How Koko Supports Students in Closegap in Under 10 Minutes
If you work in schools, you know the reality of meeting student needs. It feels impossible to get to every student every day as overloaded counselors juggle large caseloads and the complexity of student schedules. We built Single Session Interventions (SSIs) into Closegap because we wanted to give students more care in less time. Partnering with Koko lets us layer in interventions that have already been tested in labs and in the real world online.
Koko’s impressive results are by design
You already know Koko as the leader in digital interventions for youth. Their platform has been used by millions of young people on the platforms they use, like Snap and TikTok, and studied in multiple randomized controlled trials. And their impact shows measurable gains in youth wellbeing.
When we asked Rob, Koko’s Co-founder & CEO, about how they design SSIs that work, he highlighted a few principles that align closely with how we think about supporting students at Closegap.
1. Evidence first
Koko starts with academic papers and interventions that already have a clinical evidence base, then adapts them for real world use. Implementation and research for online SSIs were pioneered by Dr. Jessica L. Schleider who leads the Lab for Scalable Mental Health at Northwestern University. Koko works closely with the Lab for Scalable Mental Health for further development and dissemination of many of their SSI topics. Teachers, support staff, and administrators can point to independent, peer-reviewed evidence when they explain why they are using these resources in Closegap.
2. Short, not shallow, single sessions
There’s a familiar myth that young people have terrible attention spans and can only focus for a few moments. Koko’s data says otherwise.
“One thing that surprises people is that we can get young people to commit to 8 to 10 minutes, with pretty high completion rates,” Rob shared. “These are people who are just scrolling through TikTok. So this idea that they can only attend to a 30-second clip is not quite right.”
The key isn’t time. It’s meaning. “If you provide really meaningful experiences for them where they feel heard and listened to and validated, you can get investment from them.”
In Closegap, that same 8–10 minutes fits neatly inside class time, advisory, or a counseling block, right after a student check-in. Learn more about SSIs in Schools.
3. Youth voice and iteration
Koko runs ongoing user research, listens to open-ended responses at scale, and works with youth to refine language, pacing and examples.
Similarly, Closegap builds not just for youth and schools, but with them. Closegap regularly convenes a youth advisory council, and constantly iterates from feedback from counselors and educators working with students every day in schools.
And, we built measurement tools directly into the SSIs themselves to know what works, for whom, and in what context. Together, we design, ship, measure, listen, and adjust. This process builds towards results that positively impact youth mental health, with the data to prove it.
4. Serious topics, humane experience
A lot of Koko’s work touches heavy topics like self harm, suicidal ideation and body image. Rob’s take is that the experience “still needs to feel human and even a bit delightful, not clinical and cold.”
That matches what we hear from students when we test Closegap content: they want to feel safe, not pathologized. It’s what our Lead Designer & Engineer, Roxane, calls our approach as being “warm, not fuzzy.” That’s why students will find GIFs and use students’ own language within their resources. That’s another way we meet students where they are.
This means gold for students and schools
Put simply, Koko and Closegap together help students access more care in less time.
“Counselors should not have to create their own resources from scratch or learn another technology tool,” said Jared B. Fries, Director of Partnerships at Closegap. “A 10-minute, evidence-backed intervention that students actually finish is gold.”
For a student, that might look like:
Checking in on Closegap, naming that they are struggling with their body image, self-harm, or suicidality.
Closegap, and/or their educator, making a recommendation to that student to try out Koko’s SSIs that are aligned to that need.
Students spend eight to ten minutes learning one new coping skill, seeing examples from other young people, and practicing a reframed way of thinking.
As Rob put it:
“You can move the needle on things like depression in a very short amount of time by exposing people to coping skills they may have never encountered elsewhere… If we can just change the direction a few degrees when you're young, that translates to a lot of impact over time.”
That’s more care, in less time, for students who might otherwise slip through the cracks.
