Peppy Pals Social Skills

To give children the skills they need to reach their full potential, and at the same time level the playing field, we must consciously tap into every child’s social and emotional intelligence as part of the early childhood development.

Peppy Pals is the first company in the world to gamify social and emotional intelligence without using text or language. Our unique approach uses storytelling, humor and qualitative animations. Through five gender-neutral characters children explore scenarios relatable to real life that also sparks parent-child conversations. 

Today, we have reached 500,000 downloads worldwide. Our easy-to-use application has proven to reduce conflicts, form stronger relationships and help children talk vividly about emotions. By using a non-language method we have created a basis from which we can reach millions of children globally, including vulnerable populations and those affected by conflict, which makes us eager to continue to change lives on a much larger scale.

Over the past 30 years we have become 40% less empathic, and over 550 million (13% of the world’s population) are suffering from mental health problems. Both of which derives from an underserved development of social and emotional skills (SEL). Practicing SEL can prevent this. Global organisations such as World Economic Forum and OECD also notes that SEL is a crucial skill set in the future workforce. Research also shows that SEL can improve students’ performance by as much as 11 percentile points.

The numbers are in. If children under five are equipped with SEL, they have a much better foundation for reaching their full potential later in life. However, there is a lack of playful tools to do so, and an urgent need to level the playing field. As Minouche Shafik said: “In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in the future they’ll be about the heart”, which is why Peppy Pals has created a world where hearts grow smart.

While offering a global product, our focus in 2020 will be to reach at least half a million of the 23.1 million children (up to five years old) in the US.

Peppy Pals provides children ages 2-5 with the SEL they need to reach a prosperous future. In order to do so, we also address their parents and caregivers. By using storytelling and humor, our aspiration is to bridge the parent confidence gap within SEL and inspire them with playful tools that spark conversations and strengthen relationships within families. 

We use a research-based standard called CASEL, and have made sure to include children, parents and psychologists in our development. For instance, we tested over 50 different characters to ensure children understood their different personalities and gender neutrality. 

We have developed 16 scenarios that cover important skills such as resolving conflicts, managing stress and overcoming fear. Our impact was confirmed by a study from Uppsala University conducted by a Swedish professor within human computer interaction. It proved that children understand and can re-enact the social and emotional interaction in Peppy Pals’ games and mimicked the characters while playing

We target children from all social classes. Since the needs of low-income families generally differ regarding e.g. early childhood knowledge and ability to pay, we have consciously made our application easy-to-use and free to download.

Peppy Pals has created language free games to spark conversation between children and adults on topics within SEL. We encourage responsive caregiver-to-child interactions and have proven to bridge online to offline learnings in a playful manner. We believe play is essential for children’s development and by meeting children in the digital world they are in, we also know that screen time can become quality-time for the entire family.

In Peppy Pals colourful world, there is no right or wrong. Instead we encourage children to use their creativity and imagination to figure out how to solve different problems and situations.

Our core focus is our global application available on both iOS and Android platforms. Since the launch in 2014, we have continued to develop a 360-concept with supporting products such as emotion cards, digital lesson plans, books and movies. 

We use a design for all approach to to reach as many children as possible, with an extra focus on the most vulnerable, for example due to stress experienced in humanitarian emergencies and conflict settings. Our language free games is created to set aside barriers due to nationality or language and as our apps are free to download we aim to reach families living in poverty. As an example, we are currently initiating a collaboration with SOS Children’s Villages where we will send “Peppy Pals’ Emotional Toolkits” to remote areas. 

Every year we team up with UNICEF and the global organisation Six Seconds to celebrate EQ for UN Children’s Day. During the celebration 2018, Peppy Pals’ activities for SEL were shared with over 750,000 children in more than 130 countries. By partnering for change, we aim to reach more children, as well as children in greater need of our tools, that we would be able to do by ourselves. Our partnerships have been very successful and we are constantly searching for new partners to continue our growth.

During 2019 we have directed our focus to further assist parents. Becoming a parent is challenging, and you do not have a driving license to deal with situations such as tantrums or promoting SEL. In fact, 70% of parents feel that they are expected to do it all without fundamental support systems. 

As parents play such a crucial role for their child’s development, we are adding guiding tools in our application connected to the scenarios, to boost parents confidence and support them further.

Peppy Pals was the first company in the world to gamify SEL without using language. The fact that the games do not use language enables us to scale quicker and to reach vulnerable areas faster and cheaper. This approach has required a lot of high quality animations, with extensive body language and facial expressions on the characters. 

In addition;

1. we have an strong foundation in research, using CASEL’s international standard and with Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence as partner, 
2. our content is built on children’s perspective,
3. our content bridge a gap between adults and children on SEL,
4. our characters is gender-neutral and with different personalities grounded in psychology so children can relate to them, 
5. out content is well-adapted for children with autism and other special needs,
6. we have developed an online to offline approach to ensure that children will bring their newfound knowledge from our products and use their new skills in the analog world, 
7. we use a magic formula combining entertainment and education, and 
8. last but not least, we know that children love our content. 

Innovation is one of our core values. We have a facial recognition pilot and one virtual reality scenario ready and we are currently researching to tap into augmented reality to make children see the characters in the physical environment they play in, and encourage them to interact with the characters to spark SEL, e.g. through comforting the rabbit if it is crying.

We have developed our applications in-house with our own team of highly skilled programmers and designers. All 16 scenarios have been developed in Unity, and starting off as games, the scenarios is now also available as books, audio books, movies and lesson plans. Apart from the scenarios we also have additional content, such as recognizing emotions on the characters, and handing the characters objects and notice their different reactions. We have used high quality animations to make sure that the characters express their feelings clearly, both through facial expression and body language.  

One of Peppy Pals' main goals is to use the power of games to something more meaningful. The technology we use is not new, but the way we use technology to gamify SEL is groundbreaking. We cannot help but appreciate the irony; Technology is blamed for the general decrease in SEL and we use the same technology to enable children to increase their SEL. 

We believe technology and a design for all approach is fundamental in order to reach children with different needs regardless of their social class, nationality and language.

The desired state is that every child below five gets the chance to develop the social and emotional skills they need to reach a prosperous future. 

The reason why the desired state is not the reality today (i.e. why the problem is not yet solved) is due to lack of knowledge, time and money as traditional SEL tools cost a lot of money and takes a lot of time. We have developed a product that do not take so much time to learn or use, and which do not cost so much money. Thus, by collaborating with the right partners and reach more children that need us, we can make a real difference.

Our theory of change for the individual child is best described by our educational journey. Our stories address a range of topics, enabling parents to choose the once that are most important. The stories captures the children's attention and engage them through the colorful animations and lovable animal characters, and allow children to explore SEL on a neutral ground through conversations and play. We encourage parents to link the stories back to real life both while playing and later on to remind the child about their new knowledge.

Through our work we are proud to contribute to the SDG number 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and 4 (Quality Education), although when we are educating parents and teachers on SEL, we always address the SDGs as the “Survival Kit for Humanity”.

So far, we have 500,000 downloads of our application (spread across 150 countries) without any marketing budget, and we have reached 30% of our market in Sweden. Even though we are not meaningfully affecting children through every download, we will use this figure as an estimate. Considering our high retention rate, the fact that one download often is used by several children (siblings or a group of children in kindergarten) in combination with our reach and impact through other channels, i.e. books, YouTube, educational platform, and TV-serie, we have decided to use downloads as our best estimation of how many children are we are directly serving. 

As we will approach bigger markets, and continue the marketing push we recently initiated, we aim to double our downloads in the next year, i.e. 1 million downloads in one year. We have set our goal at 10 million downloads in five years. Our goals is dependent on continuous partnering efforts, and to access more content providers such as NetEase in China (NetEase will market and include our application in their portfolio from August 2019) and SOS Villages in Sweden (who will supply their selected families with Peppy Pals’ content). 

We have initially focused on development, research, customer evaluations and impact measurement to be able to check all boxes before we scale globally. We have used Sweden as our proof of concept market, and now we are confident that the our concept is repeatable and that we are ready to scale.

To overcome one of our biggest barriers - financial sustainability - we aim to reach bigger markets, i.e. scale number of downloads and keep conversion rate. We have seen an interest from US (200,000 downloads without any marketing) why we will redirect our efforts to US. To tap into the market efficiently, we will relocate part of our team to US. 

We have a great experience with partnerships to achieve growth, and that is our primary plan to scale further. We keep an opened mind on how the partnership may be structured, but we mainly reach out to content providers (as Fingerprint Play and Clever in the US) and nonprofits (as SOS Children’s Villages in Sweden were we will together raise funds to be able to supply their selected families in Mozambique and Ukraine with “Peppy Pals’ emotional toolkit”.) We are conscious that strong, strategic partnerships are vital for a good market introduction, which is one of the core reasons we apply to Solve. 

Our marketing focus is primarily on YouTube. We activated our English channel only three weeks ago and have already more than 162,000 views and 1,000 subscribers. 

Apart from US, we also keep an eye to the east as NetEase have reached out to us and requested to distribute our app in China. NetEase will be our market introduction to China, and after this collaboration we will evaluate the market fit and scale in a couple of years.

As we are moving from Sweden to US, a key barrier is to understand the new market; the customers, key players and specific challenges. We are looking for a resource to help us enter the market, as well as find the best partners to help us grow. We have proof of content from Sweden and we know from our testimonials and retention rates that children love our content. However, our challenge is to cut through the noise in a new (and big) market and at the same time ensure that we reach children from all social classes. A platform strategy, where we provide our content to relevant and responsible platforms, has been successful and that is a strategy we will continue to use for new markets.

This growth will also require heavy investments in marketing, and with a proof of concept on a new market (US) within the next 10-12 months we are confident we can raise another series of funds to reach our five-year plan.

In the long-term our biggest challenge is our financial sustainability as well as finding a strategy that can expand our impact and reach to new, developing markets serving a different kind of customer.

First barrier: Enter US market (short term)

We believe partners is the key to a new market, and we are humble to the fact that we need to establish many new connections and partnerships to make a successful entry in the US early childhood market. We are currently discussing this strategic decision and potential connections with already existing partners and advisors, such as the LEGO team, Fingerprint Play, Amazon and Six Seconds. We will also relocate part of our team to US this fall to quickly tap into the new market.

Second barrier: Financial sustainability (long term)

As previously noted, we aim to find our financial sustainability through revenue growth from an increased number of downloads with retained conversion rate. In addition, the more convincingly we can show rapid growth from downloads and YouTube, the easier it will be to monetize other revenue streams as well, i.e. revenue share from partnerships and licensing/royalty. 

Due to lack of funding we have not until this year been able to iterate fast, try new business models and acquisition channels. However, with the help of the initial investment from LEGO Ventures this is exactly what are doing at the moment. We are excited to see where this data will lead, and we are eager to use it to refine our business model and growth path with the help of brilliant minds and great advisors, whose expertise we are always welcoming.

N/A

Five full-time and one part-time staff, plus one consultant on part-time.

Peppy Pals is built on in-house expertise including game development, psychology, and shaping the business. Our team have proved ourselves as expert within SEL with a true a passion for children and play-based learning. We are the first to gamify SEL for kids without using text or language, and have created a first mover advantage in the parent market focusing on SEL-games as a way to connect children and adults.

Core team:

Rosie Linder (Founder and chairman), economist from Stockholm University and winner of a serie of awards for social entrepreneurs. 

Paulina Olsson (CEO and co-founder), MSc in International Business Copenhagen Business School, award-winning entrepreneur, and recently awarded by the Swedish King for her leadership.

Amelie Askman (CSO), Master of Laws from Stockholm University, more than three years experience from a tier-one law firm, specialized in M&A. 

Matilda Sonesson (CMO), MSc in sustainable business development Uppsala University, specialized in growth marketing, with an add-on education at Berghs School of Communication. 

Björn Eriksson (CTO), programmer with more than five years industry experience as Art Director, Concept Artist, Illustrator and Programming.

Sally Lo (Head of Research), psychologist from University of Kent, with experience as child psychologist in Swedish schools. Lo is currently finalizing her title as clinical psychologist at Åbo University specialized in child development. 

Board of directors include:

Lena Ramfelt former professor at Stanford University teaching entrepreneurship.

Rob Lowe at LEGO Ventures, with more than five years experience from the LEGO Group, and additional marketing experience from BBC and Nintendo.

We have three groups of partners: 

• Research. Partners who help us develop, measure and validate our evidence based content consisting of Yale Centers of Emotional Intelligence, the global SEL-organisation Six Seconds, and Uppsala University in Sweden.

• Reach. Partners with whom we have ongoing partnerships regarding collaboration, cross-promotion or joint projects to enable further reach, consisting of LEGO, NetEase, Epic!, Amazon FreeTime, SONY Sweden, Pizza Hut (Sweden), Tiney, and Martina Children’s Hospital.

• Impact. Partners who help us make a real impact for children who need us, consisting of Fair Education Alliance and SOS Children’s Villages.

In addition, Reach for Change and the European Investment Bank are valued partners to us as we have participated in their social entrepreneurship programs and still have close contacts as members of their respective alumni network.

Business model in terms of revenue  

Business model in terms of impact

Our impact relates to child-adult interaction and impact on children’s social and emotional development. We are confident of our impact on both levels through multiple surveys, studies and testimonials. E.g. a global survey conducted in collaboration with Reach for Change showed that 85% of parents using Peppy Pals noticed an improvement in their child’s awareness, understanding and expression of emotional and social skills. A study conducted by Uppsala University also showed that children who engaged with Peppy Pals talked more vividly about emotions and could relate back to scenarios in everyday life, applying the learnings in an online environment to an offline one.

Our current business model include three revenue streams (all of which monetize our strong brand): (i) product sales, (ii) revenue share, (iii) royalty from licensing our content through distribution partners. Peppy Pals is a for-profit with a social impact. We see a long-term sustainability similar to Sesame Street, while operating similarly to LEGO with both a for-profit and non-profit arm. 

Children from all backgrounds benefit from our products. Thus, we are constantly testing and evaluating the best way to make our products available to everyone while keeping our own sustainability. We have for instance gone from paid apps to using a freemium model, so everyone can download for free and access rotating parts of the content, or access all at once for a one-time fee. The conversion rate is according to industry average, yet (similar to big app developers like Toca Boca) it is not profitable in the long run. 

We are investigating a third party funding solution to distribute our products further in collaboration with SOS Children’s villages, were we together will raise funds to supply their selected families in Mozambique and Ukraine with “Peppy Pals’ emotional toolkit”. 

We are confident of our impact, and we are currently iterating to nail our financial sustainability and reach our goals and support millions of children around the globe. As such, we also see a huge potential of being acquired in the long-run by a company sharing our values such as Khan Academy, ClassDojo, LEGO Ventures or Sesame Street.

Coming from a strong traction on a local market, we will now put all efforts to growing in the US over the next 1-2 years (first barrier). Thus, it would be incredibly beneficial for us to more quickly expand our network. The early childhood market in the US is an enormous market compared to Sweden, and although we are confident that Sweden worked well as proof of concept, we recognize that a successful introduction to the US market is dependent on the right local partners, mentors and advisors. 

We take pride in the high value partnerships and investors we have established, as our experience being women pitching solutions for children and talking about emotions is not too well-received by many potential partners (or investors). An admission to Solve, not to speak of introductions initiated by Solve, would give us a quality stamp that would make a real difference for us.

In addition, we would be grateful for input and support regarding:

• Our long-term strategy for financial sustainability (barrier two).
• Suitable organisations to partner with to reach more vulnerable children and caregivers in the US.
• Recruit talented and experienced board members to grow our business and impact. We are currently looking to form both a formal board as well as an informal advisory board outside of the Nordics.
• Mentors with knowledge and experience of augmented reality/artificial intelligence games to support us in our continuous process to innovate SEL for children.

N/A

Partners for impact

Trusted companies or organisations working for children’s rights through their early childhood development. Our design for all approach enables us to collaborate with both national players to reach vulnerable children in the US, as well as international actors to reach children exposed to humanitarian emergencies and conflict settings around the globe.

Examples: UNICEF, Save the Children.

Partners for reach

We are looking for distributors, i.e. platforms that hold content for a large number of children who are interested to host Peppy Pals’ content. We are also interested in companies who reach a lot of families in general, i.e. children’s hospitals (proven successful for both parties in Sweden), food chains or restaurants who target families with young children (also proven effective in Sweden through Pizza Hut). 

Examples: Apple, YouTube Kids, Boston Children's Hospital, Subway.

Partners for research/innovation

We would love to find partners for technical innovation-research as our current research partners is focused on SEL. 

Examples: MIT Innovation Initiative, Harvard University, Affectiva.

In addition to these partnership groups above, we are very interested to meet founders focused on early childhood development (e.g. Sesame Workshop, Omidyar Network, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and other successful companies within early childhood development (e.g. Khan Academy Kids, PBS Kids, ClassDojo) to exchange knowledge and expertise.

N/A

N/A

N/A