The Carnegie Corporation, one of Sesame Street's first financial backers, hired Cooney, a producer of educational talk shows and documentaries with little experience in education,[7] during the summer of 1967 to visit experts in childhood development, education, and media across the U.S. and Canada. She researched their ideas about the viewing habits of young children, and wrote a report on her findings[8][9] entitled "Television for Preschool Education", which described out how television could be used as an aid in the education of preschoolers, especially those living in inner cities.[10] Cooney's study became the basis for Sesame Street; full funding was procured for its development and production and the creation of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the organization responsible for producing the new show. According to Gikow, the show's financial backers, which consisted of the US federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation,[11] insisted on "testing at critical stages to evaluate its ultimate success".[6]