'It's not about spamming communities': How to leverage messaging apps

SAN FRANCISCO — Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, has been hard at work bringing the beloved Muppets characters from television screens to cell phones. In Latin America, the organization is integrating content from Sésamo, the Spanish language version of Sesame Street, into an automated chat response system. Sesame Workshop hopes that its efforts to turn Muppets into bots will benefit children and their parents seeking out educational content during the coronavirus pandemic. In the development process, the guiding question was: “How do we get the right piece of content to the right person at the right time?” said Lewis Kofsky, vice president and general manager of Latin America at Sesame Workshop, in an email to Devex. That question drove additional questions, he said, including: What information or content do caregivers and young children want and need? How do caregivers learn about the service? How does messaging differ from other forms of communication? “We have built this ongoing discovery and iteration into our approach and we continue to adapt and ask new questions as we go,” Kofsky said. As a growing number of NGOs build chatbots to meet needs from a distance during COVID-19, Devex caught up with organizations that already utilize messaging platforms to gather emerging best practices. “What percentage of your original theory of change can you implement on WhatsApp?” --— Sindhuja Jeyabal, cofounder and chief of technology, Dost Education Navigating access challenges The pandemic led Bridge International Academies, a for-profit network of private schools that focuses on primary school children living in extreme poverty, to refine its at-home learning program. The program uses WhatsApp — which is owned by Facebook, has 2 billion active users, and is the preferred messaging app among the users it is trying to reach — for mobile interactive quizzes and virtual classrooms. While the needs of these students are at the center of the design process, Bridge must also take other family members into account since many of the families it reaches share a smartphone. “When building an application that’s intended for primary aged children, especially when it is likely that one family shares a single phone, you have to think about the pivot point at which the parent gives the phone to the child and how the tone of the messaging needs to change at that point,” said Kent McNeill, chief technology officer at Bridge, in an email to Devex. One chatbot personality might bring the parent or guardian into the application and allow them to set up the experience, he said, while another personality might come online once the child is engaging. While smartphone ownership is growing rapidly around the world, access remains a challenge for Bridge and other programs that are bringing more of their education materials online. Not all families have access to smartphones, nor can they afford the additional costs in data that come with using smartphones for at-home learning. The Bridge team is dealing with this in a number of ways, for example by offering quizzes through an SMS shortcode, working with mobile telecommunications companies to offer zero-rating access to at-home learning materials, and utilizing multiple channels including online, SMS, and radio to reach parents and children. Meeting people where they are When the World Health Organization sought the best way to get information on COVID-19 out to as many people as possible, WhatsApp emerged as the best option. “The way a lot of people look at how to get content into people’s lives is they will try and drag people into their channels,” said Andy Pattison, manager of digital solutions in the department of communications at WHO. Most people only use a few of the apps on their phone, and Pattison said that WHO launched its WHO Health Alert service on WhatsApp in part because it wants to get information out on those apps that people are already using every day. “It's not about spamming communities or bringing them into a behavior change tunnel but rather creating meaningful transactions that build trust over time.” --— John Warnes, innovation officer, UNHCR The UN Refugee Agency is also increasingly finding that messaging apps, and in particular WhatsApp, are the preferred and trusted channels of the people it aims to reach. But while WhatsApp messages are encrypted, the platform does share some information with Facebook. None of these digital channels are completely secure, and there are always risks, but UNHCR has a comprehensive data protection policy and is working to capture as little data as possible while also limiting third party access, said John Warnes, UNHCR innovation officer, in an email to Devex. His advice for organizations just getting started with messaging apps and chatbots is to understand the needs of the communities they aim to serve, both in terms of communication channels and the type of information and services they’re looking for. “It's not about spamming communities or bringing them into a behavior change tunnel but rather creating meaningful transactions that build trust over time,” he said. He added that these interactions should not be seen as a one-off, but rather as an ongoing strategy to continually build and improve services based on feedback from communities. Raising awareness of the service Sesame Workshop is tailoring much of its educational content on WhatsApp to meet the needs of displaced children from Venezuela who are on the move or in temporary forms of housing, using surveys and pilots to gather data and iterate. “Chat requires a different approach than other digital channels and a deeper engagement with and understanding of the needs and behaviors of end-users,” Kofsky said. “It’s not enough to simply push content.” To drive awareness of its WhatsApp chat service, Sesame Workshop included its chat number on episodes of Sésamo airing across Latin America. With the support of the Inter-American Development Bank, the organization is offering 525 episodes of Sésamo in Spanish and Portuguese to public television channels and ministries of education across Latin America and the Caribbean. Each episode features popups with the WhatsApp number and a unique code that allows users to request content related to that episode. One of the challenges posed by WhatsApp is that, unlike broadcast media or other forms of digital media, messaging must be initiated by the end-user. Users receive a simple menu of options, then opt-in, at which point organizations can customize responses based on their behaviors and expressed needs. WhatsApp was designed to be a personal service, but the company has released features that allow NGOs to more effectively leverage the platform, while still working to ensure that inboxes are not overloaded with spam. “It provides the potential for a very powerful personalized support tool in direct service interventions,” Kosky said. Dost Education, a nonprofit that helps parents in India improve their child’s school readiness, has always leveraged phones as the primary way to reach parents. As a result, the organization was in a position to scale during the COVID-19 pandemic, as other organizations with in-person programs are in the midst of pivoting to digital platforms. “Identify the goal or use case of what can be achieved on WhatsApp and go from there,” said Sindhuja Jeyabal, cofounder and chief of technology at Dost Education. “What percentage of your original theory of change can you implement on WhatsApp?” While social distancing measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have prevented many organizations working in global health and international development from carrying out their work, not all programs lend themselves to chat services, she said. Update, August 7, 2020: This article has been updated to clarify what information WhatsApp shares with Facebook.