Site iconSite icon Glific

From Engagement to Impact: Reflections on the Glific Sprint

Krishna Priya Dwibhashi

This blog is written by Fawas, Product Analyst on the Glific team.

The Glific Sprint kicked off on 14th September, and by the 17th, several NGOs joined us with visible excitement and curiosity. For many of us, including myself – it was the first sprint experience, and the shared enthusiasm created an atmosphere of openness, learning, and collaboration. It was also inspiring to see how different NGOs are leveraging Glific across multiple use cases and sectors.

The sprint began with an ice-breaking activity where participants grouped themselves based on their responses to different questions. With each round, they moved into new groups, which gave everyone the chance to interact with multiple participants right from the start.

Two Tracks, One Goal: Building for Impact

This sprint was designed around two distinct tracks:

NGOs like Arghyam, Key Education Foundation, MukkaMaar, Saturday Art Class, Rocket Learning and Antarang  took part in the Impact Track.

This blog is about the Impact Track, where we worked on understanding user engagement and how chatbots support program outcomes. Another blog will cover the Prototype Track, which focused on trying out new ideas and features.

Deep Dive: The Impact Track

Our work in the Impact Track drew inspiration from the Agency Fund’s product evaluation strategy (click here to read the Agency Fund’s blog) . The goal was to move beyond surface-level usage and ask:

We began by mapping out each organization’s:

By looking at the activities users completed through the chatbot, including tasks, interactions, and other engagements, NGOs were able to define user engagement funnels.

These funnels helped them understand where users were dropping off, what was working well, and what could be improved. This clarity allowed them to connect chatbot engagement directly with proximal program outcomes, and eventually, with impact at scale.

Key Education Foundation

Key Education Foundation runs a program to help parents of children aged 3 – 6 spend quality time with their kids through playful learning at home.

The chatbot guides parents through:

  1. Registration – Parents register and fill in basic details.
  2. Access to Digital Content – Worksheets, Parenting Tip Videos, and “Let’s Play” stories/activities.
  3. Content Process –
    • Parents choose a worksheet, tip video, or activity.
    • They receive the video.
    • They get a gamification element.
      They submit evidence (like pictures or answers).

Along with this, KEF also runs 1 – 2 yearly campaigns encouraging parents to try more activities with their children.The program runs for two years for each student, and every two years new students are onboarded (with older students also welcome to rejoin). From the organization, Swarupa and Shrea joined the Glific sprint.

Since the new session started this July, there wasn’t much data yet. So, KEF used last year’s engagement program data to create a funnel. The funnel helped us track where parents were dropping off and how many reached the end.

This insight from the funnel gives KEF a clear direction: improving the registration process can significantly boost participation in the next program.

When Swarupa and Shreya saw the funnel and the 28% completion rate, they were excited and happy. It was a moment of validation for all the effort and planning they had put into designing and running the program. They felt proud that their(and the KEF team’s) work was making a real impact, and the funnel gave them fresh motivation to push even harder for the upcoming session.

Arghyam 

Jal Jeevan Mission Assam is working to make sure every rural household has safe drinking water through a tap at home. To support this, the team tried out a chatbot that helps pump operators, section officers, and SDOs with simple reminders, quick reporting, and better visibility of water schemes. From Arghyam, Sreechand Tavva  joined the Glific sprint.

Their big goal is to keep water flowing with minimal disruption, and when issues do come up, ensure they are spotted and fixed quickly. In the sprint, they built a clear user journey, starting from the first nudge to regular reporting, along with simple ways to measure if operators are engaging week after week.

One of the “aha” moments was realizing how powerful small nudges could be. Pump operators became far more consistent when they received daily reminders. The team also noticed that even after the pilot ended, POs kept sending images regularly, even without nudges, as it had become part of their routine. 

As the Arghyam team is moving towards the goal of getting more digitally verifiable data and ensuring drinking water safety, one of the products they are envisioning is jal shoochak, read more here. By putting on the lens of envisioning an engagement funnel as shared in the product evaluation framework, Sreechand was able to make connections and define the nudge strategies at the disposal of the implementation team to meet the requirements of ensuring consistent data upload by the pump operators, adequate water delivery to the localities and ensuring that the pumps are functional. 

Saturday Art Class

Saturday Art Class (SArC) brings art and creativity into classrooms for children from underserved communities. Their training program, Art for Educators (AFE), equips teachers with skills in visual arts and social-emotional learning, helping them become creative facilitators for their students.

Through Glific, educators access:

Surabhi Shinde, first time Glific sprinter, joined from the Saturday Art Class (SArC) team.

Since the program runs across multiple states, the SArC team focused on their Nagaland program during the sprint. SArC created a user engagement funnel to evaluate how educators interact with the chatbot:

This funnel helped measure educator engagement and product use over the last quarter in Nagaland.

Additionally, the team focused on the following during the sprint:

The sprint gave SArC a clear view of educator engagement for the last quarter of the Nagaland program. This process now serves as a template that can be replicated across other programs and used iteratively for monthly reviews, streamlined processes of sending HSM messages through automation, and opened possibilities for AI-assisted support, helping teachers deliver art education more effectively.

MukkaMaar 

Shraddha Sonar, a sports woman, fighter, MMA trainer and currently managing and operating Mukkamar’s chatbot Glific sprint for the first time. MukkaMaar runs the MukkaMaar with Mukki program, which equips adolescent girls in classes 6 – 9 with physical and non-physical self-defense skills. The program blends mental, verbal, and physical techniques to build confidence, agency, and self-esteem, and is delivered directly to students through government partnerships.

The learning experience is guided by Mukki, a chatbot mascot who engages with students like a trusted friend. Through 20 rounds across 10 levels, students practice stretching and defense techniques, learn about empowerment self-defense, helplines, and non-physical strategies, while also engaging in fun quizzes, riddles, and stories. They earn points that can be redeemed for mobile recharges, keeping the learning both rewarding and motivating. Students often describe Mukki as a best friend and role model, and many report feeling more confident and capable of defending themselves. Families were generally supportive, seeing the program as something valuable for their daughters.

MukkaMaar joined the sprint on the impact track to build an impact funnel and identify where students drop off. Since the team had already begun this analysis, quickly visualized the funnel together and then focused on the bigger question: how to help students complete all levels. Shraddha shared ideas like adding milestone certificates, making flows more interactive, and using features like “Mukki of the Week” or Instagram shoutouts to boost motivation.

The sprint provided insights into how the program is taking shape.Going forward, the focus will be on using the funnel and these new engagement strategies to help more girls complete the curriculum and build self-confidence.

Antarang Foundation 

Antarang’s vision is to have every young adult productively, passionately and positively engaged in a career of their choice, enabling them to uplift their families and communities from intergenerational poverty. About 1/3rd of India’s youth are unemployed, i.e. Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET). 

The Career Chatbot is shared with students in classrooms, and also with alumni as a continued support system. The Career Chatbot started 4+ years ago during Covid, as Antarang’s in-person support needed to be shifted online, especially because Covid saw a high rise in student dropouts from school. 

The challenge facing the Antarang team was that over the years, having built a lot of content and flows, Antarang realised that the user journey for a student or young person became too long and complex for them to navigate. This reduced the usefulness and accessibility of relevant content on the bot for a student. 

Vani Kaul and Insiyah Rangwala joined from Antarang Foundation, with the following as the main objectives: 

  1. Define/redefine the role of our Chatbot in a young person’s life 
  2. Define the desired outcomes from the Chatbot for its users
  3. Reimagine and restructure the curriculum delivered
  4. Improve the format and flow of delivery to build higher accessibility

Antarang had their “aha” moment, as they went through the product evaluation workshop, and decided to use the framework as the lens to structure their upcoming engagements as they re-envision the role of chatbot as the tool in the young person’s life. Following was what they defined and will pitch to their team as they take the chatbot into its fifth year and onwards of engaging young people in making informed choices and transitions in their careers. 

Rocket Learning  

Rocket Learning is an NGO focused on Early Childhood Development (ECD) in India. Their mission is to reach 50 million underserved children by 2030 through a community-led ECD system that ensures every child, regardless of background, attains full brain and body development by age six.

Balagopal and Prathmesh from Rocket Learning joined the Glific sprint. They are using the chatbot to support Anganwadi workers in their day-to-day activities such as handling poshan tracker queries, generating stories, poems, and activities, and clarifying doubts around apps like WhatsApp.

Their long-term vision is to provide instant access to help and support, improve digital literacy, and eventually offer Anganwadi workers a personalized coach and guide through the chatbot.

During the sprint, they brainstormed how to define chatbot engagement more clearly. While building the impact funnel, realized the need to rethink how they measure the top layer of the funnel. Although it took some time to gain clarity on these two points, once defined, it became straightforward to build the funnel since Rocket Learning already had custom data views in place for their existing dashboards.

The funnel visualization provided fresh insights and raised new questions especially around how they can convert users from experimental programs into more deeply engaged participants.

Showcase Session: Sharing Learnings and Innovations

The sprint concluded with a lively showcase session, where participants presented the ideas they had experimented with, shared insights on user engagement, demonstrated AI flows, and highlighted new explorations. Teams discussed challenges they faced, creative solutions they implemented, and lessons learned from testing different approaches. The session also provided an opportunity for peer feedback, knowledge sharing, and celebrating innovative thinking, bringing the sprint to an inspiring and collaborative close.

Looking Back at the Sprint

Walking into my first-ever Glific Sprint, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But what I found was a room full of people, NGOs, partners, and colleagues, all buzzing with ideas, curiosity, and a shared passion for creating change. It was inspiring to see technology and social impact merge so seamlessly, and to discover how organizations are reimagining their programs through the lens of impact measurement.

Exit mobile version