Education with FamZoo Partner Edition. Written specifically for Credit Unions, but 99% relevant to all partners.
• How to Embed Your Own Custom Content in FamZoo Partner Edition
• What Credit Union Leaders Are Saying About FamZoo
• FamZoo Earns “A” on Credit Union Report Card
• FamZoo Picked as One of 72 Coolest Startups in America

What's the FamZoo Sign?

So, you run into Anne Reuss at a marketing conference, and you want to tell her about your really cool startup.

How do you do that?

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention: she’s Deaf. And there’s no sign language interpreter in sight. Word-of-mouth marketing is not gonna cut it here. As Anne would “say”, you’re going to have to do a little word-of-hand marketing. Get creative. Move outside your comfort zone.

That means you’re going to have to step up to the eyeSocial Challenge. Here’s the crux of the challenge lifted from Anne’s page:

Create a sign that will be representative of your start up company, brand and even social terms... Record a quick video to post on YouTube so we can boast your work, and share on my Facebook page.

Challenge accepted! My ten year old son and I picked up a few American Sign Language basics by browsing the video signing dictionary on ASLPro.com. Then, he helped me put together the FamZoo video response to the eyeSocial Challenge. Here it is (be sure to watch “past” the end for a little chuckle with the bonus outtakes):

Did you like it? If so, scroll down this list of eyeSocial Challenge participants, find our entry, and give us a big thumbs up! And check out some of the other fun signs, too!

PS: If you’d like to see a real pro sign and learn something about good old fashioned customer relationship along the way, watch Anne in this video:

Automating Allowance and Chore Tracking for the Bank of Helbig

In his recent column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Allowances for Kids, with a Savings Twist, Bob Helbig, describes the new allowance and chore system he rolled out this year for his young daughters, Mia (10) and Tess (8). The Helbig system includes:

• a formal description and contracts (see Mia’s here and Tess’ here),
• expected weekly and daily chores,
• penalties for certain hot-button infractions,
• a $3 weekly allowance split between spending and saving,
• the ability to choose how much is kept and how much is saved each week, and
• aggressive matching incentives from Dad to encourage saving.

It’s a neat family banking system. Bob hopes it will instill some valuable lessons over time — the key one being: “saving pays!”

Since being able to customize your virtual family bank is one of our hallmarks, we decided to put FamZoo to the test: could we faithfully represent the “Bank of Helbig”? Yep.

Here are the step-by-step instructions for how we took the rules described in Bob’s system and brought them to life in FamZoo.

Meet the Helbig Family

The first order of business is to register the family. Here’s the Family tab after filling out the three short forms to register Bob and add his two daughters. We also picked some suitable avatars for each family member and added Bob’s touch-phrase from the end of his column — “Savings pays!” — as a family motto. Check out the top section in the right sidebar.

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Create Spending and Savings Accounts

Bob’s Allowance Savings Plan document opens with:

To encourage savings, Mia Rose Helbig and Teresa Violet Helbig will be able to choose how much of their allowance they keep each week and how much will go into their savings accounts.

So, we’ll need two accounts for each daughter: one for the “keep” portion (which I take to mean spending) and one for savings. We create each by clicking on a Create Account link (which you can find on either the Overview or the Bank tab) and filling out the form.

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Here’s what the Overview page looks like right after creating all four accounts:

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Create Checklist for Chores & Payments

Bob’s document continues with:

Each will earn $3 weekly if they fulfill all conditions spelled out in their respective allowance contracts.

Peeking at the contract, we see the conditions include a set of expected daily and weekly chores. Those can be captured in a FamZoo checklist. So, we go to the Checklist tab, click the link to create a new checklist, and fill in the form to get started. We’ll do this once for each daughter, calling one “Mia Allowance” and the other “Tess Allowance”.

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Add Expected Chores

Now that we have the (initially empty) checklists for Mia and Tess created, we can start filling them in with the expected chores for each daughter. Just click the Add Item link and fill in the options to match each chore name and frequency specified in the matching allowance contract. For example, here’s the Add Item dialog filled in for Mia’s weekly “Vacuum the living room” chore that we’ll assume happens every Saturday.

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Add Penalties

Bob’s contracts also include penalties for a couple of habits he’d like to discourage. For example, here’s the one for Mia:

It is Mia’s responsibility to bring her lunch bag home every day. Failure to do so will result in a penalty of 50 cents being deducted from her allowance for each day she does not bring it home.

We can represent this clause in Mia’s contract with a checklist item repeating every weekday that debits her spending account 50 cents whenever it is checked off. Here’s how we fill in the Add Item dialog to make that happen.

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Add Weekly Keep/Save Choices

The final step in the setup is to represent the weekly allowance keep/save options that Bob describes in his plan document:

Each week, each girl will decide how much of their allowance they will receive in cash and how much she will save. For every dollar they choose to NOT receive in cash, but designate for savings, it will be matched by an equal amount to be deposited in their savings accounts. All decisions on how much to keep and how much to save must be made in whole dollar amounts (no fractional amounts).

Since all payments are made in whole dollars, this description neatly translates to just four possible keep/save options depending on whether the daughter chooses to save zero, one, two, or three dollars. So, we can easily create end-of-week repeating checklist items that capture each choice. For example, here’s what the Add Item dialog looks like to capture the case when Mia chooses to keep one dollar, save two dollars, and get a two dollar match from Dad:

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Check Off Chores/Penalties

Now that the checklists are all set up to capture the rules of the Helbig system, it’s just a matter of checking off items for completed chores and any infractions during the week. Here’s what a typical day might look like in the Due Today view of Mia’s checklist:

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Choose Keep/Save Amounts

Then, at the end of each week, Bob can check over the girl’s performance. If they’ve lived up to the contract, the girls can make their keep/save choices. Bob can check off the items for the selected choices to make the appropriate credits to their accounts. Here’s what it looks like just after Mia makes the choice to keep one dollar, save two dollars, and pick up a two dollar savings match from Dad:

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Review Decision History

At any time, Bob or the girls can review the history of their decisions and the running balances in each account. Here’s what the history in Mia’s Savings account looks like after several weeks of keep/save decisions:

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Mia’s Account Summary So Far

At the end of his column, Bob summarizes Mia’s keep/save status as follows:

Our older daughter, 10, who tends to want cash on hand, so far this year has earned $27, kept $16 and chosen to save $11, meaning she’s benefited from $22 deposited in her savings account.

Here’s what that same summary looks like on Mia’s Overview tab:

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Whaddya Think? Ready to Start Your Own?

So those are the allowance and chore rules in the Helbig family, and that’s what it takes to automate their system in FamZoo. What do you think of the Helbig approach? How does it compare to your allowance and/or chore system? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Ready to set up your own virtual family bank system in FamZoo? Register here.

Need help getting things configured just right? We’re always happy to help. Contact us.