Interested in Using Messaging Apps like WhatsApp for Engagement? So are we!

Echo Mobile’s platform enables organizations to engage, influence and understand their target audiences through technologies that are available on any mobile phone, anywhere in the world: SMS, IVR, and USSD.

However, we are increasingly asked whether mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger can be leveraged in Africa for similarly effective and efficient engagement at scale.

The short answer is… not really. And not yet. But we are watching and working carefully to figure out how and when!

As a starting point, we partnered with the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) to examine how and to what effect international development organizations have used messaging apps. We recently published our extensive research!

We are excited to summarize our findings here and link to the research at the end of this blog. If this catches your interest, please contribute to the discussion page (link at bottom). If you are interested in using messengers with Echo, let’s talk!

Our Research

Our global research with DIAL was intended to benefit technologists who develop messaging apps as well as those interested in using them in Africa and other emerging markets.

We explored diverse cases, spanning advocacy groups, social enterprises, private development firms, global multilaterals, and conducted more than 50 interviews with development practitioners, digital development experts, technology providers, and entrepreneurs, resulting in the following publications:

1. A Project Catalog with brief summaries of 14 organizations that have used messaging apps.
2. Six in-depth case studies examining how organizations chose and deployed messaging apps, their successes, challenges, and discoveries.
3. An extensive analytical report synthesizing key lessons about using messaging apps for development from across the project catalog and case studies.

Our Findings

Access is still a major hurdle in Africa

By 2018, 3.6 billion people were using mobile messaging applications — nearly half of humanity. In 2017, Africa reached 191 million social media and messaging app users, 90% of whom are mobile and the majority of whom use only WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, the world’s most popular messaging apps.

Yet this messaging app use, while growing, represents just 16% of the population (while almost everyone uses SMS and voice calls). Messaging apps are not yet a truly scalable engagement channel for organizations in sub-Saharan Africa because:

• Just 21% of Africans have internet access.
• Messaging apps exclude people in rural areas and women, who are 26% less likely to use mobile internet than men.
• The majority of mobile phones in Africa are still feature phones.
• Year on year growth in shipments of feature phones to Africa have increased while smartphone imports are declining.
• Echo’s Deployment team has observed in the field that even those with smartphones do not necessarily use smart features, like mobile apps. Our research with DIAL found that this is largely because of mobile data costs, while toll-free shortcodes and IVR lines offer a toll-free experience.

Women are less likely to have access to internet than men ~ Photograph by Catherine Clark from WFP

Even if you are trying to engage just the minority of Africans who use smartphones, the variety of different messaging apps makes this challenging. Some populations use WhatsApp, others Facebook Messenger, Viber, or Telegram. These tools can’t talk to each other, so which do you use? How do you know where to find people?

Unlike SMS, there is no single global standard — there are dozens of messaging apps that do not talk to each other, each with millions of users, and with popularity that varies widely by region, country, and demographic. Even within Kenya, farmers may use Facebook Messenger, while women in urban settlements use WhatsApp.

Web platforms like Echo allow organizations to conduct SMS engagements across all demographics, locations, and even remotely across international borders. But similar scale and flexibility for messaging apps will have to account for the use of multiple different messaging apps, none of which talk to each other.

Each app also has different features and requirements for integration with other platforms like Echo or your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.

These integrations requires significant technical capacity, and some messaging apps simply cannot be integrated with (yet), notably WhatsApp. WhatsApp must instead be used manually, at very small scale, in-country, and without the benefit of analytics like Echo’s.

There are Viable Options for Messengers, if Used Carefully

From in-depth research into these cases, Echo identified four common use cases where messaging apps have been effective for international development organizations:

1. One-to-One Matching of People With Resources
2. Group Peer-to-Peer Learning and Behavior Change
3. Information Broadcast
4. Crowdsourced Reporting and Feedback

For all of these use cases, Echo found that the following considerations are essential when selecting specific messaging apps:

1. Privacy and Security: To protect user information and personal security, consider information types and stakeholders when reviewing encryption protocols, data policies, and anonymity features and policies.
2. Operational Requirements: Not all messaging apps have features tailored to organizations, which can make them operationally inefficient.
3. Scalability and Searchability: Some messaging apps limit the number of users that can be added to a group chat or broadcast list. Some also limit the ability to share and search for content and group, which can make it difficult to scale messaging app initiatives.

Echo found that the following considerations are essential for successful project design when deploying messaging apps for development:

1. Engage More Users With Multiple Channels: Messaging apps are cheap for organizations but can be costly to users. Smartphone users without Wi-Fi still prefer free channels like SMS and IVR, which also enable organizations to reach a larger audience.
2. Go Where the People’s Attention is: For organizations deploying messaging apps for development, the most critical success factor was whether audiences were familiar with the apps. If not, organizations should substitute or combine other channels like SMS.
3. Focus on User Needs Over Implementer Needs: Development organizations that deployed messaging apps successfully conducted extensive user research and chose messaging apps based solely on the appeal and costs to users, not implementers.
4. Prioritize Communications Content and Personnel: Development organizations had the most success with messaging apps when they had teams dedicated to continuous content development, as well as sector experts and data analysts.
5. Partner for Scale and Technical Expertise: Many organizations achieved scale and impact by partnering with the messaging app developers, third-party technical service partners, or government or creative agencies.

Want to read the full report, case studies, and project catalog? There’s a lot to learn over at:

https://messengers.digitalimpactalliance.org

Interested in using messaging apps as a channel on the Echo Mobile platform?

We’re working on it!

Please contact info@echomobile.org to share your ideas. We’d love to speak with you and see how we can support your needs!