How Zlto is Building a Movement during Covid-19
As the status of Covid-19 fluctuates in South Africa, access to basic goods remains a core issue. Unemployment figures continue to rise and government programs have become bottlenecked, leaving a tremendous strain on many South Africans to generate income to feed their families. Food security is exacerbated as social distancing measures continue to be enforced.
We’ve witnessed numerous community organizations respond with generosity by creating independent food campaigns across South Africa. The NGO RLabs is actively highlighting grass-roots food drives initiatives, such as “Our Drive”. (support these initiatives at rlabs.org/donate).
As an initiative that was started to help unemployed youth find jobs without worrying about the cost, Zlto has assisted a range of users access goods through our incentives marketplace while driving positive action through its micro task platform. We’ve worked with partners such as Google and Unicef to address youth unemployment across South Africa, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
When it came to Covid-19, the Zlto team’s response started by evaluating the tools we had and leveraging existing networks to identify a fast-scaling response.
Prior to the pandemic, the Zlto platform was focused on the following use cases:
- Digital Incentives
- Microtasking
- Surveys
- User Analytics
We spoke with our active partners to explore which avenues would best form a unified response to the social issues surfacing from the virus, starting with food access.
In our “Zlto Covid-19 Barometer”, we surveyed our users and found that 78% indicated disturbances in their food supply, while 85% indicated that the lockdown will have a negative impact on their household income.
We made these results public and began sharing the information we learned with our partners. We found a high level of interest among corporates who wanted to take action and combat these social concerns before they could take hold.
Merging our partnerships with our team’s innovations, we agreed on a plan of action. We identified three critical goods — food, electricity, airtime — that we could easily disburse through the Zlto digital incentives marketplace.
Together, we launched a campaign to feed 50,000 families in 12 weeks — the Zlto #EssentialsCampaign.
The campaign’s focus is to target families lacking access to essential items: electricity vouchers for their homes, food vouchers via Shoprite, and Airtime for their mobile devices.
We first launched through targeted partnerships, eventually making it completely open to the public. We require all users to complete a Covid-19 Survey before purchasing from the Essentials Store, and all users are verified through email, SMS, and a completed user profile.
In just one week of launch, we’ve nearly doubled our user base and increased daily active users by more than 400%.
With more users, we’ve been focused on exploring new and creative ways to expand our platform to capture more value for our users and reward Zlto for doing good.
One idea that our co-founder, Marlon Parker, had was to take our survey tasks and convert them into nano-courses — a series of rapid questions that require responses beyond “Yes” or “No” and instead interacting with their communities to reflect the content they learn.
By expanding our existing survey templates, we constructed a course titled “Introduction to Social Innovation”, where we tasked users to spread the idea of wearing a mask across their communities. One question even asked them to use what they had in their homes to create their own masks.
The positive response surprised us. In just half a day, the nano-course was completed by 400 people. Our users responded across their social media accounts, some even taking their time to create custom graphics, all sharing the message to “Do your part and wear a mask” and submitting proof of their work.
The #EssentialsCampaign’s strength depends on our users. The level of engagement has made us proud to be serving them, and more so that through this campaign we can drive action, empower voices, and send messages across South Africa critical to combating the virus.
More than 12,000 people have completed the nano-courses we’ve built on Zlto — all 1 week since launching our first course.
We’ve launched 5 new courses, ranging from “Starting a Side Hustle” to “Finding a New Job” to “Learning how to Stand Out”.
As a team, we are excited for the next 8 weeks and how we can do our part to expand access to essential goods for families across South Africa, while multiplying the net positive impact of each new user through our nano-courses.
The #EssentialsCampaign has already helped serve 270,000 meals over 10 days across all major regions of South Africa.
If you are interested in joining the movement, visit zlto.co where you can access our nano-courses, earn Zlto, and purchase essential goods.
Thank you to our partners in the campaign: J.P. Morgan, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Unicef, E Squared, and of course RLabs.