Introducing Adapt
Posted on February 27, 2020 by Daniel Farrell
Our most recent blog post has been written by Maud Millar, Founder & CEO of Adapt, the Award-Winning Revision Timetable App and exclusive partner of Educate
The Adapt Community
Adapt is a breakthrough revision timetable app, but it’s also an active and engaged community of 115,000 daily users who spend on average 20 minutes a day on our platform (all acquired in the last 6 weeks). All of our members are candidates currently looking to finish their GCSEs or A-Levels, and uniquely amongst many marketing platforms, Adapt has the educational interest and performance data of students recorded in App.
Adapt – available exclusively through Educate – offers HE marketing partners a cost efficient and highly relevant marketing programme that can find exactly the right students. Need to improve widening participation?Looking to find good geographers? Hone your focus in only on those studying the subject who will meet those grades? Need a large clearing appeal? With 250,000 students forecast to be using the app by clearing you will have an instant return on your investment that none of our competitors can match.
Our community of users is growing rapidly and we expect to have hundreds of thousands of engaged users in the U.K by late Spring.
Adapt lets you spend money on advertising in a more focused way that will drive more relevant leads than traditional social & search. Together, we can give you an unprecedented uplift across your recruitment targets, helping you meet difficult KPI’s in a challenging environment.
So how did we get here, and how are we so successful?
So how did we get here?
We launched Adapt publicly as a free product on the App Store and Google Play Store on the 11th January 2020. We immediately hit No. 1 on the Education charts on the day of release with over 20,000 downloads, and we’ve grown consistently by several thousand every day since then; as of this week, we’re at 94,000 users and storming towards our big 100,000 milestone.
Currently, Adapt is a revision timetable app, allowing students to get organised and motivated and to watch their progress tick along as they go in brightly-coloured, clearly-defined visualisations- but we’re about to complete our journey into helping students plan their post-school pathways, by launching Opportunities in partnership with Educate. From March 2020, students all over the country preparing for their GCSE and A-Level exams will be able to access hand-picked progression opportunities into FE and University, delivered straight to the place they’re studying to get the grades to unlock those futures.
The “What Comes Next?” Feeling
We continued to dig into the problem, finding out more about the root causes of stress and uncertainty. We discovered that, alongside asking for help with planning exam revision, students also wanted help after exams- specifically, with how to pick the right University.
This anxiety ties in with the 42% of students who stated their biggest worry was “their future”, and makes sense given that the same cuts which have caused teacher shortages have also led to the widespread axing of careers services.
We found that there was strong support for a tool which could point students towards appropriate post-school pathways, with 94% of students saying they needed this guidance. Further to this, 88% said that they would want to subscribe to a spectrum of Universities in order to receive messaging about open days, courses, and any other relevant information. This is in line with the perspective of students we have spoken to previously, who say that they would consider a wide variety of Universities and courses but they don’t have enough time to investigate them all.
An evidence-driven solution
In 2018, Barnardos conducted a national survey of students aged 14-19, asking them what worried them most. Of the students surveyed, 65% responded “school”, with 42% citing “their future”. We dug into this problem, finding out more about the root causes of this stress and uncertainty, and discovered there are two things that students want:
- A good plan to get them through their exams (cited by 89% of students surveyed)
- Help with what comes after those exams- specifically, with how to pick the right University (cited by 94%)
We found that there was strong support for a tool which could point students towards appropriate post-school pathways, with 94% of students saying they needed this guidance and 88% saying that they would want to subscribe to a spectrum of Universities in order to receive messaging about open days, courses, and any other relevant information. This is in line with the perspective of students we have spoken to previously, who say that they would consider a wide variety of Universities and courses but they don’t have enough time to investigate them all.
It’s clear, therefore, that what students want most is guidance into what and when to study for their exams, and into what they can do with their qualifications after they leave school.
The solution that we proposed in response to these insights was a dynamic and adaptive revision timetable app that students could use to organise their academic work and University journey. The most important elements for students were that it was flexible- hence its adaptive nature- and that it had specialist guidance into both academic curricula and post-school pathways.
The academic requirement was met through the addition of subject breakdowns, written by current teachers to the specifications set by exam boards, while the appetite for post-school pathways was addressed through a designated “Opportunities” tab, featuring tailored university recommendations provided exclusively for us by Educate.
Having exhaustively tested all elements of our roadmap in over 150 hours of user interviews, we finally launched to a closed Beta of 10,000 students in September 2019 for live testing.
97% of students in our Beta told us that it made them feel more motivated
96% felt more organised
91% felt more in control of their revision,
80% felt less stressed about revision, and
91% thought that it would improve their exam results.
We intend to spend this exam cycle monitoring the effects of time management on student results and wellbeing, alongside running a research pilot with Oxford University into whether ongoing engagement with time-management tools leads to more students getting their grades. We’ll be publishing our findings after the exam results arrive in August 2020, but in the meantime, anyone who wants to find out more about the exciting opportunities Adapt can being to your marketing campaigns please get in touch with Educate here