Indus Action is a non-profit organization based in India that works to improve access to education and employment opportunities for underprivileged communities. The organization in partnership with J-PAL and BHUMI is focussing on implementing policies and programs at the grassroots level to promote advocacy of early childhood care and education. They were among Glific’s early adopters and have been using it for the past two years to run some of their programs on WhatsApp. 

About their Program

They collectively launched a new initiative called the Tech-enabled caregiver program, which intends to scale across Tamil Nadu in the Tamil language. The program will run for three months, running from Monday through Saturday every week, parents will get activity messages with instructions so they can participate in activities with their kids. These messages can be in the form of audio, video, or files. This will be a pilot program that will run in partnership with 6 anganwadis to evaluate responses from parents and also check for any challenges they may come across while running the program.

In order to scale up from the original set of 6 anganwadis to 100 anganwadis following the pilot, the program will be carried out in conjunction with the Tamil Nadu government. The implementing partners recruited facilitators that support parents throughout the first few weeks of the program by frequently checking in once a week. This helps in introducing parents to technology and increases the program’s adoption rate.

Setting up the program on WhatsApp

In order to set up their flows and prepare for the pilot, We at Glific have been working closely with the Indus Action team. We experimented with Glific’s new Google sheet integration feature, which made setting up flows in Glific much easier. Read more about the feature here

Google sheet integration is particularly is especially beneficial when different content is being sent in the same sequential manner. Which for the Indus Action was the situation when the daily content order remained the same for the full three months. With the order being

1. Daily a button template message is sent with a message like Here’s today’s activity
2. Beneficiary clicks on the Yes button
3. Daily activity message in the form of audio, video, or file is sent.
4. After 5 min beneficiary is asked if they understood the message
5. Beneficiary clicks on the Yes or No button

Here the Daily activity message changes daily while the rest of the order remained the same 

This side-by-side comparison shows how the Gsheet integration streamlines the designing flows in Glific. As seen on the left side of the image, a following node with a daily activity message must be added for each day(P.S. This is for week 1 only, and for week 2, six more needs should be added). With Gsheet integration we can fetch data for a particular date from the sheet and use the same in the flow using a single node as seen on the right side of the image

Measuring the impact

1. Measuring the count of parents on a daily basis who responds with Yes to daily button template message and how many respond with Yes or No to if they understood the activity
2. Facilitators also do home visits and at Anganwadi centers to have in-person meetings with parents where they share their feedback
3. They also did a baseline survey during the initial week of the program which they will compare with an endline survey to measure the growth 

In addition to helping set up the flows, We at Glific also set up a DataStudio dashboard for Indus Action where they can monitor their program through various graphs and can also export the results in CSV format. Further evaluation of the program is being conducted by J-PAL