Glific - A Two Way Commuication Platform

NGOs face a challenge in delivering their programming digitally when physical means are no longer an option. COVID made it even more urgent to solve this. Interacting with millions of people a day in a timely manner while measuring impact, is crucial.

Our open-source, 2-way chat platform Glific, aims to disrupt the communication paradigm between NGOs & their communities. NGOs engage with their beneficiaries at scale, to distribute content, & effectively deliver their education, healthcare programming with lesser staff

To administer a program to a diverse community at large scale, 

• our solution supports multiple regional languages 

• images, videos, audio messages further strengthen the impact of messages

• reach of WhatsApp in Asia and the Global South is extremely high which allows NGOs to meet the communities where they are at

• scalable technologies and features are the foundation of the solution

Glific, an open-source two-way communication platform, helps NGOs bridge the last mile gap digitally via smartphones & WhatsApp.

During the pandemic, NGOs such as Slam Out Loud, Reap Benefit, and others wanted to connect with their beneficiaries digitally to continue their programs since in-person meetings were not possible. They were able to put something together but it was not an efficient, cost-effective, or scalable digital solution.

Mobile phones and cheap data can revolutionize communication between NGOs and their communities. This will enhance their program delivery to be more efficient. In India, WhatsApp has an installed base of 400 million people (and growing). This makes it a great platform to connect to the end-user since they are already familiar with using the app, and there is no download required, which is a huge hurdle for most app-based systems.

We want to solve the problem of NGOs’ program delivery with an open-source, two-way communication platform Glific, that NGOs use to engage with their beneficiaries, distribute content, provide useful information at their pace & get feedback.

It enables NGOs to launch their programs in a chatbot format quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale. We have been able to design, test, and build our platform working closely with a group of NGOs from month 3 onwards. Our goal is to deliver NGOs a platform that meets most of their needs!

Our solution is a React application that the user runs in a browser (mobile app coming soon), communicating with the backend. The backend is responsible for processing incoming messages and sending outgoing messages via WhatsApp Business API. The backend is built on Elixir and Postgres and integrates with Google BigQuery, DataStudio and DialogFlow for advanced functionality.

Most NGOs use our SaaS platform to deploy their program. They also have an option of installing their own instance by downloading our open-source codebase.

Our customers are NGOs, and social impact organizations that have a significant end-user base of beneficiaries they communicate frequently with. Our initial NGOs are in the education, career skilling, health care, and legal sectors.

An ideal NGO customer would have an end-user base of at least 500 people and interacts with them 2-3 times a week. This could include delivering content and conducting quizzes, checking on their welfare, giving them an update on the latest legal front.

We have been able to design, test, and build our platform working closely with a group of NGOs from month 3 onwards. Our goal is to deliver NGOs a platform that meets most of their needs!

About 20 NGOs are using the platform currently, So far, the platform has reached 50K+ beneficiaries. The solution has been used for an exchange of over 1.5m+ messages 

Partnering with more NGOs who are reimagining their programs to run digitally, we will be able to reach a lot more beneficiaries and impact a lot more lives.

All our existing NGOs are part of our Discord communication channel where they seek help and exchange ideas with us and other NGOs addressing similar issues. We talk with our customers on a daily basis and work with them in tailoring the system for their needs. Most of our recent features have come from ideas and suggestions requested by the NGO.

Providing a platform to make it easier for NGOs to deliver their services in a digital manner is important and critical. As more and more of the world gets digitally connected, giving NGOs powerful tools and systems to deliver their programmatic services is the role that Glific plays in the ecosystem. We do not provide direct services to the end-user but are a vital component in connecting NGOs to their beneficiaries and hence have a strong alignment with the challenge.

Examples of our work during the pandemic include connecting citizens to volunteers and hospitals to provide support and care.

We are working with a group of 20 NGOs and onboarding 3-5 new organizations on a monthly basis (the current Covid Pandemic in India has slowed things down). For the new NGOs that we onboard, we meet most of their needs, and hence we are beyond the pilot phase.

In the past few months, the platform has interacted with more than 50K+ beneficiaries and sent/received more than 1.5 million messages.

Glific makes it easier for NGOs to communicate with their beneficiaries in an automated and scalable manner with minimal technical expertise. 

Our focus on the NGO and social sector allow us to build tools and solutions that address their needs in a much more effective manner. Providing a SaaS platform at an affordable price with amazing customer support, allows NGOs to focus on the processes for the problems they are tackling. Building a community of NGOs and developers helps strengthen the ecosystem. 

Being an open-source project, allows us to share solutions across multiple NGOs and hence strengthens and validates the power of the ecosystem. Most of our best ideas and integrations have come from our NGO partners as we work closely with them on a daily basis.

Our goal at Glific is to provide the best platform that we could potentially design and build to make our NGO partners' life easier. As such, we are enabling a broader positive impact for our NGO partners.

Some examples of organizations  that we've enabled include:

* Reap Benefit -to connect hospitals, volunteers, and Covid patients.

* Digital Green - to connect farmers to experts in a dynamic manner and get relevant information to both parties on time

* Weunlearn - the ability to run a large-scale study in a limited amount of time in an attempt to gauge and address the mental health of adolescents during Covid

* Video Volunteers, IDInsight, Janagraaha - the ability to run small impromptu citizen and community surveys across large parts of India on a real time basis.

Our targets are below. In 2021 so far, we have served 21 NGOs and have reached a bit more than 50,000 beneficiaries. We expect this number to increase significantly as the effect of the pandemic recedes in India and the school year begins

Year    NGOs served         Total Number of Beneficiaries

2021    40                         150,000 

2022    80                         200,000

2023    200                       2,000,000

As a sector-agnostic platform, we cannot measure our impact directly against most of the SDG's, with the exception of SDG 17, which is "Partnership for the  Goals", which we can measure by the number of ecosystem partners we have at any given time which comprises of NGO Partners, Software Partners, and Consulting Partners.

We will also measure our impact by measuring the growth of our platform over time. Some of the metrics that we currently use across a time range include:

• The total number of Active NGOs on the platform
• The total number of messages sent and/or received
• The total number of end-users who interacted with the platform
• Number of new users
• Number of repeat users
• Number of disappearing users
• Growth rate for each of the above metrics over time 

6 Developers

1 Product Manager

1 Support and Sales

2 Active Volunteers

3-5 Open Source contributors

The team comes from a strong product, technology, open-source, and social sector background. 

Our founders, Donald Lobo and Kurund Jalmi have been working at the intersection of technology, open-source and social good for the past 15 years and have a deep understanding of the space. They also co-founded CiviCRM, an open-source constituent relationship management (CRM) system for the social sector. Today, CiviCRM is a thriving and successful open-source project that is sustained by the community.

Lobo also has been running a private foundation that is focused on technology with a focus on India. As such, his connections to the Indian philanthropy and non-profit ecosystem are helpful to Glific.

Glific works as a collaboration of software companies. As such, we seek to ensure that the companies that we work with is diverse and inclusive. We are trying our best to have an equitable gender balance within our software companies, but are far from achieving our goals. Of the two software companies, one of them has a 50% gender balance in their founding team. Our training partner, Tech4Good Community, also has been co-founded by women.

We currently are 7 males and 1 female on the team. Our goal is to ensure that the next few hires are predominately female.

Three reasons why it will benefit Glific to become a solver

• The solve network with its diverse views and thoughts on how to solve problems at scale in a sustainable manner
• Our focus is on building the community and the ecosystem, which intersects a lot with many of the organizations that are in the network. We believe the synergy and symbiosis with like-minded organizations will be beneficial
• Access to mentors and folks who have done similar things before. Glific straddles the divide between a focussed open-source software social business and an NGO. We want to do good, but be sustainable. We want to make a big impact by helping orgs go above and beyond what they potentially can do by themselves. 

All the reasons above converge with each other. The bottom line, being in the company of other solvers, will help us grow and dream even bigger!

Branding and marketing is our biggest weakness, and we hope to get help from the broader community out there. 

Being an organization that is in-between a software provider and an NGO, the impact question is always a bit hard for us to answer in a good manner. Do we use business metrics from the software world, or do we use social impact metrics from the NGO world. We'd love to get better clarity and a better story to go around this for Glific

- Organizations with needs that are addressed by Glific and in general by the broader open source ecosystem

- Organizations that have a deep and long presence in countries that we are interested in especially in Asia and Latin America

- AI/NLP experts from MIT faculty to help us straddle the divide between technology and literacy, which we can potentially bypass quite nicely with the integration of audio and video in our communication.

Glific can be a valuable tool for refugee organizations. Many refugees are from countries where WhatsApp is widely used. Many refugees do use WhatsApp to communicate with their family and social networks in their home country, and as such Glific can be used and deployed with NGOs in these places.

We are working with Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project in the US to help them distribute information to people seeking asylum, specifically at the southern border.

Glific is currently being used by quite a few NGOs(20+) in India working in inclusion and economic opportunity (skilling). It's a great platform for NGOs to distribute content and provide advice to people in a scalable and efficient manner.

We expect that this year, we will work with a few NGOs that interact with 50K+ contacts exchanging 1m+ messages a month. 

At that volume, we plan on incorporating Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technologies to make the conversations more meaningful and effective. Glific is already integrated with Google Dialogflow and we can build NLP agents in Dialogflow to interact with end-users, along with manual intervention when needed

We are also at an interesting place in the context of learning and technology. Many of the beneficiaries of our NGOs are not literate and hence cannot read or write. However, using smartphones they can still communicate via emojis, audio, and video. We will use AI-enabled transcription systems to convert this data to text from which we can take meaningful action. We have just started a project with Digital Green and Navanatech to test this hypothesis.

This grant will enable us to conduct experiments and pilot projects with other NGOs also.

Glific has the ability to combine communications @ scale with innovations in machine learning, natural language processing, audio transcription, and more. 

Given the platform, we can work with organizations like Video Volunteers to help conduct citizen-led surveys all across India. This will allow them to collect data from rural India and hence be able to predict and plan different interventions. In times of Covid and the pandemic. This can serve as a warning sensor to see how/where the virus is spreading and hopefully with the help of the government put in some relief strategies