An Update on Growth and Product Improvements

Strong Growth in the Newborn Care Foundations Course

This year we’ve seen remarkable growth of our flagship course, Newborn Care Foundations. More than 23,000 health workers have now completed the course, up from just over 6,000 at the end of last year. Knowledge gains are holding steady at around 20 percentage points, demonstrating that the course continues to deliver reliable improvements in knowledge of basic but lifesaving newborn care practices.

Equally important, our philanthropic cost per learner trained has dropped to under $7, much lower than a per-learner cost of about $14 last year. Cost per course completer is a key "North Star" metric that we track to assess our impact and cost-effectiveness. Declining unit costs point to strong progress towards achieving our vision of cost-effectively delivering lifesaving training at a massive scale.

Some of this growth has come from investing in direct-to-consumer marketing (mostly advertising on Facebook), a strategy we have now validated as a powerful driver of course uptake. With support from Good Impressions, who generously provided pro bono expertise, we’ve optimized our campaigns while maintaining low costs per course completer. We've also confirmed that this approach does reach our target audience of licensed birth attendants. This gives us a highly efficient and simple pathway to reach more health workers with our courses.

Enhancing the Course and the Platform

As our reach grows, we continue to improve both the content and the technology behind it. Recent highlights include:

• A new module on early breastfeeding and skin-to-skin care: We introduced a module reinforcing the importance of early initiation of breastfeeding (EIBF) – starting breastfeeding within one hour of birth. This practice improves newborn health outcomes (we estimate that EIBF reduces newborn mortality by 7-24%), yet remains underused. To strengthen uptake, the new module leverages behavioral insights such as dynamic social norms, showing learners that their peers are already adopting these practices.

• Course and certificate sharing features: An improved "results" screen nudges course completers to share the course, making it easier and more intuitive for them to do so. We’ve seen strong growth in sharing and referrals since this feature was released, and now over 10% of Newborn Care Foundations course completions can be attributed to referrals.

• AI-enhanced support: We’ve rolled out a new system to classify support queries and send responses to common technical issues. Importantly, the AI only uses responses that we’ve pre-written and approved. This helps learners get faster support while ensuring safety and accuracy, while also making our support more scalable and keeping costs down.
  
  

Left and center: Screenshots of new platform features encouraging learners to share courses with others. Right: A screenshot from a new module in the Newborn Care Foundations course that uses behavioral nudges to encourage health workers to implement specific practices that promote early initiation of breastfeeding. 

Looking Ahead

We know that course uptake and completion are only part of the equation – our ultimate aim is to improve health outcomes. We’re continuing to invest in monitoring, evaluation and research. We’re also expanding our work into new geographies and starting work on new courses that address other leading causes of preventable death. We look forward to sharing more about these efforts in the future!