ETIH Innovation Awards Winners: TalkingPoints wins Best AI powered EdTech solution (USA and Canada)

TalkingPoints was recognized for Message Mentor, an AI-supported family engagement tool designed to improve school-family communication, attendance, behavior, and access across more than 150 languages.

TalkingPoints wins Best AI-powered EdTech solution at ETIH Innovation Awards 2026

TalkingPoints was recognized for Message Mentor, an AI-supported family engagement tool designed to improve school-family communication, attendance, behavior, and access across more than 150 languages

TalkingPoints has won Best AI powered EdTech solution (USA and Canada) at the inaugural ETIH Innovation Awards 2026, with judges recognizing its use of artificial intelligence to strengthen communication between schools and families.

The national nonprofit’s AI-powered platform supports communication in more than 150 languages and provides research-based guidance to help families support learning at home. Its Message Mentor feature uses generative AI to help educators write more positive, clear, and effective messages while keeping teachers in control of what is sent.

In the 2024 to 2025 school year, TalkingPoints supported 9,288,894 students, families, and educators nationwide. Its entry focused on how stronger family-school communication can improve attendance, behavior, academic progress, and trust, particularly in historically under-resourced communities.

For Laila Brenner, Head of Philanthropy at TalkingPoints, the starting point was a practical gap in how schools have traditionally approached family engagement. In-person events and formal conferences can be useful, but they do not reach every household equally.

“The most common way that schools have historically engaged families is through in-person events like back-to-school nights, bake sales, and parent-teacher conferences,” Brenner says. “Yet this leaves out families who lack time and resources, and may not feel comfortable showing up.”

That gap was central to the judges’ assessment. ETIH Innovation Awards judge Tina Austin described TalkingPoints as having “exceptional, well-evidenced real-world impact,” pointing to its reach, language coverage, outcome data, and human-in-the-loop AI design. She also said the platform addresses “one of the most persistent equity gaps in education: the communication barrier between schools and non-English-speaking families.”

Building trust through everyday communication

TalkingPoints created Message Mentor to support educators with one of the most difficult parts of family engagement: making communication consistent, constructive, and relationship-centered, without adding to workload.

Brenner notes that many families want to be involved, but may not know what is happening in the classroom or how to support learning at home.

“Teachers care deeply about building relationships with families, but many are managing large workloads and were never trained on how to engage families consistently, especially across language and cultural differences,” Brenner explains.

Message Mentor sits inside the TalkingPoints platform and gives educators AI-supported suggestions aligned with family engagement research. It can help reframe messages so they are more positive, collaborative, and actionable, while the educator decides what to use.

That design was important because TalkingPoints did not build Message Mentor as an automated communication system. The AI supports the educator’s voice rather than replacing it.

“At the heart of school-family partnership is trust and human connection, and we don’t want AI to take that away,” Brenner says.

The feature is grounded in the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships. Teachers can edit, accept, or reject AI suggestions before sending messages, with the platform designed to keep human judgment in place.

ETIH Innovation Awards judge Al Kingsley pointed to that evidence base and implementation model, citing “a controlled district study showing 12% higher high school attendance” and “43% lower suspensions in early and middle grades for connected students.” He also noted TalkingPoints’ support for 9.3 million users, more than 150 languages, and AI grounded in the Dual Capacity-Building Framework.

Emma Thompson, Director of Content and Editor at ETIH, says: “TalkingPoints brought the AI conversation back to something very practical: whether families can understand and participate in their child’s education. The use of Message Mentor was compelling because it did not remove the educator from the relationship. It gave schools a way to communicate with more clarity, particularly where language and access have historically created barriers.”

AI as an assistive layer, not a replacement

A recurring theme in the entry was that effective family engagement depends on tone, timing, and trust. TalkingPoints’ research found that students whose families received more positive messages from educators had stronger attendance and lower suspension rates.

For Brenner, that reinforced the decision to make Message Mentor an assistive tool: “The AI is trained on a proven family-engagement framework that helps guide communication by suggesting ways to make messages more supportive and clear, while the educator stays fully in control of what gets sent.”

That balance between AI support and educator control was also reflected in the judging. Neil Almond, ETIH Innovation Awards judge, described TalkingPoints as occupying “an innovative space” by trying to deepen relationships between schools and families to improve student outcomes.

The platform’s reported outcomes gave the judges a stronger evidence base than a product description alone. According to TalkingPoints’ entry, nearly 500,000 Message Mentor conversation starters have been used by educators, more than 75 percent of teachers report that Message Mentor helps them begin conversations with families, and 98 percent of educators say TalkingPoints increases their capacity to engage families.

Brenner says the team was particularly struck by how strongly the quality of communication appeared to link with student outcomes.

“One insight that surprised us was just how strongly the tone of communication mattered,” she says. “We expected communication frequency to play a role, but our research showed that positive, supportive messages were especially connected to improved student outcomes.”

In one large district study cited in the entry, high school attendance increased by 12 percent compared with a control group, equivalent to nearly three additional weeks of learning per year. The same research found that suspensions in early and middle grades were 43 percent lower for students connected to TalkingPoints, with particularly strong improvements for Black and Latino students, English learners, students with individualized education programs, and students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Tina Austin, ETIH Innovation Awards judge, highlighted those figures, noting that the attendance and suspension data represented “measurable improvements in real educational outcomes.” She also pointed to the platform’s “responsible, human-in-the-loop AI design” as part of its strength.

Scott Thompson, Director at Paxton Media, whose brands include ETIH and RTIH, says: “This entry showed how AI can be applied to a practical problem that schools are already trying to solve. The strength was not just the technology, but the way TalkingPoints connected communication, inclusion, family engagement, and student outcomes in one model.”

Language access, inclusion, and what comes next

TalkingPoints’ work across more than 150 languages was another major element of the entry. For the organization, translation is not only a product feature. It is part of whether families feel able to participate in their child’s education.

“We’ve learned that accessibility and trust are deeply connected,” Brenner says. “Language access is not simply a convenience feature. It shapes whether families feel welcomed, respected, and able to participate fully in their child’s education.”

Brenner also makes clear that translation alone is not enough: “Families respond differently when messages feel supportive, culturally aware, and relationship-centered rather than transactional or only focused on problems,. .

That relationship-centered approach also shaped the platform’s attendance tools. By analyzing family responses, schools identified root causes behind absenteeism that traditional systems may miss, including transportation challenges, caregiving responsibilities, and scheduling barriers. That allowed schools to respond earlier and provide more targeted support.

“The broader takeaway for us has been that communication itself is not the goal,” Brenner says. “The quality of the relationship behind the communication is what ultimately changes outcomes for students.”

Stakeholder feedback in the entry also reflected the practical role of the platform. Dr. Rachel Edoho-Eket, Educator in Howard County Public Schools, says: “TalkingPoints is a perfect bridge that we use to make sure our families are involved and engaged in every way possible.”

Michelle Thompson of Green Bay Area Public Schools also links family engagement to student achievement: “Our district leadership is recognizing the decades of research telling us that involved families have an impact on student achievement. If kids have families that are involved, they will perform better regardless of socioeconomic status, and that’s huge.”

Following its ETIH Innovation Awards win, TalkingPoints is continuing to expand its AI-driven tools for educators and families. Brenner says the team is developing more personalized at-home learning supports aligned with classroom instruction in literacy and math, as well as tools that help schools understand attendance and engagement challenges in real time.

For TalkingPoints, the award validates a core principle behind the platform: “Winning the inaugural ETIH Innovation Award is incredibly meaningful for our team because it validates something we’ve believed for a long time: family engagement is not an ‘extra’ in education, it is a core driver of student success.”

Brenner adds that the recognition of AI innovation is particularly meaningful because TalkingPoints has focused on using AI to support, not automate, relationships.

“From the beginning, we’ve believed AI should strengthen human connection, not replace it,” she says. “Message Mentor reflects that philosophy by helping educators communicate more effectively with families while keeping trust and relationships at the center.

To find out more about TalkingPoints, Message Mentor, and its family engagement platform, more information is available via the organization’s website.