Breaking the barriers to relationship support with a versatile and innovative experience platform
Making relationship support accessible with a versatile and innovative experience platform.
The challenge
Create an inclusive and highly adaptable digital relationship therapy solution that breaks boundaries to therapy
Many couples struggle with relationship problems that have far-reaching effects on their mental and physical health. However, the majority of couples do not seek help for their relationship. To reach more couples while maintaining the efficacy of traditional couple therapy, the University of Miami had to create a digital relationship intervention with four features.
- The platform would need to integrate two front-facing accounts (one per partner) with a single backend interface to combine each partner’s data and feedback to customise recommendations for the couple’s next steps.
- The solution would need to be capable of customising content to personalise the users’ journey based on whether couples are participating with or without their partner, the specific populations they belong to, and their specific relationship difficulties.
- The couple’s coach would need visibility into the couple’s progress and key responses and a management interface to facilitate coaching calls.
- The solution would need to be versatile and able to scale and grow as the need did. This included self-registration and other automation, social and interactive features for coaching sessions and feedback and a personalised user experience.
Making relationship support accessible through engagement
The easy-to-use dashboard gives coaches instant access to their assigned couples’ evaluations and history, past sessions and activities, session scripts and notes, and their next steps.
The platform’s notification function reminds couples of upcoming calls with coaches and required activities, and a built-in scheduler helps to create appointments effortlessly. This has proven to be highly effective in keeping couples motivated and engaged with the programmes and addresses the inaccessibility of face-to-face therapy by offering support when couples need it most.
This is also a huge win for admin roles because self-registration and self-selection of their coach and scheduling enable the supporting team to serve more and different types of couples (e.g., military, same-sex, low-income).
Creating a unique, personalised couples’ journey on a platform built for the experience
In terms of content and recommended activities, resources, and tips, the user experience and design of the course are personalised to each couple’s needs.
By building a programme that is tailored to each couple’s journey, through easily customisable content, OurRelationship is able to improve engagement and completion results. As a result, overall feedback indicates that couples participating in the programme together experience a high success rate.
Visibility and reporting from live dashboards also allow the admin users and coaches to obtain accurate insight into how they are progressing through the programme. This helps admin users or coaches to refine the couple’s journey further and ensure the optimal impact of programme material.
Built to scale and grow with demand
Totara has given OurRelationship the ability to grow and expand, as the program gains traction and needs change. The flexible system allows OurRelationship to incorporate new features to enrich the participant experience, and to create multiple programmes tailored to unique audiences – such as same-sex couples, military couples, or individuals participating alone.
The new mobile app now also enables OurRelationship to extend its reach even further by making the programme even more inclusive, for those who do not have a personal computer or laptop at their disposal. This offers couples, individuals, and admin users’ full access to the system while on the go, anytime and anywhere.
The results
Statistically improved relational and mental wellness among participating couples
In a randomised controlled trial of 300 couples across the USA (compared to couples in a wait-list control group), those participating in the OurRelationship program showed statistically significant gains in several aspects of their relationship. What’s more, they also reported a marked reduction in individual mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety. This also had a knock-on effect on the families and children of the couples, who have also reported improvement in family life.
Based on these results, the research team was able to secure a five-year grant from the federal agency, Administration for Children and Families. OurRelationship now offers the innovative online relationship tool to approximately 2,500 low-income couples nationwide – at no cost.
