The Tiny Happy People text messaging programme offers free, digital parenting support by sending parents short, evidence-informed videos about activities they can do with their children. This provides a low cost and universal, preventative solution to reach parents at scale, including those unable to access in-person support due to various barriers. Parents of children aged 6-24 months are eligible to sign up and receive text messages once a week for up to 18 months.

Nesta worked with BBC Education and the University of Sheffield to test and evaluate a text messaging service which shares Tiny Happy People video content with parents and caregivers. We wanted to leverage the large body of free Tiny Happy People videos and package this into a comprehensive, engaging experience for parents that boosts their children’s outcomes, particularly their early language and communication and socio-emotional development. We also wanted to explore how we can effectively work to reach lower-income parents and encourage them to sign up and engage with the programme.

The project team followed a ‘test-and-learn’ approach, undergoing several rounds of user research and testing, alongside other workstreams to tackle multiple goals. 

First, we conducted user research interviews with 21 parents in August 2024 to explore their everyday needs and challenges and the appetite for a text messaging service. We recruited parents through a recruitment agency, requesting that our sample include:

• parents in receipt of certain benefits, or with an income below a certain threshold (based on their household size)
• a representative sample of certain demographics (ie, ethnicity, qualification level), family types (lone parents, larger families), and geographies (urban/rural and across the four nations). 

We used a prototype sign-up page for the text messaging service for parents to provide their details and sign up to a waitlist, and received parents’ feedback on it. We continued to develop the parent experience and underlying technology to increase the capabilities of the programme throughout the entire process.

Finally, we conducted a medium-scale pilot test between January and March 2025 with over 1,700 parents across the UK, who were recruited via a range of routes, including:

• referrals by eight local authority partners
• paid ads via Instagram and Facebook 
• posts on the official Instagram feed for BBC Tiny Happy People.

Finally, we conducted a medium-scale pilot test between January and March 2025 with over 1,700 parents across the UK, who were recruited via a range of routes, including:

• referrals by eight local authority partners
• paid ads via Instagram and Facebook 
• posts on the official Instagram feed for BBC Tiny Happy People.

Over the course of the 18-month programme, parents will receive: 

• one text message per week until their child was 24 months old, including a monthly wrap-up each month
• a welcome and closing message
• quarterly check in messages about how they are finding their content. 

This costs roughly £3.40 per parent (including hosting and response texts) to deliver the entire programme. 

During the live pilot, we collected data on engagement rates, referral routes, and rates of parents asking for an adjustment to their content. We also conducted a diary study with 31 parents who participated in the live pilot to find out more about their experience of the service, as well as how often they implemented Tiny Happy People activities into their day-to-day routines with their children.

At the end of the pilot, we also sent out a survey to all of the parents who had signed up (n = 1,763) to collect feedback on their experience and thoughts on improvements, gathering survey responses from a bit more than 10% of our sample (n=186).

In addition to these tests, we have also:

• commissioned 12 new Tiny Happy People videos focused on how parents can support their babies’ and children’s socio-emotional development, advised by our project consultant Dr Crispin Day
• translated almost 100 text messages into Welsh, and prepared to offer the text message programme in Welsh as well as in English in any subsequent delivery phases.

Our pilot used version three of our prototype web platform, which had been developed following previous rounds of user testing. We recruited parents to participate in the pilot and tracked their engagement with the programme between 28 January and 31 March 2025.

We found that:

We garnered over 1,700 sign ups in just over two months, from all areas of the UK (sign ups by nation were roughly proportional to population). Over a quarter of parents (28%) who visited the website went ahead and signed up to receive text messages.  We theorise that this easy-to-access text messaging programme overcame barriers that parents often experience, such as:

• time and financial constraints
• difficulty with finding reliable, educational, trustworthy and comprehensive resources
• everyday, unexpected challenges.

Our funnel of users

• Site visits - number of visitors to the site
• Sign-ups - number of visitors who were 'converted' to sign up (cost per acquisition and conversion rate)
• Engagement rate - number/percentage of links clicked on

*This surpassed our moonshot goal of 500

N.B. Data is as of the end of the pilot

The vast majority of parents who signed up during the pilot reached our web platform from a paid advertising campaign run via our Nesta social media accounts (Facebook and Instagram) and a post from the BBC’s Tiny Happy People’s Instagram page. Our cost per acquisition on social media, over the course of the campaign (21 February-31 March), was £0.35 per sign up. This indicates the efficient performance of the paid advertising campaign and relevance for our audience.

We didn’t capture much demographic data when parents signed up to make the sign up process as smooth as possible. We did capture postcodes to see the level of deprivation of the neighborhood parents live in, using the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). The chart below shows the number of sign ups that we had from each IMD decile. Decile one is people living in the 10% most disadvantaged geographical areas, while decile 10 is the least disadvantaged 10% of areas. 

While we had parents sign up in every IMD, we found that sign ups were higher in IMD deciles 6-10 compared to 1-5, and sign-ups in IMD decile 1 were particularly low. In the next phase of testing, we are keen to prioritise increasing sign ups by parents who live in lower deciles and be experimental and creative in how we go about reaching these families. We will be able to test a wider range of different recruitment strategies in the next phase of our work.

Parents in IMD deciles 1-5 (our target group) clicked on links to watch Tiny Happy People videos at a similar rate to parents in IMD deciles 6-10. This is promising, and shows an early signal that the offer is engaging to parents in lower IMD deciles once they have signed up. These levels of engagement suggest that the text messages and videos they are receiving are relevant enough to keep them interested.

Towards the end of the pilot, we sent a survey to all parents who signed up for the programme (n = 1,763) and 186 parents responded. Around 70% of participating parents reported that the texts were useful/very useful to them.

In comparison to other forms of parenting support (eg, support from family/friends, professionals, parenting apps), almost half of respondents found the programme to be just as useful as other forms of support (score of three), with nearly a third finding it more useful than other forms of support they’ve used.

Parents who responded to the survey (sent out on 3 April, and closed on 15 April) reported high engagement with the service. 97% of respondents reported that they engaged with the content (reading texts and conducting the activity) one or more times per week, with 41% reporting that they engaged a few or multiple times per week.

In other positive signals of the programme’s value, the majority of respondents (74.7%) said that they were likely or very likely to recommend the programme to a friend.

One of the respondents to our survey commented:

Encouragingly, a majority of parents reported that they are implementing at least one key parenting behaviour more frequently since receiving text messages as part of the programme.

While it is important to note that these answers are subjective and subject to social desirability bias, it is encouraging that parents are recognising the key messages of the programme and reporting increased implementation. This is a positive early signal for us that the text messaging programme can have a positive impact on the home learning environment and children’s outcomes.

Our diary study (n = 31), which we ran alongside the pilot, also showed us that most parents who completed diaries were highly engaged with the programme, found it simple and accessible, and the tips valuable to engage their child. 

The following quotes are key insights from our diary study and survey respondents.

A commonly highlighted positive aspect of the programme was how simple and easy the tips and videos were to follow, and how naturally “they fit into everyday routines” (eg, while cooking or doing laundry). Parents liked that the activities didn’t feel overwhelming and didn’t require special materials.

Some parents also noted that their children seemed more engaged in their interactions than usual.

Some parents did say that the content could be more useful and novel, and requested additional content on topics such as: 

• developing children’s fine motor skills and problem-solving activities
• more interactions with family and friends
• more ‘mealtime’ activities
• play ideas with older siblings
• more about helping mums and what they need.

There are a range of ways we can further improve the programme which we will explore in the next phase:

• Including content for a wider age range of children: expanding the current offer to include babies younger than six months old and/or children older than age two. 23% of survey respondents suggested that having the programme in pregnancy would be useful, others asked for advice on ways to include older siblings, and some suggested that they would like to receive the programme until their child started school.
• Broadening language options: having the programme and subtitles on videos available in Welsh, French, Chinese, and other European languages were the most popular requests.
• Improving the text messages themselves: some parents wanted more tips, songs, or structured guidance to help deepen or vary the experience, such as more explanation on the learning benefits of activities.
• More transparent communication: having text messages come from a known sender number to appear more credible/recognisable to users.

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.

The team is scoping a second phase of the project, which will have a much larger emphasis on routes to delivering the text messaging programme at a wider scale while continuing to iterate and develop the text messaging programme and the technology which sits behind it. 

We estimate that the current programme costs roughly £3.40 to deliver per parent, so we will be exploring different options for how the programme could potentially be funded to be offered to parents in the UK at either a targeted or universal level.

If you are an early years service provider who is interested in having access to the Tiny Happy People text messaging service in your area, please get in touch about becoming a project partner in our next phase of work by emailing Lauren Liotti.