Anonymous Digital Groups to elicit feedback from users
Authors: Charles Copley, Eli Grant
Collecting feedback from users is a common problem in any service. This is often achieved through focus group discussions or surveys, however these are expensive and slow to carry out. With the advent of IP messaging it is, however, possible to carry these out digitally over platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, signal and others.
One of the issues with such groups, is that certain identifiable characteristics are shared with other members of the group. In particular, the telephone number of all participants would be accessible to other members of the group. This is a serious problem for any focus group discussions that deal with issues of health, in particular stigmatised areas.
It is however relatively easy to design a system to removes such identifying characteristics, provided that you have access to an API of the messaging platform. We implemented such a platform and demonstrated its efficacy with groups of size 10.
Implementing the platform is a matter of ensuring that all incoming messages get routed through to a central system (in our case RapidPro), where identifying characteristics (e.g. phone number) can be removed. The message can then be forwarded to other members of the group. This is demonstrated graphically below:
One of the magical things about this architecture, is that it can be used on any messaging platform that you have API access to. It even allows such groups to be set up over a text message platform!
We hope that this information will be useful to others. We will be publishing our findings having carried out digital focus group discussions in other blogs under the Patient Engagement Lab Publication.
