George Jagodzinski (00:00):
Today, we learn about technology and social media being used for good. Believe it or not, it's not just for making money, bragging, or bullying. It can be used for good, and my guest today, Ryan Callahan, who heads innovation for Blue Star Families, has done a fantastic job along with his team helping veterans and their families get more support from their communities. Ryan talks about his journey from e-commerce and marketing into this fantastic mission and how he leverages clear goals, data analysis, and user-centered design to keep the innovation aligned to mission. Please, welcome Ryan.
(00:32):
Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no-BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski. Ryan, thanks so much for being here.
Ryan Callahan (01:08):
Happy to be here, George. Thank you.
George Jagodzinski (01:10):
So last time we were talking, you were explaining how you're bridging the civilian-military divide. I'd first like to start with, how are you doing that?
Ryan Callahan (01:19):
Yes, so thanks for having me. Ryan Callahan, I'm the Executive Vice President of Digital Innovation for Blue Star Families. And what Blue Star Families is is we are a military support organization that focuses on military families. There are a lot of issues that your average person in our country may not even understand. Military spouse unemployment is incredibly high right now; it's over 21%. There's different challenges that military families face when they move into new communities. Your average military family moves every two to three years, so there's different challenges when you uproot a family and move them into a new community.
(02:06):
At Blue Star Families, we've been challenged to help military families, give them support, and help them thrive. We're doing that through a bunch of different things, but I think today we can discuss how we're doing that on the digital frontier.
George Jagodzinski (02:23):
Yeah, you've been doing a lot of innovation, and it sounds like you're using social media for good, which is just such a treat to hear about. And I believe you just launched a platform. Tell me a little bit about that.
Ryan Callahan (02:34):
Yes, so the Blue Star Neighborhood, it's the largest platform that supports military-connected families. We just launched two months ago, so it's crazy to think we're already the largest. But it just shows you the need out there. There's over 45,000 VSOs and MSOs; those are veteran service organizations or military support organizations. But none of them really focus the way we do on the family unit. So that's what we do in the digital neighborhood, is we connect military families to each other, to information and resources that can help them live easier and more fulfilling lives.
George Jagodzinski (03:21):
That's fantastic. How have you been getting people to engage on the platform? How's that working?
Ryan Callahan (03:27):
We built a content strategy basically around social media where we understand what military families are engaging with, and we're able to then utilize what they are engaging with outside of the platform, and we use those discussions to get them to come discuss it with us, and then we're able to then connect them with different perks. We have a bunch of amazing corporate partners like Starbucks who's giving away gift cards towards military families this month during Military Appreciation Month.
George Jagodzinski (04:05):
I'm curious, what's the experience like for these families? I think there's a lot of things that your normal civilian doesn't understand that these families go to. You talked about them moving and all that, but I'd love to maybe hear some stories from the real world as far as what the challenges are that they face.
Ryan Callahan (04:21):
Yeah, absolutely. We use human-centered design. It's really important to look at the consumer, in this instance it's the military family, and see the different touch points along their life cycle and their journey, one of them being the fact that they move every two to three years. That's a huge pain point because with moving comes potentially seeking out a new job, uprooting your kids from their school system, being able to connect and feel welcome in a new community. And in these communities, you're the minority. Only 1% of our country serves. You're moving into a new community where you aren't known, and there's little done to support you.
(05:13):
That's what we try to do at Blue Star Families is make your lives a little bit easier. For example, so I talked about military spouse unemployment. We launched an initiative called the 4+1 initiative. We did this with hiring our heroes in the military, the MSEP program through the DOD. This is aimed at employers doing one of four things; you can promote job transferability, the ability to work remotely at home, paid PCS leave, permanent change of station leave. So employers can basically adopt one of these things that can help make military spouses' lives a little bit easier, and in return, they're getting an amazing part of the American workforce. I work with military spouses every day, and they're resilient because they have to move so often, and they're just hardworking people who love our country and they are part of the mission, which is important.
George Jagodzinski (06:20):
I love it. I know we've got some veterans working for us, and they're just some of our best employees that we have. It's an untapped market, right? I talked to a woman once. She built a platform for enabling caregivers when they come back into the workforce to be able to, how can employers leverage them? And so, it's great to hear that you're enabling employers to tap into this network.
(06:43):
The pattern that I'm hearing, though, in your story is everything that you've built and innovated in your platform. It comes from a real problem that you're trying to solve. I find this should be a reminder for so many companies out there. I think innovation is sometimes just led by the next coolest technology. It's like, "Oh, we're going to do AI." Why? "Because it's cool." It reminds me back in the days people were like, "We want to go mobile." And why? "Well, everyone's going mobile." But what is it that you're trying to do? But even then, I would imagine it's easy to get distracted. How do you keep yourself laser-focused on the right mission and the right problems to solve?
Ryan Callahan (07:17):
I think it all has to do with data and, specifically, our survey data. I's been running for 15 years. It's called the Military Family Lifestyle Survey. What that does is it uncovers truths, like truths that military spouse unemployment is 21%. That survey data kind of helps us hone in on specific areas, one of them being welcoming military families into their neighborhood. We recognize that 70% of military families actually don't live on a base. They live in a community. So that's something that we uncover through our survey data, and then we're able to kind of innovate off of that data to find the solution to connect families online so that they can feel welcome.
George Jagodzinski (08:15):
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(08:42):
What's on the roadmap? What's next?
Ryan Callahan (08:46):
We just came off of Memorial Day weekend. Unfortunately, in the military community, there's very high rates of suicide and suicidal ideations. We just launched a PSA called Combat the Silence, and that's aimed at military families to help them look out for their loved ones who may be experiencing stressors or signs of self-harm. So that's obviously a very important thing. In the Blue Star Neighborhood, military families can talk to each other in a safe space about mental health and how they are overcoming some of the obstacles that life faces their way. So Combat the Silence is an important campaign that we have going on.
(09:38):
And then the other huge initiative we have going on is called Do Your Part. You can go to doyourpart.com, actually. It's a nationwide initiative that is aimed at civilians being able to learn about military life. And civilians can do their part in a bunch of different ways. They can join the Blue Star Neighborhood and connect military families to their employers. They can connect them to resources. Even just welcoming them in their community goes a long way to doing your part. So that's an exciting initiative that we have going on right now.
George Jagodzinski (10:22):
I know I've got some veterans on my road, and we've got a fantastic community going here. But I know it's not always like that everywhere. Are you finding that it's different in different parts of the country? Are you going global? I'm curious kind of the context of the data and the problems you solve, how that changes per region?
Ryan Callahan (10:38):
Yes. We have a data scientist on staff, and we are able to find different parts of the country that may need a little bit help to move along for this initiative of Do Your Part. Blue Star members are across the country and really across the globe because we're stationed overseas, and those CONUS members really need support, especially through digital connection, as they're overseas and experiencing military life.
George Jagodzinski (11:13):
What challenges have you faced on getting the employers, or the partners, like Starbucks, getting more people on board? What challenges do you have there?
Ryan Callahan (11:24):
I think that there's always a need for monetary support. At the end of the day, we are a nonprofit that serves the military community, so getting more organizations involved to show their support, I think, goes a long way. The other thing that organizations and companies can do to do their part is even just volunteer. So this notion of raising your hand and saying, "Hey, I'm willing to help military families. Put me to work. Where can I go into the community and help?" This past Memorial Day is a great example. There were all sorts of initiatives across the country where volunteers were greatly needed to help support.
George Jagodzinski (12:19):
What strategies do you take? You talked about your data scientists. You talked about some of your human-centered design. What strategies do you have for the whole team to keep focused? I know in some of our clients we'll even have just the personas up on the wall. It's like Joe the banker or things like that. Do you use personas and stories? Tell me a little bit of under the covers as far as what you do.
Ryan Callahan (12:42):
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So as far as strategy goes, my team uses the OGSM model, which stands for objectives, goals, strategies, and measures. So each month we're trying to achieve different measures and those feed into the strategy, I guess, behind it. For this year, we have monetary goals that we want to hit for fundraising support, and then we also have different growth metrics for the Blue Star Neighborhood that we want to achieve based on number of members. Some of the other big metrics that we go for is monthly returning users and monthly active users. Those are important in the overall ecosystem of a digital environment.
George Jagodzinski (13:28):
Love it. And you came from marketing, so help me understand the bridge that took you from marketing into this world.
Ryan Callahan (13:37):
Yeah, absolutely. It all starts with my childhood. I was the son of a Marine Corps veteran, and they actually, both my dad and my mom worked for a digital equipment corporation. So I had one of the first computers in my house growing up, and that's where my real love for technology kind of started. And then as I progressed in my career, I worked for Sperry in e-commerce. So that's where I really started to learn different levers to pull online and to look at different growth metrics.
(14:15):
Then I transferred over to the dark side. I worked for an advertising agency that specialized in remarketing and retargeting. So from there, I really got to see really how the whole digital ecosystem works, and abandonment of websites, and what makes people stay in different digital environments.
(14:39):
And then, I got a knock on my door digitally. The co-founder of RallyPoint reached out to me on LinkedIn and he said, "How would you like to run advertising operations within a social network for the military?" I jumped at the opportunity because it was very rare where you could combine what I do well, which is connecting people online, building community, with a passion, and my passion for helping the military community kind of grew there.
(15:10):
From there, we were able to grow RallyPoint to the largest social and professional network for the military, over 2 million members. One of the projects that I worked there on that I'm most proud of is suicide prevention. So we recognized, unfortunately, that members were coming on and showing signs of distress. What we needed to do was find a way, find a solution to get critical needs to our members in live time. And we actually partnered with Dr. Matthew Nock at Harvard University and his team of postdoctoral fellows, and we trained an AI algorithm that did natural language processing amongst our public posts to detect risk of suicidal ideations. And that software has no doubt saved lives. I think last I saw it was at 50 digital interventions, so pretty amazing work.
George Jagodzinski (16:15):
That is amazing. That's a big shift from retargeting into what you're doing now. Like, "Ryan, I already bought these shoes. Why are you showing me these shoes again?"
Ryan Callahan (16:25):
Right? Yeah, it's amazing. Once you get that purpose, there's no coming back. I define my personal mission, which is to inspire innovative ideas that will improve the lives of others, and so I'm kind of laser-focused on the military community right now and how can I do more good. That's what keeps me up at night, and that's what every morning I wake up inspired to help military families.
George Jagodzinski (16:58):
Yeah, I mean, if we can use technology for good, it's always a wonderful thing. I spent some time in Iraq during the summer of 2005, which was just a delightful time, and that was eyeopening to me as a civilian to see what it's like to go from there back to "normal life" here. I mean, even just driving on the roads in Iraq to then driving back on roads here was that it almost broke my brain a little bit. I thought, "Man, it'd be great if these guys and gals could just have an island where they kind of reacclimate for a little while before coming back here." Maybe there's VR technologies or are other things that are out there. I'm curious, do you have eyes on other technologies or things that are happening right now that are moving things in the right direction?
Ryan Callahan (17:40):
Definitely, yeah. The VA gets a bad rap, but the VA is the home of innovation. The first heart transplant, liver transplant, was done there. I actually just saw, just yesterday, the VA has VR for their employees to actually sift through your average appoint. So you're sitting in a bed, and you're going through this experience, and the clock's ticking, and things are happening late, and you're not getting discharged on time. And it's really, I think, built so the employees can have compassion for who they serve as well. So I always look to the VA for innovation.
(18:24):
We talked about human-centered design earlier; the VA was the first government entity to really prop that up. So the VA started the Veteran Experience Office, and I believe now five government entities now have a chief veteran experience officer. But that was all around human-centered design, and how can we put the consumer at the center of our attention in order to be able to serve them better?
George Jagodzinski (18:59):
Man, that's wonderful. I feel like that VR experience for any employer or executive would be great, to just really feel what's going on. There's always that disconnect between frontline workers and the customer experience and the people making the strategy choices.
Ryan Callahan (19:15):
Yeah, and the frontline workers are the most important. They're the ones who see the pain points, and they're experiencing and able to see what the problems are that our community faces.
George Jagodzinski (19:29):
I'm curious now, with everything you've learned in this part of the world, if we were to drop you back into e-commerce or the agency world tomorrow, would you be doing anything different based off of what you've learned now?
Ryan Callahan (19:42):
I mean, it's an interesting question, especially with death of cookies and all of that. I think that I would definitely look at it through a more purpose-driven lens now. There's some things that I think it's important that the landscape is changing for good so that consumers are protected, and you're not able to get in front of them as often as you used to be able to in the past. I think that that's what I would probably take back to the world is a more ethical approach to marketing.
George Jagodzinski (20:25):
I bet it would work. Many times when we see organizations, not just thinking about the consumer, but thinking about the consumer's family or their entire circle, you really start to solve what are the problems around just the product that we're selling. And I feel like that's what you're doing right now. You're looking at the whole ecosystem of what it is that you're trying to solve, so that would make a lot of sense.
Ryan Callahan (20:45):
Yep.
George Jagodzinski (20:47):
So Ryan, is there anything that I should ask you that I haven't?
Ryan Callahan (20:53):
Every year, 600,000 families move into new communities. So from September 21st through September 29th, this year is Blue Star Welcome Week. So keep an eye out, and think about how you can do your part and welcome military families into your community, especially during Blue Star Welcome Week. It's like a giant block party. Think about our schools get involved, and the kids learn to welcome their new students, their new colleagues. It's a really cool initiative that we're doing. In order to learn more, you can go to bluestarfam.org.
George Jagodzinski (21:38):
That's great. I mean, it's the least we can do. We should be welcoming everyone into our communities, especially our veterans. And if we can use technology to make it that much easier, then that's fantastic. It's really inspiring what you're doing, Ryan. I always like to finish these interviews with a question, which is, in your personal life and career, what's the best advice you've ever received?
Ryan Callahan (21:57):
Find joy in what you do. Humor reflects a joyful heart, so I always try to find the humor in things. We have this mantra at Blue Star Families that we call ourselves Happy Warriors. We're happy because we're creating change. But change is hard, so we're warriors because we're fighting against the system to advocate for military families. It's important to highlight the funny things that happened along the way. I make a point to share anecdotal stories with my team about funny things that happen to me.
George Jagodzinski (22:39):
That's fantastic, and it sounds like you've found the joy in what you're doing. Ryan, love it. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Ryan Callahan (22:47):
Yes, thank you, George. Appreciate it.
George Jagodzinski (22:50):
Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform, and pretty please drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications.
(23:04):
If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at EvolvingIndustry@Intevity.com. Reach out to me, George Jagodzinski, on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time. And until then, keep evolving.