Thrive at 20

By Sasha Miller, Operations Director

It’s our birthday (whoop!). And while lockdown has put paid to our celebration plans (for now at least) we’re cheering ourselves up by thinking about some of the highlights of the past two decades.

Here are 20 of our proudest achievements:

  1. Between 2005 and 2010, we launched websites in 17 countries around the world for our client BabyCenter: from Australia to Russia, China to Brazil.
  2. Our first name was Content Consultants, but over time we realised that didn’t tell our story. In 2019, we rebranded as Thrive: Words that change lives.
  3. In India where our mobile messaging programme reaches 2 million people, we have moved the needle on 17 out of 23 life-saving health behaviour targets.
  4. Our first employee was a brilliant researcher called Francesca Thomas. We now employ 35 people, and Francesca is still one of them.
  5. Our content is accessed by 21 million people around the world every month.
  6. In 2017 we launched Unihealth, the UK’s first health and wellbeing messaging service for students. 84% of student respondents said the service helped them to look after their physical and mental health.
  7. In 2019, we won two British Business awards: Female Business Owner and Work/Life Balance. We were very proud.
  8. We helped WaterAid, Unicef and 40 other NGOs respond to the Covid-19 health crisis by providing a free library of behaviour change messages, voice scripts, images and articles to non-profit organisations.
  9. Our work on behaviour change messaging programmes in India, China, South Africa, Mexico and Uganda has helped millions of women have healthy pregnancies and babies. We have written over 7,000 messages, delivered by mobile phone.
  10. In partnership with our client, BabyCenter, we produced content for new and expecting mothers for Facebook Free Basics: 120 articles for 40 countries in 27 languages.
  11. Our work on Free Basics led Thrive Director Daphne Metland being invited to share a stage with Mark Zuckerberg.
  12. We’re proud to be based in Norwich, a growing hub for creative and tech businesses, but we work globally. We have editors in Australia, Canada, Brazil, India, Germany and France and great contacts just about anywhere else.
  13. More babies are being tested for HIV in South Africa, thanks to our messaging programme.
  14. We have worked with our very first client, continuously, from 2001 to today: that’s 5,200 days (we feel old!).
  15. We designed our midwife translation fans – a nifty tool to help midwives communicate with women in their care who don’t speak English – as a conference giveaway but they were so popular we ended up printing over 20,000 copies.
  16. We don’t just write about pregnancy we, erm, do some practical research too: 20 babies born to Thrive mums and dads in 20 years. Some of our first ‘Thrive Babies’ are now at university!
  17. Thrive Director Daphne Metland has presented our work to Ministries of Health in China, Uganda, South Africa, UAE and Mexico.
  18. We have written White Papers on digital health, mental health and recovering from cancer.
  19. We are a female-led company with a focus on social good.
  20. We are also experts on spas and wellbeing (not many people know that!).

Sasha is the Operations Director at Thrive. She specialises in health and behaviour change and is passionate about creating content that engages its audience and drives positive change.

Learn about some of the amazing projects we’ve been involved with. Or if you would like to have a chat about a project you’re planning, get in touch.

Here at Thrive, we work with brands, partner agencies, governments and charities who want to transform lives and societies for good.

Download our free white paper on the link below to learn how femtech and other digital platforms can overcome barriers to health access for women:


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