Announcing Magpi Respond: Let Your Data Trigger Messages
Magpi Respond lets you react to field data with automatic messages (and in 2016 we’ll be adding mobile payments!).
First Came Forms
The team at Magpi has been working on mobile forms for nearly twenty continuous years, since back in the Palm Pilot days. For all that time, we’ve obsessed on how to help our users get their data from the field into analyzable form as quickly and easily and inexpensively as possible.
Then Came Messaging
Much more recently, in 2013, we added Magpi Messaging, a second component to Magpi.com that enables our users to create text and audio messages and set up affordable broadcast messaging campaigns. Want to remind your field staff to submit their data every Friday? Magpi Messaging can do that. Want to send messages to pregnant women, timed to various stages of pregnancy, for just pennies? Magpi Messaging can do that, too.
But our goal for adding the messaging component to Magpi was to combine the two, and that goal has now been realized with the addition of Magpi Respond.
Forms + Messages = Respond
The basic idea behind Magpi Respond is for your data to trigger some kind of action. Data uploaded to Magpi is examined according to your instructions, and then messages are sent to recipients of your choice. And those messages can be email, SMS, or even automated audio phone calls (great for illiterate populations).
So, for example, if someone saw a sign in a public office asking for feedback by SMS, if that person texted saying that they wanted more information, the information could automatically be sent to them. Or, if they indicated that they were very unsatisfied, the office director might be automatically notified by email (click any image to enlarge).
Or if a doctor in West Africa submits a patient record indicating risk factors for Ebola, that could trigger automated and immediate notification of an Ebola response team by SMS and the district supervisor, (perhaps by a pre-recorded voice message in Dioula, a local dialect).
Or if a supply clerk, filling in a daily stock form, indicated less than a certain quantity of an essential supply, all the appropriate supply-chain people could be alerted automatically by email, voice, or text.
And like everything else in the Magpi system, Magpi Respond is designed to be simple for anyone to set up: no programming, no meeting with mobile carriers, no consultants. Which means that like everything else in the Magpi system, Magpi Respond is affordable for both large and small organizations — and is even available to Magpi Free users.
Coming Soon: Magpi Payments!
Right now, Magpi Repond can send emails, and text and audio messages — but in Q1 2016 we’ll be adding mobile payments to the system! Imagine the effect on reporting if the supply clerk in the example above got automatically paid with mobile money every week for reporting the supply levels.
Imagine setting up a “conditional cash transfer” (CCT) system in just a few minutes.
Originally published at Magpi.
