The goal of the intervention was to design and test a low-cost intervention to catch parents’ attention and provide frequent and accurate updates about their students’ absences from school. One way to minimize cost was to design an automated intervention that did not require school staff time. Text messaging was chosen as the mode for delivering information. New Visions had the opportunity to design a text-messaging system that could automatically send daily absence updates to parents, triggered by attendance information posted by schools. The goal of the study was to provide quick but definitive information about whether delivering such updates improved attendance, so the partnership selected a rapid-turnaround experimental design.