Concorona

When the COVID-19 pandemic first shook the world, our team at Vollar immediately saw the devastating effects of fake news.

Our background in behavioural economics and technology positioned us perfectly to deploy a chatbot that rewards people for keeping informed about the virus. The Concorona chatbot allows the public to participate in quizzes and symptom checks, and for their interactions on the chatbot, they earn reward points called Concora. 

Concorona partners with small and medium businesses who offer discounts on their products or services in exchange for Concora rewards, bringing new customers to their businesses.

Concorona gathers data from every interaction a user makes, including knowledge gaps around specific questions from our quizzes and detailed symptom data from our symptom checks. Because rewards drive regular engagement, we are able to gather real-time geolocated symptom information from across South Africa. We hope this data can be used for early outbreak prediction.

Concorona is solving the problem of misinformation and lack of real-time information regarding the symptoms and spread of COVID-19.

Our solution is a chatbot that rewards people with points for completing daily health checks and weekly quizzes. Users can use their points to purchase discounts from participating businesses.

A chatbot was chosen because it provides immediate access to users, it's simple to use, and it can be easily translated. Creating a chatbot allowed us to go from idea to production within 2 weeks.

Concorona keeps people informed on the latest information through simple to understand quizzes. These quizzes are updated regularly and also include questions that dispel myths.

On the other side, businesses that offer deals have a new way aquire customers in this difficult economy.

If the platform gets enough support, the data that is captured can be very useful to health workers to better understand how the virus develops, and how it's spreading.

Concorona is keeping people informed, and helping people and businesses to stand together to drive responsible behaviour. It allows businesses to take a stand and say, “if you keep informed, we’ll reward you”.

While there are numerous solutions on app stores to track COVID-19 symptoms, Concorona is the only solutions we are aware of globally that is using rewards to drive regular checkins. Without regular checkins, health information that is captured provides limited value. However, with regular geolocated checkups by the same people, offered by Concorona, data scientists will be able to understand how the virus develops and spreads.

Concorona uses chatbots to deliver it’s services. Chatbots are an amazing tool for engaging with large audiences because they are simple to understand and use, can be easily translated to multiple languages, and launching a service as a chatbot gives immediate access to users without them having to download an app first.

Concorona is currently deployed on Facebook Messenger and Moya Datafree Messenger (South Africa)

Our rewards system is built on our own wallet technology called Payper.

Since inception, Concorona has onboarded over 26 000 users, facilitated over 19 000 symptom checks, and facilitated over 25 000 quizzes.

As a result, we have listed and sold over 700 hundred deals and discounts from participating businesses.

Here is a screenshot from our dashboard, showing the current areas where are testing high for COVID-19.

Concorona is a free chatbot that rewards people for keeping informed about the corona virus. On the chatbot, users can engaged in quizzes and symptom checks. 

These interactions result in the users earning reward points that can be used to purchase discounts from partner businesses. Additionally, data is generated from these interactions.

Out long term outcomes are to:

• To generate enough real-time data that prediction models can be built to more effectively deploy health workers to areas that present the greatest risk of outbreak.
• To stop the spread of misinformation by rewarding people for getting correct information.
• To create a platform that people can gain discounts on essential products and services, making their money go further during the economic downturn.
• To create a platform where small and medium businesses can gain exposure for their products and services, to acquire new customers and survive the economic downturn.

We are certain that Concorona is on track to reach these outcomes because of user growth and user activity.  

Concorona currently serves over 26 000 users. 

Concorona is ready to scale to any country, and we believe that within 1 year it could easily pass 1 million users. 

The next five years depend very much on how society responds to the virus and how great the need will be for a service like Concorona. If the need is still great, Concorona could surpass 10 million users in this time.

Within the next year we would like Concorona to be available in at least 4 countries. We are already in the process of building relationships to launch Concorona in Uganda.

Within 5 years, 12 countries or more, impacting the lives of millions of people.

Concorona is already ready to scale. When starting in a new country, we translate the platform to the local language and build partnerships with local businesses to offer deals on the platform.

Currently the barrier is funding. Concorona was built and is maintained by the team at Vollar. Vollar is a startup working on its own product and currently doesn’t have enough time or money to put dedicated staff on scaling the platform out.

We are applying for various funding sources to gain the necessary capital to scale.

Concorona was build internally at Vollar (www.vollar.org). Vollar is a startup specialising in using behavioural technology to drive positive social impact. Concorona is maintained internally while working on other tasks for Vollar.

4 people.

Margo - Business partnerships / Sourcing Information
Moshibudi - Business partnerships / African Translations
Tiialotta - Chatbot maintainance / Deals manager / Translation management
Kyle - Chatbot developer / Rewards developer

Out team specialise in behavioural technology and using rewards to incentive outcomes.

We have proven this capability through Vollar and through the growth of Concorona.

Bi.Nu - Providing data free access to the deals platform so users from low-income communities can access the platform.

Moya Messenger - Providing free access to their businesses api for launching Concorona on their platform. They also promoted Concorona to their users, resulting in massive growth for the platform.

Partner Businesses - Providing deals and discounts

Concorona is not currently producing revenue. However, when we have gained enough business partners and users, we will produce revenue from charging a small listing fee and a small fee every time a user purchases a business’s deal. 

This could be expanded to create revenue from partnering with brands directly. 

We are raising capital at the moment, either from grants or equity investments, and will use this funding to scale the service as its own line of business. We will launch a revenue model to keep the businesses sustainable and growing.

Since this initiative is quite young, we are also open to exploring keeping Concorona non-profit, if we can find donors or impact investors that are willing to support and scale the initiative. 

We are applying to solve to increase the recognition and impact of our solution. We also hope to raise funding to scale Concorona.

We believe that partnering with Solve will give Concorona the necessary networks to scale.

Acquiring deal providers on the platform is a requirement to launching in a new country. Finding partners that can facilitate introductions to businesses in other countries to acquire deal providers would be highly valuable for scaling.

Concorona is producing big data on symptoms relating to COVID-19. This data can be used to build models to predict outbreaks early.

Concorona has the opportunity to become a profitable businesses that impacts millions affected by COVID-19. This technology can be easily white labeled and reused for any issue that's affecting a society.