In mid-March, Liz Oertle and the Denver-based Nanno team were invited to help brainstorm ways to find childcare solutions for medical personnel impacted by Covid-19.
The effort, spearheaded by Gary Community Investments on a request from Gov. Jared Polis’ office, aimed to find a way to provide emergency child care for essential workers across the state.
Nanno, an on-demand childcare app, had recently taken part in 500 Startups and raised over $1 million on Republic, a crowdfunding site for startup investment.
Oertle said the company was focused on building out its solution during the early parts of 2020, a decision that proved to be beneficial when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
"the most impactful thing for me was getting reunited with our passion for helping people with childcare."
In light of Covid-19, Nanno had already given employers — including all Denver area hospitals — free access to its platform to help mitigate the effect of the school closures. But, the company was looking for more opportunities.
So, when Gary Community Investments invited Nanno to the brainstorming phone call, the company was ready to help.
Oertle said the call inspired her to think like a startup in solving the childcare gap, going to the customers first to assess their needs.
“Our goal was to make sure the people that needed to get to work, could get to work,” she said. “So, we surveyed the frontline workers.”
What she found surprised her, these workers were more comfortable sending their children to a licensed center-based facility, rather than inviting a caretaker into their home.
While Nanno traditionally offered childcare solutions for in-home care, Oertle said they were prepared to take on the challenge of building an entirely new platform.
In the next five days, Nanno got to work, using its technology to build a platform for the state. Instead of its babysitter vetting process, it ran providers by state licensing authorities to make sure their licenses were valid.
And instead of focusing on providers’ scheduling availability, Nanno matched based on their licensed capacity to care for children in certain age groups, and then broadcast each family’s care request to all nearby providers licensed for those age groups.
Less than a week after that first call with Gary Community Investments, Nanno launched the platform to the public.
Since then, Nanno has matched nearly 4,000 families with care throughout Colorado. Nanno has now handed management of the platform over to the state, continuing to run the technology in the background.
Reflecting on the experience, Oertle was thankful to be able to help out during these challenging times and found herself thinking back to Nanno’s founding mission.
“On a personal level, the most impactful thing for me was getting reunited with our passion for helping people with childcare. It’s such an under-appreciated, but so essential part of life,” she said. “It’s easy when you get involved in a company and product to lose track of why you’re doing it in the first place. This reinvigorated my whole team on why we started the company.”
Nanno is in the process of revamping its childcare platform, adding engagement tools and customized features to meet the demand of its customers. While the goal of connecting parents with high-quality, vetted caretakers remains, Nanno is preparing to launch what Oertle calls “an immensely superior” version of its platform at the end of the summer.
