Should you collect data from hard-to-reach populations using Voice (IVR) or SMS? If you’re not sure, you’re not alone: Unilever recently faced the same question in Indonesia. After sending around 26,000 SMS and IVR messages and questions to about 4,000...
Text can’t replace the human voice. Not really. That’s one of the lessons a lot of people have had to learn the past six months while working from home. This is true for office work—but it’s also true for NGO surveys and any kind of social intervention. Two ways to...
Recently, a program manager reached out to us about surveying members of a rather remote community. Usually, such a survey would mean she or one of her colleagues would ride a boat for several hours—one way—followed by the giving of gifts and finally the survey. This...
This is an exciting time for communicating with beneficiaries around the world. As more and more messaging apps are ready for integration we can reach more people and in better ways. Surveys in particular benefit from this: you can make surveys more powerful, cheaper...
We’ve seen one simple mistake ruin SMS surveys again and again. It happens only with text messages, but if you plan a text survey, we’d love to help you avoid this mistake and improve your response rate. Let’s use a mobile operator in the Philippines...
I know how you feel. I have worked at an enterprise software company in the US, and I have also worked at a nonprofit (NGO) in the Philippines. So I’ve seen firsthand just how different those universes are, as well as how different the utilization of technology can be...
