Adopt North East, Adopt Coast to Coast, and Adoption Tees Valley, supported by funding through Adoption England’s Innovation Fund, have jointly launched a new digital approach to adoption contact and maintaining relationships. The agencies have implemented the Virtual Memory Box (VMB) platform to support safe, meaningful, and child‑centred communication between adoptive families and birth relatives.

Following a successful pilot and initial design phase between Adopt North East and Virtual Memory Box, the three Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) came together with the team at Virtual Memory Box to continue developing the bespoke system, ensuring it meets the needs of adoptive and birth families keeping in touch. VMB also enables other important people in a child or young person's life, including close friends and previous carers, to maintain their relationship via the platform.

All three agencies have been using the system since the beginning of the year, each receiving positive feedback from birth families, adoptive parents, staff and professionals about how the system has improved their experience.

A modern digital letterbox for adoption

Virtual Memory Box is a secure, encrypted digital website that was designed as a platform for life story work, safely storing memories for children in care. However, upon discussion with RAAs in the North East, it became clear that the platform could be developed to also manage contact and maintaining relationships between adoptive families and birth families. 

The new offering is designed specifically for adoption services to help adoptive families keep in touch with birth relatives in a safe and secure way. It replaces traditional “letterbox contact” - often slow, inconsistent, and administratively heavy - with a modern, intuitive platform that allows adoptive parents and birth relatives to exchange messages, photos, voice recordings, videos, updates, and life‑story materials in a safe, moderated environment.

The three Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) across the North East have now embedded VMB into their Keeping in Touch processes, marking one of the largest regional rollouts of digital contact in the UK.

Jade Stephens, Recruitment, Assessment and Support Team Manager, Adopt North East, said: “We worked with the team at Virtual Memory Box on a pilot to see how their software could benefit adoptees and their families. We knew that our current processes for maintaining relationships could be improved. We were keen to explore digital options to offer a more reliable, easily accessible and secure system for families that could strengthen relationships between adoptive families and birth relatives.

She continued: “We can already see the long-term benefits of VMB administratively but more importantly we can see it is supporting more meaningful relationships, contributing to life story work which will benefit children and their families. We’ve had some birth family members engaging for the first time, feeding back that they find VMB more accessible than ‘traditional letterbox’. Because of how the system has been designed and the ongoing support of the VMB team we are able to adjust the system to families’ different needs. This has resulted in contact that is more reliable, consistent and dynamic for many families than we have seen previously.”

Paula Gibbons, Head of Service, at Adopt Coast to Coast said: “We at Adopt Coast to Coast had already completed an audit of our keeping in touch arrangements and the feedback from birth families and adoptive parents was that the system was not as responsive as they would like.  For the Agency, it was heavily bureaucratic and this built in unnecessary delays for children in receiving their keeping in touch.  The opportunity to utilise Virtual Memory Box as our new solution arrived at the right time and quite literally ticked all the boxes for us.

She continued: “Virtual Memory Box has revolutionised this key practice area for us. We’re still developing some of the systems and processes to ensure the software works the way we need it to, but it has made everything so much more efficient, consistent, timely and manageable. Families have responded really positively and we now have 70 previously inactive keeping in touch arrangements re-established, it really has been transformational.”

The system uses automatic prompts to ensure birth relatives are regularly reminded of when they can upload their updates to the system, which can include messages, videos, voice notes and images. This can all be done via mobile phones, offering flexibility should any users not have access to a laptop or PC. 

In a recent Young Person Voice and Influence Group, adopted young people identified that VMB and access to records is important to understanding their identity. The young people agreed that VMB sounded better than a traditional ‘post box’ approach and suggested that it should sit within their wider adoption journey in which young people understand their rights and are prepared for potentially difficult information. They said: “Give us access to our story, but prepare us for what we may find, respect everyone’s boundaries and make sure support is there when we need it.”

Adoptive families are prepared to support keeping in touch arrangements and life story work and can upload their material as regularly as they wish. Adoptive and birth families communicate directly with one another, with adoptive parents taking responsibility for sharing updates with children and young people in line with their age and stage. Direct communication via VMB further reduces the need for professional oversight, which allows more resources to be allocated to focussed support around keeping in touch and life story work, for the many adoptive and birth families who request this.

Jade added: “The biggest change for contact is that it is now immediate. Users add their own messages and any other media and it’s immediately on the system ready to be seen by the recipient. It helps us to facilitate a more genuine, two-way relationship between the families securely, and without delay. Adoptive and birth families have fed back on the limitations of the traditional letterbox system and how it didn’t support relationships in the way they hoped, but ongoing feedback is now showing that VMB is.” 

One member of staff at Adoption Tees Valley that has been using the new system said: “Now I’ve had some time getting used to the system, it makes sharing updates with families much easier and quicker. Birth relatives and adopters have shared they like that the updates are all in one place and easy to view. Some of our adopters have amended their historic arrangements, allowing birth families to share updates more than once/twice a year, and happy to receive additional media types (audio/videos etc). This has been a joy to witness this development for these families.”

An adoptive parent also fed back after using the system: “I think the message option will be much easier to use. I like being able to confirm I have received birth mother's update and let her know I will reply as planned so she is not just waiting.”

Birth parents have also shared positive feedback with one birth mother saying: “It (VMB) is good. It was easy to log on using my phone and I could see photos and my letter.” Another birth parent commented: “I like it (VMB). I used my phone and saw my update. I haven't replied yet, but I think this will be easier than writing a letter.”