Ypulse Youth Site Profile: iaam.com
Posted by meredith on 05-11-2010
Today's Ypulse Youth Site Profile is on iaam.com, an interactive community for young adults.
What it is: An interactive online community for young adults that looks to provide "valuable information on money, career, health and lifestyle" through interviews with professionals, interactive games, multimedia contests, inspirational blogs, videos, photos, music and more.
Who it's for: Young adults 13 years-old and older who are interested in an edutaining approach to learning about financial education, career choices and healthy lifestyles. Parents and teachers are also encouraged to join the community and view and participate in parent and teacher forums.
What works for us: When it comes to edutainment, balance is key. And with its clean but not boring site design and effectively eye-catching content — articles like "4 Reasons Why Your Paycheck Is Smaller Than Expected" — iaam.com does a successful job of handling what could easily be dry topics in an interesting, approachable way. It also helps that the site is scattered with pure entertainment fare like movie trailers and music videos along with informative, engaging videos — some of which are exclusive to iaam.com, others curated from sites like New York Times (I especially appreciated this one on how to handle overdrafts co-presented by PBS' Frontline).
Another feature of the site we appreciate is the series of professional interviews with folks involved in film, journalism, animation and photography. Nothing like real-life anecdotes from the field and humbling stories of obstacles overcome to inspire young readers to apply their own creativity towards reaching personal goals. From the quality and quantity of content on the site, (along with the above, there are also comic strips, contests, puzzles and more), it's clear just how much effort went into making this site a non-boring, expansive online space to explore.
Challenges: While I can appreciate that the site design purposefully doesn't shout "financial education!" or "career choices!" and instead plays up the more fun content to visitors, it does make the focus of the site slightly difficult to figure out at first glance. I also wonder if teens or young adults won't come with specific "life skills" questions in mind that they'd like answered. For both reasons, I'd love to see these practical topics spelled out somewhere on the home page as well as some hint towards the way the site hopes to empower its visitors ("Start figuring out your dream career" "Manage your own money, etc.") These are powerful messages, and I think the site has the info and resources to back them up…
That said, I'd definitely be interested to hear how the team behind the site is looking to spread the word to teens and young adults. Judging from the lack of forum discussions and the recent launch date, they might be in need of a kick start from other folks in the space. They're currently on the lookout for sponsors, but it would also be great to see educators or organizations involved with financial literacy and career advancement help drive teens in need of a resource like this.
Categorized under: Web