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Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHU or JHSPH) is the top international public health school in the world and the largest educational institution of its kind. It is dedicated to improving the health of the global community by deploying diverse medical professionals and scientists across the globe to research and innovate on how to prevent diseases and injuries. JHU then implements largescale solutions to safeguard the public’s health worldwide.

JHU reached out to engageSPARK to explore the possibility of collaborating on a public health research in Colombia using SMS text message surveys and Voice IVR (interactive voice response) surveys. The project, The Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative, is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Government of Australia.

JHU sought to survey people from different walks of life in Colombia and wanted the sample to be truly random, so JHU used a random digit dialing (RDD) approach to generate millions of potential Colombian phone numbers, with the aim of collecting 10,000 to 15,000 complete surveys over the course of 14 months.

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International Organization for Migration (IOM)

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is the leading International Organization (IO) in the field of migration under the United Nations (UN) umbrella. With 173 member states, IOM is committed to promoting “humane and orderly migration by providing services and advice to governments and migrants.” IOM has been working with the Government of Ghana in managing migration through different projects for over 25 years.

For their 2018 project in Ghana, “Aware Migrants Information Campaign – Engaging West African Communities (EWAC)”, IOM has reached out to engageSPARK expressing need for a Voice IVR (interactive voice response) Survey solution. The project aims to empower migrants and their communities in making sound decisions to avoid risks of exploitation, enslavement, and death along the way.

In order to gather numbers to be enrolled to the program, and to reach as many people as possible, IOM partnered with a local mobile network operator (MNO) in Ghana to advertise on the MNO’s subscribers’ phones. Through the help of engageSPARK’s SMS and Voice IVR platform, IOM was able to collect valuable data from participants in Ghana and was able to answer critical questions related to irregular migration.

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Inclusion Economics India

Inclusion Economics India Centre, based at Krea University, collaborates with state and central governments in conducting research focused on improving governance, environmental protection, financial inclusion, health, nutrition, and gender equality that affects millions of lives.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent nationwide lockdown in India, Inclusion Economics India launched an automated Voice IVR survey to 300,000 low-income workers returning to their native state. The program aims to better understand the issues returning migrants are facing, whether they have access to government benefits, and whether they are interested in learning more about the different government schemes.

From the initial plan of reaching 300,000 low-income workers, they closed 2020 having reached out to over 400,000 phone numbers. The project then got extended until March 2021 to understand more aspects related to the research.

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Mercy Corps

Mercy Corps is an international NGO that has helped communities turn crisis into opportunity since 1979, and has given a total of $3.7 billion in life saving assistance throughout the world. They alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities.

Following the devastating impact of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013, Mercy Corps implemented a cash transfer and financial literacy program to help families rebuild their lives.

As part of the campaign, Mercy Corps used engageSPARK’s platform to teach financial skills to 20,000 typhoon survivors to help them be more resilient to the next typhoon.  Mercy Corps did this by sending an engaging 12-episode soap opera drama to the survivors using SMS text messages and automated phone calls.

Due to the high response rate to the soap opera episodes, Mercy Corps was able to achieve a dramatic increase in financial literacy among the recipients, resulting in a 106% increase in savings among people who reported receiving soap operas via automated phone calls.

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Grameen Foundation

Grameen Foundation (GF) is a global nonprofit organization that aims to alleviate hunger and poverty by providing financial, health, and agricultural services to rural families, especially women.

Grameen has been collaborating with engageSPARK for over three years using SMS messaging in two of its programs in the Philippines: FarmerLink and WomenLink. This case study focuses mainly on Grameen’s WomenLink program, “WOMENLINK PHASE 1: Empowering women through financial inclusion in the Philippines”.

Grameen sent out weekly SMS blasts to women enrolled in WomenLink program totaling to 280,977 SMS sent throughout the course of 6 months that ended in December 2018 with an estimated SMS cost of $4,400.

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Acumen

Acumen is dedicated to changing the way the world tackles poverty by investing in companies, leaders and ideas that enable the poor to transform their lives. Founded in 2001, Acumen has invested more than $88 million in 82 companies spread across Africa, Latin America and South Asia. It also supports these companies with tools to gather feedback from their clients, with the aim of improving its investees’ products or services. 

Acumen used engageSPARK to run a series of IVR surveys, achieving very high response rates. Because IVR campaigns are cheap and easy to set up on the engageSPARK platform, Acumen was able to launch the survey 12 different ways, running experiments to determine which combination of factors would lead to the highest survey response rates.

The survey’s high success rate enabled Acumen to meet its goal of quickly and reliably measuring the level of awareness that people had about certain benefits and to help educate those people. IVR campaigns via engageSPARK proved to be an extremely powerful survey tool for Acumen to boost its effectiveness.

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People in Need

People in Need (PIN) is a Czech-based non-profit organization providing humanitarian and development aid across the globe for over 20 years. 

PIN reached out to engageSPARK about a mHealth (mobile health) campaign for mental health outcomes among 200+ adolescent Nepali mothers aged 14-19. It was one of two interventions under the Hello Saathi Project. Using engageSPARK’s easy-to-use interactive voice response (IVR) system, they sent audio drama and quizzes available on basic mobile phones.

PIN applied a rewards system to keep the mothers engaged which was made easy with engageSPARK’s automated Global Airtime Top-up API where the mobile credit is automatically sent to the registered phone number as soon as the IVR is completed.

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Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a global research and policy non-profit organisation that discovers and promotes effective solutions for global poverty problems. Sustainable growth requires the management of scarce natural resources, such as water. In countries such as Zambia, which has an arid climate, water management is an extreme problem. One of the hurdles that need to be overcome is lack of education among affected people on how best to manage the scarce water supply.

IPA researchers used engageSPARK to conduct a survey in Zambia to assess whether improved information and incentives can help households better manage their water usage. Research participants were contacted via automated SMS text messages and automated phone calls.

By leveraging the tools of the engageSPARK platform, the researchers were able to show that targeted education can indeed help households manage their water usage. The automated messaging and calls were an ideal complement to the rest of the tools the researchers used to inspire participants to engage actively with the survey. This helped the researchers to truly understand what incentives would be most effective in bringing about change and motivating households to conserve water.

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House of IT

House of IT is an Australian BPO with clients in Australia, Europe and the USA. Their services include outsourcing of Software Development, IT Support and Managed Services. Many BPOs struggle with high rates of employee absenteeism. In addition, employees often don’t send advance notification if they will be late or absent. To solve this problem, House of IT decided to use engageSPARK to manage their employee attendance.

They set up an attendance hotline on the engageSPARK platform that their employees can call or text to (for free) to report that they’ll be late or absent, reducing excuses like “no load”, “no airtime”, or “no internet”. Because of this, managers and HR get notified instantly of an employee’s absence or lateness.

The attendance hotline has enabled House of IT to improve their employee attendance management dramatically, by making employee attendance behavior much more transparent. HR can closely monitor attendance rates in real time, and respond rapidly whenever there is a staff shortage. As many of their projects are time sensitive, this provides a critical advantage to the company.

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Noora Health

Noora Health is a non-profit organization that offers training and information to caregivers and patients after surgeries. It aims to ensure that patients are well taken care of during their recovery process from a major medical event or chronic condition. While in the hospital, patients and their families receive a great deal of training and information. But once they are released from the hospital, families often travel long distances to their homes. 

Noora Health decided to tackle this challenge by leveraging the engageSPARK platform to develop an efficient way of providing patients and their families with a quick summary of information taught in the hospital classroom once they get back to their homes. Since the educational material was delivered via interactive voice response (IVR) and SMS text messages, this allowed Noora Health to reliably reach patients even in remote areas without internet access.

By using engageSPARK, Noora Health was able to reinforce the training given to patients and their families in the hospital, and to send key information relating to critical symptoms, diet, body temperature, hand washing, and exercise. Its ability to communicate via automated phone calls with the patients and their families after they had left the hospital helped the organisation to achieve its mission of providing high-impact health skills to improve health and save lives.

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SNV Netherlands Development Organisation

SNV is an international NGO that aims to alleviate poverty by enabling increased education and employment opportunities and increasing access to basic services. In rural Cambodia, malnutrition is prevalent for children under the age of five in low-income households. It leads to stunting, illnesses, infections, increased risk of mortality, delayed cognitive development, poor performance and absence from school. 

To address the nutritional deficiencies that cause stunting, SNV Cambodia implemented a communication campaign to change people’s behavior. SNV Cambodia leveraged engageSPARK’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform to implement its project, with the aim of encouraging rural female farmers with home gardens to feed their children the right amount of diverse vegetables every day. 

The high success rate of the IVR campaign, coupled with its low cost, enabled SNV Cambodia to positively impact the lives and behavior of a large Cambodian farming community, by reaching out to them with engaging messages that helped to open the eyes of participants to the importance of a balanced, nutritious diet for their children.

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