Scoping Sourcebot, our financial messenger bot for Zimbabwe
--
Supported by #innovateAFRICA, The Source and the European Journalism Centre are building an open source newsbot to help news organisations deliver personalized news and engage more effectively via messaging platforms (read our original application here).
We’re starting in Zimbabwe with The Source, a new financial news start-up operating in a desperately insecure financial environment. From Bloomberg:
Zimbabwe abandoned its own currency eight years ago and adopted mainly the dollar, initially halting hyperinflation. Now, with a floundering economy and a strong dollar stoking imports and curtailing exports, banknotes have virtually disappeared, prompting the central bank to order private lenders to cap customer cash withdrawals at $150 a week. While the Reserve Bank estimates about $4 billion is circulating in the economy, Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries President Busisa Moyo says the amount may be as little as $100 million, about a quarter of what he believes is needed.
In the midst of this, The Source is becoming an increasingly important and influential voice. Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Nelson Banya and News Editor Alfonce Mbizwo, it is arguably now the definitive destination for independent finance and business reporting from Zimbabwe.
The aim of Sourcebot is to deliver reliable, personalized finance news and data against this backdrop and build a new readership for The Source via Facebook. Last week, we kickstarted our product development and began to scope our minimum viable product (MVP), so we can have maximum impact as quickly as possible.
Meeting our early adopters
Attending the workshop in Harare was a great chance to get face-to-face with a great set of early adopters — young, digitally-savvy journalists with a professional interest in news. Most had smartphones and were very active on WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter.
WhatsApp was by far and away the most common messaging platform in the group — the journalists were members of multiple broadcast groups (The Source has one with 5000 members for instance), but also general groups for different types of journalists. Inside these, they reach out to one another for tips, sources, contacts and support. WhatsApp bundles are cheaper than other data bundles.
Facebook had a strong adoption with this group too, but seemed to be used less on mobile. Some had the messaging app, but it wasn’t as common as WhatsApp so we’d need to encourage download of this. The fact that Messenger lives on Facebook web is a huge opportunity however. Most of the early adopters accessed a desktop with an internet connection for work.
Twitter is used for sources and networking, and general self promotion and news consumption. Not an ideal environment for a bot, but could be good for spreading the word about it.
Action: The bot has to be an FB Messenger bot. WhatsApp bot APIs don’t exist (and break the platform’s T&Cs). FB has the reach, the framework (including wit.ai), the community, the failed experiments, and — as you’ll see — there’s a nice secondary benefit to using that platform…
The Source’s Facebook play
The Source has two Facebook pages — one is orphaned following a lost password and no access to the admin email (Facebook have a policy to not help organisations with this).
A regular effort to post video and more conversational content will help. But, with only 650 followers, there’s work to do, and growing the Facebook community is central to The Source’s growth strategy. That’s where Sourcebot comes in.
An audience for The Source on Facebook exists out there. Newsday, a Zimbabwe news site, has 850k likes on Facebook. A similar bot — Zimstocks — has 36k followers. So, in addition to generally boosting audience engagement and driving traffic to The Source, a new goal for Sourcebot is to get those Facebook page numbers up.
Luckily, those initial 650 page likes, plus our early adopter group (who can feedback to us hopefully via WhatsApp) are a perfect audience to test the bot. Not having to build this community from scratch is a real bonus.
Action: Get access to the Facebook Page, and kickstart a beta testers group on WhatsApp.
What type of bot?
I went into the user interview sessions with a completely open mind as to the type of bot this might be. The interviews highlighted a gap between news consumption habits (our early adopters still tended to go and visit websites via a browser) and their use of social platforms (in-app mobile usage, high tolerance for notifications).
Sourcebot could fill that gap, by delivering personalised news into a messaging environment. Demoing CNN, WSJ, TechCrunch and Politico bots led to positive responses. Early adopters and editorial staff were excited and engaged by the interactivity, conversational style and speed (a real improvement compared to browsing a site).
A daily wrap of The Source’s best articles therefore seems like a great place to start an MVP. This requires zero extra editorial input, and is working with tried and tested content. Once we have the bot engaging with an authentic voice, we can investigate the audience for new potential features (categories, trending articles) and think about how AI might enhance the experience (though we’re going to be very cautious about that I suspect).
That’s where the hard work starts: how can we tailor Sourcebot for both The Source’s content mix and a Zimbabwean audience? Staying relevant and essential in turbulent times will be the key.
Action: The next steps will be to choose our bot development framework, see what existing open source bots we can use as a springboard, and check out how to connect to the article database.
