Family-school engagement, a critical factor for educational outcomes, occurs less frequently in low-income and minority communities. To address this gap, the multilingual technology platform TalkingPoints connects families and teachers by using personalized content in addition to human and AI-powered, two-way translated communication in more than 100 home languages. This approach helps eliminate barriers to home-school communication, which traditionally include language, time, and capacity.
Over the past three years, TalkingPoints has scaled exponentially, growing from 850,000 educators and families annually in SY 2019-20, to 1.5 million in SY 2020-21, and more than 3 million in SY 2021-22.
This catalytic growth has enabled TalkingPoints to host over 100 million conversations between teachers and families since inception in 2015. Ninety-six percent of TalkingPoints families and 90 percent of TalkingPoints teachers reported increases in their knowledge, capacity, and confidence to support student learning.
Overdeck Family Foundation provided TalkingPoints with flexible capital when the organization was early in its development and encouraged the leadership team to build internal research and data capacities to better understand the platform’s impact. Our funding also gave TalkingPoints the ability to invest in systems and processes to support its scale ambitions, such as sales and partnerships, while building out the functions that have allowed it to successfully pursue growth opportunities, such as research and data.
Despite the organization nearly doubling its budget since we began funding in 2020, earned revenue continues to cover 45 percent of the total budget, driven largely by TalkingPoints’ impressive partner renewal rate of 95 percent.
Enhancing each stage of childhood learning, from birth to high school.
Overdeck Family Foundation focuses exclusively on education, providing funding across four focus areas that encompass the whole child from birth through high school both inside and outside the classroom.