About Nesta

Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing lives for the better. We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society.

How test-and-learn approaches can support child development outcomes

Social innovation carries inherent risks, particularly when people’s lives and our limited public resources are at stake. While 'test and learn' is increasingly promoted as an approach that balances progress with risk management, it’s hard to find guidance on its implementation for social impact, making it difficult for organisations to embrace this new way of working.

At Nesta, we're actively integrating these methods across our missions, supported by new creative technologist and product lead roles introduced in 2024. Our experience developing a text messaging programme to support child development outcomes through our fairer start mission offers valuable insights into the practical application of test and learn approaches. By sharing these lessons, we hope to inspire others to take their first steps on this journey.

Act to learn

The idea of a text messaging programme was first developed through collaboration between the BBC's Tiny Happy People team and Professor Danielle Matthews at Sheffield University. An initial randomised controlled trial signalled some positive impacts on parents' verbal interactions with their children. We joined the team, also comprising experts in research, behavioural science, design and domain knowledge, to help prove the scalability of this programme in the real world and started with some big questions: 

  • How might we create demand and sustained engagement without incentives? 
  • Can we deliver it without high effort, manual delivery? 
  • Who will pay so that we can offer it to users for free?

We started answering some of these questions by making assumptions about user (low-income parents) and payer (local authorities) needs, then building a simple working prototype to convey a hypothetical user journey that was used in semi-structured interviews with a sample of both groups. 

Through this process, we observed clear themes in the challenges that potential users experience as parents. Asking them to interact with our prototype and sign up to a waiting list helped assess if and how the programme could help solve their problems, and where it could be improved. 

The learnings we gained from interviews with payers highlighted that local authorities are often trying to solve problems that are unique to their areas and that there is much variance in how they fund services. This clearly signalled that there is demand for a programme like ours but scaling through this route is complex and will need to be considered carefully.

Test through multiple dimensions

After building our confidence in demand, we turned to ensuring the programme could sustain itself technically and financially without Nesta.

We learned from interviews that the programme must feel relevant to their families’ unique needs, so our next priority was testing that we could technically deliver a personalised experience based on two variables: a child’s age and the time of day that text messages are delivered. To limit the effect of potential technical risks, we delivered a month-long version of a personalised programme to parents at Nesta and actually pivoted the technical system as a result. The test also presented an opportunity to collect usage data and capture parents’ ongoing reflections in a diary study, providing rich learning about the acceptability and usefulness of the programme. 

While the test was live we pivoted our focus to exploring financial sustainability. By mapping the costs of programme delivery at scale and analysing the financial barriers local authorities face, we identified potential partnership models that could reduce implementation expenses eg, using shared funding mechanisms.

A purposeful, iterative approach

We are validating the real-world scalability of the programme through small, systematic feedback loops. These are designed to incrementally build our confidence by testing user experiences, technical feasibility, social impact and financial sustainability aimed at increasing fidelity, and refining our approach across all dimensions as we learn. By focusing on meaningful outcomes rather than traditional, fixed project outputs we're adopting a safe, adaptive approach that allows us to navigate uncertainty and complexity effectively.

The value of this approach becomes clear when we consider an alternative scenario: immediate large-scale implementation. Without our incremental learning, we might have invested significant resources in a programme that neither met parents' specific needs nor aligned with local authorities' funding constraints, broke trust in key relationships and missed the opportunity to deliver a significant impact. 

Our learning journey continues, and the next milestone for the team involves the delivery of a small pilot involving multiple local authorities that will test our current priority assumptions, such as: how we reach our target audience; if and how parents engage with the programme; and how much it costs to deliver. As we approach six months on the team, we have recently benefited from the involvement of a "critical friend" – an advisor with no vested interest – to challenge our assumptions and uncover potential scaling opportunities that we hadn’t identified so far. This new perspective helped us stretch our thinking, revealing gaps in our approach that we plan to explore in the future.

Key principles for getting started

All journeys need some guidance. Here's a summary of our key principles for anyone wanting to take their next steps:

  1. Build diverse perspectives – combine a multidisciplinary team's complementary skills with external viewpoints to challenge assumptions and uncover blind spots.
  2. Start with clear questions and assumptions – these will help focus your testing and guide your exploration.
  3. Build confidence incrementally – taking small, systematic steps helps manage risk and allows for pivots when needed.
  4. Use simple prototypes early – this accelerates learning before major investment in development.
  5. Consider multiple stakeholders – test with all key parties who will interact with your solution, not just end users.
  6. Focus on learning outcomes – focusing on what you need to learn or demonstrate, rather than fixed deliverables, can be a good way to do this.

We’d love to hear stories of your own test and learn practice, or comments on our approach. Get in touch!

Author

Rachel Murphy

Rachel Murphy

Rachel Murphy

Product Lead, Design and Technology

She/Her

Rachel oversees and supports the rapid prototyping, development, and delivery/maintenance of digital tools and products across the Nesta group.

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Suraj Vadgama

Suraj Vadgama

Suraj Vadgama

Director of Design, Design & Technology

Suraj leads the Design & Technology practice at Nesta.

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