 Vitae Launches New Website
Dr. Kenny Explains How
Website is Like No Other
Consumer psychologist Dr. Charles Kenny has conducted right-brain research for Vitae Caring Foundation since the early 1990s. As director of The Right Brain People, Inc., his research provides the base of information for all of Vitae’s message development. Now it provides the bedrock for Vitae’s newest website, www.youroptions.com. What sets this website apart from others?  Ultimately, nobody’s ever designed a website with the understanding of what is going on in the hearts and minds of the women who are experiencing an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy. Therefore during the website design, we wanted to know what their emotional mindset is when they hit that site and what they are looking for because of the emotional mindset? What are their fears? What are you trying to accomplish psychologically and emotionally with the women who hit that site - not what kind of information are you trying to give to them, but what are you trying to accomplish psychologically? What is the emotional impact that you want that website to have? No one has ever done that before. We’ve never been able to find anything that even approximates it. That’s why this site is so unique.
If you look at other pro-life publications, what you see most of the time is a projection of the ideas and beliefs and values of the pro-life movement. If a pro-life leader believes that it’s a terrible thing to rip the fetus out of the body of its mother, at any point during development, then this is what people think you should show in pictures to scare people out of supporting abortion. The problem is it doesn’t work. Why? It’s focusing on the fetus, the baby, and that’s not where the heart and mind of a woman experiencing an unwanted and unplanned pregnancy is focused. She’s focused on herself. She’s involved in a traumatic experience. A lot of people would say that pregnancy itself is a traumatic experience. If that’s the case, certainly an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy is even more so. These women are disoriented; they’re fearful. They need something that helps them deal with their fears. That’s what this new website offers. This website reaches out not only to the women in crisis, but separately to family and friends of the woman. Why was this necessary?The woman experiencing an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy, her family and her friends are all in different places emotionally. Therefore, they need somewhat different things. Above all you want to make sure the person who has landed on your site, within 15 seconds of landing there, feels like they are talking to someone who understands them. You can’t talk to the mother of a girl with an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy exactly the same way that you talk to the girl who is pregnant. You can’t talk to Sarah Palin the same way you would talk to her 17-year-old daughter. The friends are closer to where Mom is or the Aunt, but a friend isn’t going to be thinking, “How could you do this to me?” You have to be able to talk with them, the girl, the family member, the friend, and connect with them emotionally; where they are at the time they hit that page.  How did you come up with the idea of three doors?
When we set out to do the architecture for the site, the very first t
hing that we grappled with was how we are going to deal with the different segments of customers that we are going to have. Who are those customers, and how are we going to deal with them? That led to the first main idea to designing the site. It’s like drawing a picture of a house before you worry about the color and the furniture in dressing it out. We gave the creative team the architecture of what the site should look like from a structural and organizational standpoint, and that’s where the three doors came. They lead you into three different rooms which represent three different emotional mindsets. The three different segments of people we are communicating with, or bringing to the table. You have the idea of going to a room where you feel like you are alone and no one is looking at you. You are in your own room. Once you go in a door, there are things there that suggest a bedroom. So she has the privacy, security and peace of mind of being in her own bedroom. The research told us that is what she would want. What is the significance of the dark colors in the site?There is nothing bright and cheery about this. We are not out to cheer her up. She’s probably going to be in her room, the level of light is probably going to be low, she’s going to be in seclusion, worried, crying, upset, hiding, keeping the light out as a way of the outside world not being intrusive. The first reaction when you have a trauma or loss hit you is a state of denial, and you are in an escape mode and upset. So we thought the color would match her mood, so to speak. Who was the focus of your research for the website?We interviewed four different segments of women for this project. The first group was those who had an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy and decided on an abortion. They had to be conflicted about their decision in order to talk with us during the research process. The second group was women who had an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy who decided to keep the child and raise the child. Then we had a group who wanted babies. Here we wanted to understand the motivation for having children. Then we looked at a group of women who wanted children but were not having them. They were in the process of going for some type of medical help. In a nutshell, those where the four groups of women we talked with during the research process. What did the research for this website tell you? It tells us emotionally, what her mindset is. When she is looking for help and she’s frantic, upset and distressed, her ability to look at options is limited. She’s fearful, overwhelmed, embarrassed, shamed, feels guilty and feels like she made a terrible mistake. Many girls or women no longer want to be near the boy or man, the person whom she thought she was the closest to her. This is not always the case, but does happen the majority of the time. The women are going through separation anxiety and depression as well. The question is: What is she looking for? What is the emotional message that we need to deliver? That’s what The Right Brain People are about with the work we do. With consumer motivation, we have to figure out not just the mindset of the potential client, but what emotional benefits are they seeking. We have to figure out how to deliver on those. What we learned from the research was that she’s gripped with fear. So what is the opposite of that? She’s looking for peace of mind, reassurance and hope for the future. She can’t even see a future that she can deal with. Everything we give her should lead to that. Eve ry me ssage on every page should tie back directly to a mes
sage of peace of mind, reassurance and hope.
Was there anything in your research that surprised you?We were dismayed at the apparent quality or lack of quality of the relationship these women were in. It certainly seemed like an important discovery for the women to see they are in problematic relationships to begin with, which is probably why in so many cases they wanted to abort the husband or man as well as the baby. One of the other surprises that came out of this is why women have children and just how much of a self-focused decision it is to have a child. We think of mothers being self-sacrificing, that’s the popular stereotype of mothers. Yes, to be a good mother you do have to do a lot of sacrificing for others, but why did you have the child in the first place? We think it’s instinctually wired. Everything we see points toward that. They really want to have their own child to meet their own niche. That niche is the continuation of themselves through their DNA into the future. So many times the women talked about their children reminding them of themselves when they were young. The grandma tells them about how you look just like them at that age. There was a tremendous amount of gratification out of that. We also saw how emotionally distant the father was, and I’m even talking about when they are married. Everything on the surface seems fine, but the father is not emotionally present in these pictures. This helps us understand why so many marriages don’t work out. What are some of the core psychological themes that tie your findings together?We talked about women’s dreams and plans for their lives and their futures. Dream is more of a right-brain word. There’s more romance, a little more pizzazz to it. Plan is more mundane, a little more left brain. We used the word “plan” because it has more specifics to it. They want to go to school to accomplish something, whether it’s the degree or finding a husband and having the white picket fence and 2.1 children, or whatever. They take these dreams and reduce them to some fairly specific plans in almost every case. If having a child now doesn’t work into the plan, then they are big time conflicted and abortion is the first thing that crosses their mind, even if they are pro-life. So, one of the jobs of practitioners in the pro-life movement is to help women rearrange their plans; help them adjust those plans to still find a place for baby and still have their dream realized. We must help them execute their plans, even though they might have to change them a little bit. How or where is this research implemented in the website?It’s everywhere: every word, image, picture, the trim, the design, the feel, the touch, everything. Most pro-life sites are pro-life from the get go. Not in this case. It’s much more subtle. That’s deliberate. It’s also necessary. If you can keep someone on your website for more than 90 seconds before they discover that perhaps it’s a pro-life site, or generally what your full mission is, then you’ve got them somewhat hooked already. If you are calm and reasonable and not hysterical, strident or judgmental, particularly with regard to unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, you are much more likely to keep their attention. That was one thing we heard a lot about in the communication research. Following the right-brain interviews, we showed the website to the interviewed women. All but one of the pro-choice women had very positive things to say about the website. This was really the acid test for us! There’s no point in preaching to the choir. Who do you envision using the website?Women or girls who are afraid they might be pregnant
will find their way to that website. The broadest definition would be first, any female from age 13 to 50 for whom it has crossed her mind that she might be pregnant. The subset of that would be girls and women who are afraid they are pregnant and would really be traumatized if they were—who are afraid they would have an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy. Then you would have girls and women who have confirmed that they are indeed pregnant with an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy and are trying to make a decision about what to do. That’s the first target with the three subsets. The second target would be friends and relatives. That’s Mom (potential Grandma), auntie, older sister, or friends. Girls and women always go to their sisters, not sisters in the traditional sense, but the sisterhood. They go to Grandma, older auntie, older sister, or close friends to share with them the fear of what they’ve discovered. The third group is the professional: counselors, medical persons, ministers, etc. You won’t get as much play there, but you’ll get some. This website can keep growing forever. It was built for that. It can have hundreds and hundreds of video clips on it eventually. There is also the tie in with OptionLine on the site. Women can click and get a toll-free number that will connect them with a counselor back in their own community. Has the website accomplished what the research showed?The website was born because of the research. It was designed to reflect the research. Yes, absolutely. It’s been faithfully inspired, created and designed completely based on the research findings. This is one of the very rare, unique examples of right-brain research being completely and fully implemented. Is the website the only project coming out of this vast research?There are a lot of findings and implications from this very significant research project that still need to be executed. We need to organize a project that would uncover and develop a classification and segmentation of the different types of plans that women have for their lives. We need to look at how one would, as a counselor, identify what segment the woman falls into with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, and then have counseling guidelines, questions to ask and messages to give that would motivate each of the women in those segments. Each segment would be different, so the counselor would know how to counsel for each one. We have a multi-phase project or plan that we’ve developed for the counselors. This is something that is badly needed. It’s something we would like to give to pregnancy resource centers to provide more of the Vitae brand, based on experts in the field, to ultimately help them train their counselors. That’s on the drawing board. Perhaps with funding Vitae can accomplish this just as they did the website.
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