AIfluence

AIfluence is Africa's first Artificial Intelligence-powered influencer communications platform, offering an end-to-end solution to execute and scale communication strategies with advanced algorithms that power influencer discovery, campaign, and outcome measurement for behavior change communication campaigns. We are committed to supporting our partners to promote healthy behaviors and fight misinformation on social media and beyond through the use of our AI-powered platform to identify and activate the right opinion leaders at the right time. These individuals are uniquely capable of communicating with people far and wide, in any language, country or scale. When scaled globally, we can reach millions of people with the trusted networks they are already engaged with, building an international network of change makers committed to disseminating health BCC messaging to people in their own languages, with their own communities, in their own voices which are often overlooked by traditional communication campaigns. 

The AI-fluence platform was developed to solve the biggest pain points in communications campaigns; reaching the right target audience and measuring impact. This starts with ensuring that campaigns are reaching the right target audience. Across developing countries, behavior change communication efforts are built from the top down, creating a centralized message that blanket a country or region to teach every single person at once about a disease, how to prevent it, encourage treatment, and maintenance of healthy behaviors. A team of experts craft these messages, using technical language to meet the highest caliber of scientific rigor. But so often, due to budget and time limitations, localization stalls. Messages may be translated into a couple local languages or none at all, they may not be adjusted for lower education levels, or adhere to cultural or religious beliefs across various ethnic groups. Take Uganda for example where there are over 40 languages spoken throughout the country and more than 50 tribes. No single campaign can speak to everyone’s needs, rightfully so. However, the question that arises is how can we do better at adapting communication campaigns to each community without expending vast amounts more in time and financial resources? 

In order to improve value for money and show impact of campaigns, it starts with localizing the communication campaigns themselves. We use AI to identify key opinion leaders down to grassroots level, to lead social media campaigns. These individuals have influence over their community members such as; local kiosk owners, church elders, local health workers, social activists etc who we would onboard for community outreach and social behavioral change campaigns through social media. 

We often onboard hundreds, sometimes thousands, of everyday people per campaign to drive authentic, relatable and meaningful peer to peer communication at scale. By using AI to identify and activate the right influencers at the right time, our platform is uniquely capable of impactful campaigns. We provide them with a campaign brief and encourage them to use their own voices, on the social media accounts they already post on regularly. Once posts are live, our AI platform is able to track these posts including factors such as likes, reposts, website visits, photo shares, etc to see how the campaigns spread far and wide to quantify the reach, impact, and effectiveness of both awareness raising and behavior driven campaigns. 

Starting with the general public, our goal is to link people with life enhancing information and services and by working with influencers to bring meaning and relevance to these messages. So often communication campaigns fail to reach marginalized groups as materials and messages are not adapted to local languages or contexts. While information published by the WHO is the gold standard for health communication, by the time it reaches these communities, it is not well understood or actionable, and fails to inspire healthy decisions. Through the collaboration with micro and nano influencers, we put these messages into the hands of people who can adapt the messages to become useful where they were previously irrelevant. With our influencers acting as a bridge to their communities, we have seen improvements in health information awareness and knowledge as well as direct impact such as increases in clinical visits where organizations had previously struggled to communicate with hard to reach populations.

The second group our approach benefits are the influencers we work with, where we provide both intrinsic and monetary incentives. The influencers we onboard are opinion leaders, their voices matter within their communities, and they are grassroots organizers at their core. By onboarding them and providing them with campaigns to promote, we are recognizing their work, providing them with opportunities to utilize their platforms for new causes, and supporting their growth in social media development. We are proud to offer people opportunities to generate income regardless of their location, education, training, or even disability. On the monetary side, we believe that all work should be paid work and the benefits of direct cash payments are essential to providing people with fair wage for their time. We incentivize our influencers for their participation in these campaigns, commensurate with local wages for their time. As we continue to launch more campaigns, we intend to engage our influencers to better understand how different markets have different needs both in terms of the level of reimbursement and to determine if they require further content creation training (videos, gifs, photos, etc) based what generates the most views (which can be used both for our campaigns and messages they may share personally). We recognize the role social activists have played in igniting change in a number of countries around the world and believe that this model will introduce new mediums and a new generation of leaders in these communities as well. 

Social media platforms have become a common source for health information. While the past few years have exposed social media’s use to spread misinformation, there are opportunities to use these platforms for good. AIfluence’s platform utilizes social media to collect real-time feedback on the spread of misinformation and rumors in order to better inform health campaigns and behavioral nudges. We apply these learnings to identify and accurately match micro-influencers to share accurate information and inspire people to protect themselves and communities through behavioral change campaigns that can be launched as an immediate response to the research.

AI-fluence is only about 1 year old but has seen massive success already, launching projects and campaigns with more than 15 partners in over 10 countries. We were recently selected as one of three winners for the U.S. Department of State Africa Tech Challenge where we will be implementing a campaign combating COVID misinformation in South Africa and research on rumors in the DRC. We have spent the past year building a number of use cases and organically have seen clients willing to utilize our services in a number of new countries and markets and therefore selected the Scale Phase. We are continuing to upgrade our platform to be more robust, produce stronger reports, and integrate improvement requests and needs raised by both our clients and influencers alike.

Our approach is innovative because it creates a foundational shift the way we consider behavior change communication campaigns throughout the development sector. Our campaigns draw on insights from social listening and sentiment analysis that take place across social media in real time. We then use AIfluence’s advanced algorithms to disseminate locally-tailored health messages to online as well as the hardest to reach, offline and most vulnerable populations via a network of accurately matched micro-influencers. These micro-influencers tailor content to fit the tone, slang and vernacular of their particular community, ensuring heightened resonance and impact to millions of people, creating an expanding network of influencers.  Working together, the two stages of the campaigns ensure delivery of the best possible chances of true information absorption, opinion- and behaviour change by first deeply understanding the target audiences and their feelings or vulnerability around propaganda and harmful truths, reinforcing key messages “bottom-up” through a network of trusted local influencers. No longer are we waiting for a central health ministry to share a message on mainstream news channels in the national language. Any person, anywhere, now has the power to support change and disseminate the health messages with friends, neighbors, peers, and online community. The impact of this innovation means faster, more tailored, and more effective campaigns that could slow down pandemics faster and build social protections more strongly. 

In the past year, our campaigns have been seen by millions of people. Each campaign is driven by different targets, regions, key populations, etc. One campaign that we launched to promote mask wearing and hand washing at the high of the pandemic's second wave in Kenya utilized 3,000 influencers who collectively reached over 15 million people in a three month period. These numbers are currently focused on reach of the campaign which includes not just viewers but people who like, repost, comment, and respond to the posts our influencers share. In the next year, we intend to build more use cases that show direct linkages to accessing healthcare services. In one campaign we ran we worked with our partner to target increase in demand for HIV testing at one of their facilities. In the month where our campaign was launched, we saw a 178% increase in the number of HIV tests compared to the average for three months prior to this campaign. 

We hope to continue working with partners who are excited to measure impact with us so we can ensure that campaigns lead to knowledge, attitude, and behavior changes. In the next year we hope to reach over 50 million people with our influencer driven campaigns. 

Impact is be measured through the platform starting with output and engagement measurements such as number of posts, number of views, number of reposts, etc. Utilizing this information, we then assess who has viewed these messages and utilize sentiment analysis whereby we create a comparative analysis to understand how people exposed to the messages shared by the AIfluence influencers differed both before and after the campaign and in comparison to those who never viewed the campaign at all. Lastly, when possible, we measure impact by tracking whether people visited a website linked to a campaign, made appointments with facilities, purchased a product, or accessed a service. This last part is the penultimate goal, however we also recognize there are campaigns that are critically based in awareness raising whereby in those cases we work to conduct surveys to measure knowledge, attitude, and practices that are self reported. 

Currently we have 26 full time staff members.

All of our Customer Success Team team members that engage with influencers are Kenyan, many from digital and marketing backgrounds, and most of them considered youth. They are not too dissimilar from many of our influencers; speaking local languages, watching the growth of mobile and digital tools across the African landscape, and passionate about the advancement of social issues. This team is very familiar with the challenges and opportunities influencers face as many of them experience them firsthand too. This allows the AIfluence team to create bonds to support influencers to build successful campaigns, collaborating to find out what works, what are the pain points, how can we improve, and what recommendations do the influencers have for future campaigns. The Customer Success Team are on the front lines and their inputs are critical to the further development of our backend platform and collaborating with them to find out what direction we develop the platform in the future and how we can be more successful as a team and company. 

Our leadership team comes from 4 continents and backgrounds ranging from tech development to marketing to finance to public health. We are two women and three men. The collection of these backgrounds and perspectives creates a global vision for the team that works to better understand everyone from our influencers to our partners to their funders. By bringing leadership with such diverse backgrounds together, it provides an opportunity to consider how learnings from one sector could be used across others and pushes us to consider and reconsider "how things have always been done". We believe that the people who make up our organization should represent the landscapes that we are working in and strive to build a company that allows people from any background to find a space within AIfluence that brings them professional growth and opportunities for advancement. 

There are a number of reasons we see value in becoming a Solve member, first and foremost, to be part of the network. As a start up, there is a lot be be learned from the network with other likeminded impact leaders. We hope that working with our peers will lift all of our organizations up and find opportunities for collaboration. The exposure both with other members and across the media will help our business grow and bring further credibility to our bold ideas, which is necessary in order to achieve the scale we are hoping for. 

One of our key barriers to growth is the further development of our AI platform and should there be resources within the MIT network who are able to contribute to our platform, it would be most welcome. We hope that the institute takes interest in our work and can provide insights into best practices for AI development, partnerships, share opportunities we have not yet considered, and possibly even publish academic reports on our work. 

The final key point of interest in this partnership is the legal support and ethical frameworks the Solve team may be able to extend to us. Being GDPR compliant is very important to us, and we recognize there are a lot of hurdles to jump to ensure we are meeting the highest security regulations. Working with legal support to create data security and privacy policies that meet the GDPR standard would be really beneficial to us. 

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We are open to partnering with any organizations, Solve Members, or MIT faculty/initiatives. 

We recognize that refugee communities are face a number of unique issues from the countries where they live. We want to provide an opportunity for refugees to unite, share their stories, inspired and support one another to build economic and financial resilience and self-reliance by connecting them together. Through our AIfluence platform, we are able to target key opinion leaders in the refugee communities and build campaigns for them to tell their own stories, promote key advocacy messages, and really encourage their community to unite. Through a collective movement within these groups to share messages with a universal goal, we can work with teams to share resources, generate relatable actions, and build a consensus to collective achievement. 

Women are often left out of the conversations taking place in political, media, and business forums across Africa and Asia. They represent the minority in most settings and we want to create a united movement where their voices are heard. Using the AIfluence AI platform, we are able to use our sentiment analysis tools across social media to understand what are the challenges women are facing and discussing. We can then take those conversations and reverse engineer a campaign, using our influencer AI platform to onboard female opinion leaders, trusted community members, and what we call micro and nano influencers to lead conversations that are important to women. The goals may lead them to collaboration with gender and women's groups, creating a movement to change policies, to build a social media campaign of their own, or whatever may be in order for women's voices to be celebrated and heard. In our model, our influencers are onboarded with a brief, but given the reins to create a social media campaign using their own creativity, voice, tone, language, etc. to post videos, photos, gifs, memes, or start polls and conversations. We want to allow women to drive the conversations for their needs to advance their voices. 

AI is in our name, AIfluence. AIfluence is Africa's first Artificial Intelligence-powered influencer communications platform, offering an end-to-end solution to execute and scale communication strategies with advanced algorithms that power influencer discovery, campaign, and outcome measurement for behavior change communication campaigns. We use AI to identify key opinion leaders across the African and Asian continents down to grassroots level, to lead social media campaigns. By using AI to identify and activate the right influencers at the right time, our platform is uniquely capable of impactful campaigns. We provide them with a campaign brief and encourage them to use their own voices, on the social media accounts they already post on regularly. Once posts are live, our AI platform is able to track these posts and quantify the reach, impact, and effectiveness of both awareness raising and behavior driven campaigns.

Our platform has been used to understand COVID myths and misconceptions in 8 countries across Africa and Asia, to promote hand washing and correct mask wearing during the peak second wave in Kenya, to share key maternal health tips and access to tailored websites in Nairobi's slums, and to promote HIV and STI testing with refugees. We see that our platform can spread positive messages and measure the impact of these messages, often reaching 2-3 times more than traditional communications campaigns thanks to the targeted AI that starts the process. We will use this funding to continue to tailor and refine the platform and explore opportunities for scale.