Two student researchers focused on understanding young people’s engagement in our peer support group chats (Ananya, Tuuli, Perowne & Gutman, 2025). Their findings led to several important improvements aimed at enhancing the experience and effectiveness of these spaces:
- Increased Moderation: Each support chat now includes a minimum of two moderators and one supervisor. This change has strengthened the quality of support provided and helped foster a greater sense of safety among participants.
- Themed Support Chats: For the support chats, new themed chats were introduced, which are identified and prioritised in collaboration with The Mix’s community. For instance, we are currently running a weekly employment support chat.
- Low-Barrier Engagement Opportunities: The team is now focusing more on creating lighter content to provide young people low-barrier opportunities for engagement to make it easier for them to get involved. For instance, we run a body doubling session during exam revision season to help young people stay focused and motivated
- Smaller Group Sizes: The team runs group chats with no more than 15 participants, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to be heard while also reducing the volume of messages to create a more manageable and supportive environment.
- Emotional Literacy Support: In response to findings that some young users have difficulties with expressing their feelings and what kind of support they need, the team has begun creating posts to help young people build emotional literacy such as threads introducing the feelings wheel to help users identify emotions; peer support guides or tips on setting boundaries with friends.
Following these improvements, the proportion of young people agreeing that they feel more able to understand and express their feelings as a result of using our group chats has risen from 77% in 2022 to 86% in 2025.
