We were excited by the strong take-up of the programme (more than 1,700 parents signed up), which surpassed our expectations. Our original recruitment target was 200 parents, with a moonshot goal of 500. Instead, we actually recruited over three times our goal in just over a few weeks. This is a promising signal that this type of light-touch, digital support offer is in demand by parents and is not a stigmatising form of support to access.
However, there is still work to be done to recruit parents in lower IMD deciles (particularly those in IMD deciles 1-2). We are hoping to test more creative recruitment methods in our next phase to reach more users in IMD deciles 1-5, such as ‘refer a friend’. We also want to find ways to improve our targeting on social media, which proved to be an extremely powerful tool to recruit users.
Parent engagement with the programme is strong, and it is encouraging that parents across IMD deciles engage with content (clicked video links) at similar rates. We will continue to monitor engagement rates as our data matures and parents progress through the programme. As of 23 April (following completion of the pilot), 80% of users had clicked on at least one link, which is a very positive signal of engagement with the programme.
In their feedback, parents highlighted the simplicity of the programme, the usefulness of the texts and videos and how they valued the ability to customise content and adjust this to their child’s stage of development. They also discussed the confidence they had gained as a strength of the programme.
In addition to this, parents are finding the text messages and activities useful, and in some cases more so than other forms of parenting support they have accessed. This further indicates that there is a demand in the marketplace of parenting support for universal, digital forms of support. In the next phase of work, we are also hoping to explore ways to keep parents engaged, through the relevance and type of content we send and continued improvements to the text messages based on feedback.
We are also interested in exploring ways that we can more routinely estimate or approximate the impact of the programme in driving parenting behaviours that we know have an impact on children’s language and socio-emotional development. It is encouraging that our pilot signalled that the programme is having a positive impact on several key parenting behaviours linked to early language and communication and socio-emotional development.
More than 50% of our survey respondents reported that they were describing activities they do with their child more often than before, and using everyday activities to introduce new words to their children. More than 30% of respondents reported doing other behaviours such as taking turns, singing songs, and reading aloud more often than before. This data suggests that participating in the text messaging programme is helping to promote an increase in several key parenting behaviours.
Parents’ feedback has also suggested ways we can improve the content and design of the programme, with suggestions ranging from more language options to providing text messages for a wider range of children’s ages. We will seek to implement some of this feedback ahead of our next round of testing to continue improving the service and parent experience, with the hopes of maintaining the programme’s strong engagement and positive effects on parenting behaviours.
