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Annie Advisor

Find students who need help early

According to research, only about 20% of students ask for help in time. Annie is a chatbot that nudges students at the right times via text/instant message to offer them help, lowering the threshold to ask and receive support. When barriers to learning are removed, students well-being improves and their studies proceed.

HundrED 2024
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Overview

HundrED has selected this innovation to

HundrED Global Collection 2024

Web presence

2020

Established

50K

Children

4

Countries
Target group
Students upper
Updated
April 2024
We hope to remove the stigma for asking for help at school. We want to help schools switch from reactive to proactive students support.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

School dropouts and student well-being are significant problem areas, especially in secondary and higher education. According to interviews with schools, teachers and support providers are doing mostly reactive work with already escalated problems and not proactively preventing issues. We thought there must be a better way to use the resources we have to support students.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

The Annie chatbot sends a text message to students and directs them to the right person, service or information through the conversation with the bot and based on their situation. It can also help them reflect on their situation without giving advice on what to do. This proactive offer for help lowers the threshold for asking for and getting help.

We also provide a tool for the support providers to address support needs and a tool for admins to build and reuse chat flows from shared templates.

Across the schools that use Annie to support their students, 70% of students reply to Annie's messages and 15% have a support need each time a message is sent.
In our impact analysis published in 2023, 88% of secondary students report wanting Annie permanently at their school after trying it only once.

How has it been spreading?

After starting the company 3 years ago, Annie's usage has grown quickly by word-of-mouth and we now work with 33 schools in 5 countries and around 50k students. 80% of students using Annie are in secondary schools and 20% in tertiary.

We've won the Global Edtech Startup Awards Nordic and Baltic competition in 2022 (out of 200+ startups) and finished 5th globally (out of 600+ startups). We've also published two academic papers and are in a research partnership with the universities of Oulu and Utrecht.

We're now building Annie to be more conversational, helping students reflect on their issues and integrate scientifically validated support interventions directly into the bot. First prototypes of these were created in March of 2024.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

Simply contact us at annie@annieadvisor.com or via WhatsApp to +358408472763 and let's agree on a short call to discuss. The best way to find out if Annie works for you is to try it out with a sample of your students and collect feedback.

Impact & scalability

HundrED Academy Reviews

Annie provides students with a low-threshold opportunity to express support needs that might have otherwise gone unmentioned. This helps learners progress in their studies as they see an increase in self-esteem, creativeness, passion, and much more.

Annie's chatbot solution is highly scalable, making it applicable to various educational settings, enabling personalized support for a larger student population, and fostering academic success and well-being.

- Academy member
Academy review results
Impact
Scalability
Exceptional
High
Moderate
Limited
Insufficient
Exceptional
High
Moderate
Limited
Insufficient
Read more about our selection process

Implementation steps

Chat flow design workshop
Annie includes chat flow templates for a variety of different situations where students may have trouble. There are e.g. tailor messages for new students, after a failed exam and helping students even after graduation.
Together the school and Annie go through a student support design workshop, where we modify one of these templates to the school's needs. We agree on schedules, target groups and metrics of success.
Small pilot group
Next, the chat flows are sent to students via WhatsApp or SMS and students receive the help they request. Typically, about 70% student will reply and 15% will have a support need that the school doesn't know about.
Follow-up with students who needed help
The students who requested help receive a check-in message from Annie after two weeks. It checks if their need was met and if not, directs them to additional support.
Meet & review
Finally, Annie will provide analytics, feedback from students/staff and a report on the metrics of success we agreed before the pilot. We go through these together and compare with results from other schools to see if the pilot was successful. If the pilot had an impact, we agree on next steps to continue and perhaps try out new chat flows.

Spread of the innovation

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