Adopt North East, Adopt Coast to Coast, and Adoption Tees Valley, supported by funding through Adoption England’s Innovation Fund, have jointly launched a new digital approach to adoption contact and maintaining relationships.
The agencies have implemented the Virtual Memory Box platform, which supports safe, meaningful, and child‑centred communication between adoptive families and birth relatives.
Virtual Memory Box (VMB) is a secure, encrypted digital website, originally designed to safely store memories for children in care. However, Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) in the North East recognised that the platform could be developed to also manage contact between adoptive families and birth families.
Following a successful pilot between Adopt North East and VMB, the RAAs came together to continue developing the bespoke system, ensuring it meets the needs of adoptive and birth families. All three agencies have been using the system since the beginning of 2026, each receiving positive feedback from birth families, adoptive parents, staff and professionals about how the system has improved their experience.
The new offering replaces traditional “letterbox contact” - often slow, inconsistent, and administratively heavy - with a modern, intuitive platform that allows adoptive parents and birth relatives to exchange messages, photos, voice recordings, videos, updates, and life‑story materials in a safe, moderated environment. VMB also enables other important people in a child or young person's life, including close friends and previous carers, to maintain their relationship via the platform.
The three RAAs in the North East have now embedded VMB into their Keeping in Touch processes, marking one of the largest regional rollouts of digital contact in the UK.
Jade Stephens, Recruitment, Assessment and Support Team Manager, Adopt North East, said: “We worked with the team at Virtual Memory Box on a pilot to see how their software could benefit adoptees and their families. We knew that our current processes for maintaining relationships could be improved. We were keen to explore digital options to offer a more reliable, easily accessible and secure system for families that could strengthen relationships between adoptive families and birth relatives.
“We can already see the long-term benefits of VMB administratively but more importantly we can see it is supporting more meaningful relationships, contributing to life story work which will benefit children and their families. We’ve had some birth family members engaging for the first time, feeding back that they find VMB more accessible than ‘traditional letterbox’.
“Because of how the system has been designed and the ongoing support of the VMB team we are able to adjust the system to families’ different needs. This has resulted in contact that is more reliable, consistent and dynamic for many families than we have seen previously.”
The system uses automatic prompts to ensure birth relatives are regularly reminded of when they can upload their updates to the system, which can include messages, videos, voice notes and images. This can all be done via mobile phones, offering flexibility should any users not have access to a laptop or PC.
An adoptive parent fed back after using the system: “I think the message option will be much easier to use. I like being able to confirm I have received birth mother's update and let her know I will reply as planned so she is not just waiting.”
Birth parents have also shared positive feedback, with one birth mother saying: “It (VMB) is good. It was easy to log on using my phone and I could see photos and my letter.”
For more information or to enquire about adopting with Adopt North East, please visit adoptnortheast.org.uk or call 0191 643 5000.