Kaplan's eScore moves online with assistance for parents

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, March, 2000

eScore.com, offering parental guidance for child development and learning, is Kaplan's newest addition to the SCORE! line of offerings. SCORE! Learning, Inc.(Alameda, CA), a subsidiary of Kaplan, Inc., runs SCORE! Educational Centers and now has 100 across the country. That number grows with the addition of a new center every 10 days. SCORE! Prep offers one-on-one, in-home tutoring service for the SAT, PSAT, ACT and high school academic subjects.

eScore.com not only moves the Kaplan division online, it creates their first service directed at parents instead of students. Andy Kaplan, president of eScore.com, says that the company needed a unique proposition to enter a market flooded with parental advice. eSCORE has focused on parents of children from birth to age fourteen, offering them highly customized assessments paired with actionable suggestions for improving-a child's development or learning.

The site currently offers more than 300 assessments that are recommended to users at appropriate times. Parents can also search assessments on a few themes. Assessments of multiple intelligences, including a brief child development profile on the home page, were developed in partnership with Harvard Project Zero and the director of the Brazelton Institute. Others have been developed in house, and still others through partnerships with Virtual Learning Technologies and Developmental Skills Institute.

Assessments are currently free on the new site, but fees of $10 and up for the more sophisticated assessments will eventually provide a revenue stream. E-commerce offers a second revenue stream; many of the suggestions for improvement are accompanied by recommended purchases, and Kaplan expects these suggestions to drive purchases more than store browsing. Fees for telephone conversations with child development experts provide a third revenue stream. The company also intends to offer distance learning courses for children but can not yet elaborate on those plans.

Numerous partnerships fuel the site. E-commerce partnerships with Imagine the Challenge, Educator's Resource and Baker & Taylor supply many of the store offerings. Partnerships with Dragonfly Toys, Inc. and LD OnLine allow eSCORE to identify products for children with special needs and learning disabilities. Content partnerships with the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented and the Center for Talent Development supply information to parents for these themes.

Kaplan is particularly interested in partnerships with companies wishing to add a consumer market to an existing, strong presence in the school market. One such partnership is with Weekly Reader. That company has recently started a program of extending their brand through the Weekly Reader seal of approval, and eSCORE has been approved for that. Additionally, consumers will be able to purchase home subscriptions to Weekly Reader through eSCORE. While Weekly Reader has had a summer program that has distributed it to the home, Greg Hilbert, director of new business development, says the company has never before intentionally marketed any of the Weekly Reader publications to the home. The Internet, he says, provides low-cost access to this market. Weekly Reader has also extended its seal of approval to Education-World (Oklahoma, City, OK, www.education-world.com).