Revisit of Letter Swap Evaluation: Research Briefing

There is a growing move towards adopted children maintaining rather than severing links with birth relatives. This culture change includes moving away from solely paper based Letter Box systems towards a more individualised consideration of a range of ways of staying in touch (SiT), including digital options. In 2024 we published our evaluation of Letter Swap– a digital platform for post adoption contact developed by Link Maker (Neil et al, 2024).In the original evaluation we noted that the longer-term benefits and drawbacks of the digital system needed further research, including the use of the video and voice note functions (added later). Another key finding was that wider culture change was needed
to enable maximum relational benefits from the platform. This research was needed to examine agencies’ and users’ experiences of Letter Swap one
year on from the pilot study.