Government Gains with the South Carolina Early Childhood Advisory Council

In our Government Gains series, we’re talking to dedicated public servants to learn three things about a recent project they’ve worked on that shows what’s possible when people ideate, collaborate, and innovate within government.

For this installment, we spoke with Rachal Hatton-Moore, the Two-Generation Systems Manager for the South Carolina Early Childhood Advisory Council. Her team is on a mission to help families in the state connect with public services for young children. With their tool, First Five SC, families can find out about, check their eligibility for, and apply for over 40 services, all in one place. The portal required collaboration between 11 state and federal agencies, and has attracted more than 300,000 visitors since its launch in 2023. We spoke with them about what made this project challenging—and rewarding.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in this project?

This project started back in 2019, and the process of preliminary groundwork took longer than it actually took to build the website. Before we began any of the nuts and bolts work, we conducted a statewide parent needs assessment—hosting community meetings, sending out surveys, and hearing from more than 7,500 parents about what they needed help with regarding early childhood services. We knew that the process of getting services was so overwhelming that a lot of families didn’t even try. 

What we heard is that some families need and want assistance navigating the system, and some families want the convenience of looking through a website on their own time. We’ve all seen government websites that are archaic or not user-friendly. We didn’t want that—we wanted to build a tool that would serve people with a lot of different needs, and we wanted to approach this from a system development perspective. So we got together with system navigators, parents, the leaders of public programs, and frontline staff to decide on a structure, what programs we would include, and what key features we needed. 

After that, we went through procurement for a year, and started building in 2021. The biggest challenge of the whole process was the continual need for training and communication with so many different stakeholders. 

We wanted to build a tool that would serve people with a lot of different needs, and we wanted to approach this from a system development perspective.

How did you approach this challenge and how did you decide which tools to use to solve it?

During our development stage, we held a lot of onboardings and trainings. We’d talk to people at every level who would be responsible for the success of this project—the agency leaders, the program-level management staff, and the service staff, like those determining WIC eligibility and the child mental health coordinators at regional mental health clinics. Then we went out to all these community groups and talked to them, too. That felt really important; I used to be a social worker with one of those bulletin boards that tracked where you have to be to hit the federal poverty level and how that changed by fiscal year and monitored programs as they moved to different agencies. I know it’s not easy to navigate the system even when you work in it, let alone as a family. We wanted to make sure system navigators felt confident using the tool in their work, and understood that an ancillary benefit is that it’d reduce administrative burden on them. 

Once we launched, we took a two-pronged approach to promotion. We invested in both traditional marketing—social media campaigns, billboards, and targeted ads in places like laundromats and gas station—and at the same time, we reached out directly to the community by participating in local events, giving presentations to key providers like pediatricians, and distributing flyers and waiting room signs. This combined effort raised broad public awareness while also building the trust and momentum needed for deep, sustained engagement with the portal.

It was critical to realize that this was so much more than a technical project. It was an information project, too.

We’re a small development team, but we built buy-in at so many different levels at different agencies and aligned everyone around this core value: it’s about giving families what they need, want, and deserve.

Where will the lessons you learned here be applied in the future?

We’re taking those lessons we learned about gathering feedback and dispersing information into our next steps on the project. We’re still doing feedback sessions, and learning how we can improve. We heard from families that a notification system would be helpful, so we’re working on piloting user messaging that’s text- and email-based to prompt people with reminders when they need to come back and complete something. 

Now, we’re leaning on the values we developed in this process—this is all about families. We say, “First Five SC belongs to all of us.” That it’s not just a web portal, it’s how we communicate about the childhood system in an aligned way. We’re a small development team, but we built buy-in at so many different levels at different agencies and aligned everyone around this core value: it’s about giving families what they need, want, and deserve. 

And in the future, we’re focusing on how we can iterate and improve this tool over time so it’s not just a static thing. We’ve adopted the “ready, responsive, resilient” framework that Code for America talks about. I really believe that’s our responsibility as a government—not just in South Carolina, but in every state.

To learn more about this work, watch the recording of the South Carolina Early Childhood Advisory Council’s presentation from this year’s FormFest!