Glific recently rolled out an exciting new feature: WhatsApp Groups Automation. NGOs have voiced a need for WhatsApp group management within Glific. Organizations handle numerous WhatsApp groups, sometimes more than 100, for various purposes such as sending program updates, moderating discussions, and tracking engagement to assess community sentiment—all in one centralized location.

Avanti Fellows presented an interesting use case; they needed to manage around 100 student community groups and send weekly messages and nudges to encourage progress in STEM learning. However, this wasn’t possible with the current WhatsApp Business APIs because bots couldn’t be added to WhatsApp groups due to meta restrictions. That’s when we came across Maytapi, which could help us achieve our goal.

Here’s a detailed overview of how it works.

Our team came up with a plan and got to work. After two months of planning and execution, we successfully launched the v1 of the WhatsApp groups feature.

This version allows users to send and receive text and media messages through the Glific interface, manage WhatsApp groups, schedule messages, create a collection of WhatsApp groups and includes BigQuery dashboards for analyzing stats.

On March 28th, we conducted our first demo with a few NGOs, which turned out to be a highly interactive session. We even added everyone to a WhatsApp group and demonstrated how it works by sending and receiving messages through the Glific UI. Following the call, several people expressed interest in using the feature.

Last week, during an internal sprint all of our teams Glific, Dalgo and FCXos came together. During this sprint, two of our developers, Anandu and Amisha, gave a demo to the entire team. The session was not just informative but really interactive, the team was excited to see what the new feature could do. It was awesome to see everyone so engaged and eager to dive in. Overall, it was a real team effort filled with energy and enthusiasm.

Currently, we’re onboarding a few NGOs for beta testing to ensure stability and efficient scalability. Additionally, we’ll be working on features such as read receipts for messages, message reactions, and message moderation.