The opportunity for accessible, secure, chat-for-impact services is enormous. Mobile chat via a medium like WhatsApp is transforming the way people connect. It’s also changing the way people engage with organizations and is increasing access to essential services. Never before have social impact teams been able to communicate with millions of people in such an engaging, personal, and secure manner.
But designing, launching, and managing an effective chat service at scale is challenging for social impact organizations. Lacking technical or conversational design expertise, organizations don’t know where to start. Learning resources that are practical, actionable, and easy to implement are hard to find. Case studies can inspire but seldom help teams do it themselves.
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Initiatives that create conversational artificial intelligence templates or datasets that nonprofit organizations can use are a great start. Chatbot templates created by Nethope and Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact partnership and Bothub’s multilingual datasets can reduce the time, expertise, and funds required to launch and manage chat services. But there is much more work to be done.
Social impact organizations need world-class, cost-effective, and scalable software to grow, manage, and track their chat-for-impact services. They need chat tools designed to improve lives, not sell products, or improve Net Promoter Scores — which measure customer experience and predict growth — which are the primary goals of commercial chat products in the market.
WhatsApp as a solution
WhatsApp enthusiasts will tell you that one of the main reasons they prefer this messaging app over SMS is because the service is free. You simply need internet connectivity to chat to your heart’s content. Low-cost WhatsApp bundles from mobile network operators make this easy.
The app’s multimedia-sharing capabilities also make it possible for you to send images, videos, and documents to your contacts. Plus, unlike SMS, all messages are end-to-end encrypted, keeping conversations private. In short, WhatsApp offers a range of benefits that SMS, the current standard for social impact messaging, does not.
We believe that impactful conversations have to be secure, timely, personalized, and ultimately, human-to-human.
—The WhatsApp Business API is a fast, secure, reliable way for medium to large organizations to reach communities all over the world. The application programming interface, or API, supports many of the features we’ve been using in WhatsApp with our families and friends but comes with specific rules of engagement to ensure a delightful end-user experience. Unlike other end-to-end encrypted chat apps, WhatsApp verifies business accounts. This ensures users can identify legitimate services from fakes, providing an extra level of security essential to protect vulnerable populations.
Once we caught a glimpse of the massive potential of the WhatsApp API, we made it our mission to encourage and enable social-impact organizations to use this powerful tool to drive positive action. But how are chat-for-impact services different from their commercial chatbot counterparts?
We believe that impactful conversations have to be secure, timely, personalized, and ultimately, human-to-human. Navigating pregnancy as a teen in poverty, securing your first job as a refugee, or addressing gender-based violence in your community are difficult challenges that require sustained effort and empathetic conversations.
Via Whatsapp, these conversations could be had with experienced professionals and organizations. Increasing access to relevant, automated information does help increase knowledge and can play an important role in reducing the burden on national systems. But information alone is seldom sufficient to change complex behaviour over the long term.
Advances in artificial empathy for chatbots is impressive, but there remains significant work to be done until the impact of these technologies can be felt in multicultural, low-cost contexts. To date, 3 billion messages have already been sent by governments, nonprofits, and international organizations to citizens through official WhatsApp messaging services with information on COVID-19. Our best bet is to increase that number and make effective human support across a broad range of topics accessible to vulnerable people everywhere.
This is why we launched the Chat for Impact Community, which enables 250+ world-leading social impact organisations to share their learnings around chat, impact results, and gain feedback and collective wisdom from the community.
Starting in 2019, the Chat for Impact Community started small, but demand grew for guidance on building impactful chat services as the pandemic unfolded. Since early 2020, we’ve also run chat for impact accelerator events in Kenya, Mumbai, and London and virtual events with support from Mercy Corps and the Mulago Foundation.
In May 2021, we hosted the inaugural Chat for Impact Summit powered by WhatsApp, in partnership with Praekelt.org, a tech non-profit, and global development community media platform Devex. The initiative was devised to support and accelerate the work that NGOs are doing to provide vulnerable, disempowered, and minority communities with easy and secure access to vital information and support via WhatsApp.
Out of 600 applicants, 30 organizations were selected to participate in the summit for two days of training to advance their goals of addressing societal issues using WhatsApp. Ten of these high-impact organizations were invited by an independent panel to join the Impact Accelerator, receiving financial support and mentorship.
The future of chat-for-impact
We believe this is just the beginning. The community is growing, and we can now tap into the collective wisdom of hundreds of social impact organizations.
Together, we’re creating playbooks that make it easy to duplicate and remix the most impactful chat services. We hope that secure, timely, personalized, and human conversations will be considered an essential part of any future service aimed at improving lives in low-resource settings.
Join the Chat for Impact Community on LinkedIn to learn more or email Turn.io at impact@turn.io
About the authors
Pippa Yeats
Pippa Yeats is a co-founder and product manager at Turn.io. She focuses on designing a product and community that uses chat and behavioral science to drive real-world social impact.
Lieze Langford
Lieze Langford is the partnership impact manager lead at Turn.io. She is focused on growth through business development, client success, and brand communications.
