How have the local community supported you and Kirby?
We have had wonderful support. If you look at the team helping with Autism Village, found here, they are all friends and colleagues who are volunteering. We’re lucky to have great friends who’ve stuck with us.
But we know many parents, especially the legions of single moms, who have it much worse. So many single moms, working two jobs, taking care of typical brothers and sisters who just are struggling to survive. We see them at school and other meetings and it makes my heart break. It’s another reason we decided to do Autism Village – to help the families with less resources in time and money to give their autistic kids the best possible chance.
What responses have you had from parents about the Autism Village app?
All positive. I’ve never done anything that feels this good. We get encouragement and fan mail continuously on email and our social media accounts!
How will the information be gathered for the app?
We have loaded some places into the app but getting a lot of users will be critical as it’s from the autism community’s usage of the service that most of the information will come. And that’s the reason we are focusing on mobile – making it easy to add, find, rate, and review places right at the moment and not wait and maybe forget when you get back to your home computer.
Our next move is actually going to be to introduce a viral campaign to encourage many many autism families to back the Kickstarter for even just $1 so that our Kickstarter backers are a big enough footprint of early users to get the app off to a good start. This campaign will be called “Tag10forAutism” and will launch in the coming week.
Where can the app be used?
Really anywhere that people adopt it and put places into it. We’ve good followings in some interesting places: Australia, Ireland, Honduras, etc.
When will it be made available? Will it be for android and iOS?
We expect we’ll have the app released by summer. The initial Kickstarter goal has been reached and that gets the iOS app done, but we hope to overachieve to do Android and then tablets. We want to do them all so anyone with any device can use the app.
Is there a message that you would like to give our readers?
Sharing and participating at the smallest levels is the single most important thing that we need to ask everyone who likes this idea to do. Three clicks on our homepage: www.autismvillage.com shares on Facebook, Twitter, and takes you to the Kickstarter. Don’t be shy if you like the idea, just put in $1. Sharing and participating are more important than big donations.
We would like to thank Topher for taking the time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions and we wish him and Kirby huge success with the Autism Village app.
More information about Autism Village can be found on their website http://www.autismvillage.com/
Their Kickstarter campaign can be found here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1921567576/autism-village-easily-find-autism-friendly-places
