Image by Wayne Conradie, Picturing Africa

engageSPARK is a not-for-profit social business that will empower development organizations such as NGOs and governments to dramatically extend the reach and impact of their pro-poor programs. engageSPARK will be the first solution that enables organizations around the world to easily and quickly launch comprehensive messaging, surveying, and decision tree programs focused on developing countries via SMS and Voice Calls.

Developing countries are at a tipping point, as mobile phones have become the de facto communications infrastructure. Organizations focused on the poor are taking advantage of the mobile phone’s ubiquity (4.5 billion mobile phone users in developing countries) to save and improve lives around the world. More and more organizations of all types and sizes are implementing social change interventions, data collection, and marketing programs via mobile phones. With engageSPARK, they’ll be able to do much more.

But engageSPARK is not just for NGOs and governments. Businesses and Startups will also use engageSPARK to significantly increase the reach and impact of their work, whether those programs focus on health, agriculture, marketing, consumer research, governance, emergency response, or anything for that matter. Organizations will use engageSPARK to reach anyone who has access to a mobile phone, whether the recipient is literate or illiterate.

Here is a tiny sampling of the types of engagements that NGOs will be able to create and launch from anywhere to people in 200+ countries with engageSPARK:

• Health Education: Weekly voice calls to rural pregnant women with information on health, diet, dispelling local myths, etc.

• Mobilization Reminders: Automatic SMS or Voice Calls to remind poor workers to meet up for outreach on legal rights.

• Consumer Research: Ask potential customers about their interests in market products more effectively based on each individual’s preferences.

• On Demand Information: The client calls and uses a Voice decision tree to find the location of the nearest clinic.

• Birth Registration via Field Workers: Nurses in clinics send an SMS to their government to register newborns.

• Medication Adherence Reminders: Scheduled voice calls or SMS messages reminding patients to take their TB, Malaria, HIV, or other medicine.

• Surveys: The system asks rural communities questions via Voice Calls in their local language, records the answer, and transcribes it via crowdsourcing. Organizations can also use SMS for literate populations.

• Emergency Alerts: An NGO sends an SMS to a number or records a voice message by calling a number, and we automatically re-transmit the messages to a subscriber list, including to emergency responders.

And imagine if you could do all this within minutes, without needing any technical expertise?  We’ll tell you more in future posts.