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In 2019, The Mix identified that a large proportion of young people signing up for counselling sessions did not start their sessions or disengaged with the service early after attending only a few sessions.

Although this trend is typical in the industry we wanted to understand the reasons for this, and what we could do to remove barriers to engagement to enable all young people to access the support they need.

Research conducted by UCL Behaviour Change students alongside our internal research identified a number of barriers and facilitators, and recommendations for a wide range of actionable strategies to increase engagement with the service (Mawdsley, Richiello & Gutman, 2022a; Richiello, Mawdsley & Gutman, 2022b).

The counselling team has implemented many of the strategies, some of which have been co-produced with the Services Innovator Committee that consists of young people engaged in improving our services. At The Mix we often bring youth voice and data together, to allow us to engage in two types of listening: “narrow listening” involving a smaller number of people offering valuable, in-depth insights, and “wide listening” through data.

To address the key reason for disengagement - people feeling anxious about counselling as they do not know what to expect - the counselling team introduced:

Young people laughing together
  • Counsellor bios where each counsellor sends a short introductory email ahead of the first session to introduce themselves and help with development of therapeutic relationship
  • Digitalisation of the counselling contract to make it more accessible to all young people to give them a greater understanding of The Mix policies. 
  • New content focused on pre-session anxiety and what to expect accompanied with videos and real-life testimonies from former users to help young people better understand counselling, what to expect, and how it works. 

Some users do not know how to express their feelings or thoughts, and some are unsure what to say during their sessions or how to initiate conversations. To address this, the team has implemented check-in questions at the start of each session prompting young people to rate and discuss their feelings.

To address counsellor’s lack of confidence around effectiveness of webchat counselling volunteer counsellors are regularly presented with data demonstrating the benefits of online counselling; this data is now included also in the training sessions that prepare them for volunteering. Additionally, counsellors also receive regular feedback from young people so that they can see the impact their sessions had on the young person. 

The training program for counsellors has been significantly improved, and now it incorporates areas such as tech explorations, role plays and topic related training to ensure counsellors feel comfortable and confident delivering online sessions.

Improving disengagement rates

As a result of these updates, we've seen significant changes over the last five years, with the proportion of users completing all their sessions more than doubling over this period.

While the overall disengagement rates decreased, other reasons leading to disengagement remain such as lack of time to attend sessions, and users selecting unsuitable time slots or attending sessions elsewhere.

  • 23%

    Disengagement rate in 2024

    rate of disengagement for those who started their sessions has fallen significantly from 32% in 2019

  • 8%

    People who registered but didn't attend

    Has nearly halved, down from 17% in 2019