Seeking help: Whatsapp chatbot & Webhook – invitation to contribute in the mission of building civic muscle in India
TLDR: First couple of paras are for context about the work. If you are interested in the help please jump to Help with chatbot webhook & Ask section.
India is one of the young countries in the world with maximum number of young people. With more young people there are lot of opportunities to grow as a nation. One of it is becoming more “Citizen driven democracy through active citizen participation”. This is difficult but not impossible when you have lot of youth in the country.
At Reap Benefit we work towards the mission of making every young person as a local problem solver. What do I mean by that.
Youth of the locality have the skills and muscle to solve the neighbourhood public problems. It can either by demanding the local authority and/or by working along with the local governance.
For example: If there is a garbage dump in the locality the resident youth will act as a local problem solver. They care about the problem because it is local and affects them.
With our work in last 7 years, we worked with close to 45000 young people who have taken small civic actions against problems at home and immediate community that led to following impact:
Technology has been a great enabler for citizens to flex their civic muscle and to be a local problem solver. We have seen 3x increase in the number of actions taken after the technology intervention.
HELP with Chatbot Webhooks:
Our learning over the years is that citizens do care and have concerns about civic issues around them. There is intent and interest to solve – mainly because it affects them personally. But, what is missing is not sure where, what and how to start. So, it’s the information gap, initial motivation and a running mate to support and guide.
With that in mind, we have developed our WhatsApp based chatbot which help young people to:
- Access local information
- Access stories of inspiration and solutions
- Access to nudges that can help them get started
- A virtual running mate
In last 3 months, we have activated civic muscle in about 5000+ youth across different the country who have taken 3300+ civic actions.
While this is a good percentage to start with, major percentage of drop off happen due to the need in punching keywords even if it is in their local language. We have our chatbot in 5 Indian languages.
One of the effective solution that we tested out is the location based responses. We have piloted one with some volunteer support where the user just need to send their location and the bot will provide their closest fever clinic – this we did in Bangalore.
Have a look at this video – this will give a fair idea of what we tried: https://youtu.be/HWdnPbmY9CM
Ask:
We are looking for help in building webhooks for our chatbot that can let us provide both information access + nudges to take action through location based user input. We have other usecases as well but this is the immediate requirement.
Your contribution can help us reach more youth of under privileges setup also to become the part of local problem solvers movement.
If you or know someone who can help please reach out. You can write to gauthamraje@reapbenefit.org
In case you want to try our chatbot: please use this link and for the code type (after Hi message): SNCY
Link: http://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=919513607460&text=Hi
