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.
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.
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.
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.
