Celebrating NGO Impact: Messages, Reach & Engagement

This year, we saw incredible platform activity powered by NGOs across India.

• Top 10 NGOs by messages exchange

• Top 10 NGOs by new contacts onboarded

• Total messages exchanged since 2023

• Total contacts reached since 2023

These numbers reflect the expanding footprint of WhatsApp-based engagement.

Highlights from 2025

1. Glific Accelerator & Launchpad Program

We conducted 3 in person onboarding events this year.

• Glific Accelerator conducted in June
• Two new in-person events called Launchpad format executed in September & November
• Together, 31 NGOs joined these in-person programs

This allowed faster NGO onboarding to running pilots, establishing the product fit.

2. Ecosystem Partnerships Driving Scale

This year marked meaningful ecosystem collaborations.

Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies Foundation sponsored six NGOs across cohorts, helping more organizations enter Glific and expand impact.

Team members represented Glific and our partners at events hosted by Charcha, Agami’s Justicemakers Mela, the World Bank, India FOSS, and others—bringing NGO voices directly into national conversations.

Feature Adoption: WhatsApp Groups & LLM Usage Accelerate

WhatsApp Group automation saw organic adoption with 20+ organizations using it to reach communities at scale. Groups continue to be core to NGO functioning—and automation is proving to be a cost-efficient alternative to rising broadcasting charges.

Org pilots such as Arogya World and Key Education Foundation validated this direction.

Cohorts & Programs: Restart, AI, Evaluation & Impact Learning

Restart Cohort

NGO Data Sprint Tracks

AI for Global Development Cohort

Participation in the Agency Fund Accelerator helped us bring back cutting-edge learnings on AI evaluation and impact frameworks—feeding directly into our productisation work in Kaapi. Read more on the takeaways here.

Glific AI Chatbot Accelerator Grant

We secured a $250,000 grant to run a research-driven cohort with 30 NGOs over 6–9 months in 2026. The objective: measure AI WhatsApp chatbot effectiveness for social missions at a national scale. This was made possible due to the usage, stories and successes we have observed over the course of last 2 years.

New Capabilities Delivered This Year

Custom Certificates

NGOs can now send personalised certificates and badges—driving intrinsic motivation in programs.

WhatsApp Forms

A major leap: structured data collection directly inside WhatsApp—no external forms, no redesigning UX, no drop-offs.

Kaapi Integration

We transitioned LLM calls away from direct OpenAI API usage to Kaapi—reducing latency and enabling future observability, fine-tuning, and evaluation frameworks.

Operational Improvements

• Queue monitoring & alerts
• Third-party API performance monitoring
• Queue throttling to protect tenants
• Results: Reduced latency (specially for LLM flows)

These changes strengthen platform reliability at scale.

The Challenges And Lessons Learnt

• We had to roll back a couple of enhancements, which unfortunately caused inconvenience for some NGOs. While it wasn’t ideal, we documented each incident thoroughly and used the experience to strengthen our internal processes — especially around user acceptance testing and rigorously detailing GitHub tickets.

• Another collective challenge was Meta’s frequent and unpredictable changes to HSM policies, frequency capping, and pricing structures. Although this is an industry-wide headwind, it impacted our NGOs significantly. We attempted multiple routes — including reaching out through Gupshup and other networks to connect with Meta executives — to advocate for credits, subsidized rate structures, or exemptions for social-good programs, but these efforts didn’t materialize into tangible results. We are now exploring partnerships with Turn.io, who as a Meta BSP, may be better positioned to support social impact organizations.

• On the LLM side, although most features performed well, the voice-to-voice service remained a pain point. Bhashini’s uptime has become unreliable, and as NGOs began scaling across diverse language and accent inputs, the “voice note → file search → voice note” chain started producing inconsistent results. This reduced confidence in the workflow, despite broader AI adoption growing elsewhere.

• Another minor onboarding hurdle we face is that of Gupshup stopped offering the initial $5 credit to new accounts. While not a major blocker, this extra friction makes it slightly harder for NGOs to get started quickly with their chatbot deployments.

• Finally, we had an unexpected onboarding pause of almost 3 weeks due to a mandatory Gupshup system upgrade enforced by Meta. This delay derailed momentum, and 2 out of the 10 NGOs in our onboarding pipeline (at the time) decided to pull back as a result.

Leveling up with Glific

We hosted 12 monthly webinars for new and existing NGOs, showcasing advanced capabilities that can be unlocked on Glific. These sessions significantly boosted platform awareness and consistently attracted 50+ participants each month.

Some of the important webinars conducted this year included: 

1. AI evaluation framework: We introduced the concepts for golden set of QnAs, an approach to drafting the golden set of QnAs, and evaluation indicators like cosine similarity and context precision. We shared a Google Colab notebook to run these evaluations on AI assistants being used in Glific. Check out the webinar here

2. Product evaluation framework: We continued to re-share and build on the work done by our friends at the Agency Fund, through the second of the evaluation frameworks. We covered the approach on figuring out if the chatbot is being used as intended, how to define the levels of engagement with the product, and define the outcomes through extended engagement. After defining all these, how to then put these into an engagement funnel kind of view and then finally how to analyse drop-offs between different layers. Check out the webinar here

3. The five ways of onboarding: This webinar shared practical solutions developed by veteran NGOs towards easing onboarding of beneficiaries. These included missed-call onboarding, onboarding via QR codes and keyword encoded whatsapp links, and also bulk imports of contacts from the Glific interface. Watch the webinar here

4. Using locations data for beneficiary mapping and targeting: This webinar shared the solutions for capturing and mapping beneficiaries to granular location layers for different use cases. We shared resources on how NGOs can create the user experience to provide geography layers in a hierarchical way, as well as we showcased the reverse geolocations integration that pulls the country, state, district, ward, postal code and address as per google maps. We also showcased the ability for NGOs to use public datasets like UDISE to map beneficiaries in a single input. See the webinar here

Impact stories we are proud of

Arghyam

We put this case study together of Arghyam running a successful vision AI pilot in Assam. Through the pilot Arghyam was able to to build the habit of the community water supply pump operators report the data of water supplied to their community on a daily basis. This created digitally verifiable proof of water supply schemes being operational as well as helped local authorities to identify instances of breakdowns. One of the by-products of this pilot was Arghyam being able put together a repository of high quality image samples to train a bespoke vision model which showed drastically improved accuracy of image recognition for their use case. This pilot has transformed their thinking to develop “Jal-shochak”, a product offering to help Jal Jeevan Missions across India. Read more here.

Key Education Foundation

We also collaborated with Key Education Foundation to put into perspective their journey of running CLAP program (Children Learning Assisted with Parents) over the course of last 2 years. From scaling on WhatsApp Chatbots to also piloting over WhatsApp Groups, Key Education Foundation hit new strides in their mission to make early childhood education program more accessible and robust with their government school partners. Read more here.

CIVIS

This year we also documented the success story of Civis, growing from 2.5k users to 420k users participating in public consultations of government policies. Civis saw a 3x higher engagement on WhatsApp than on web platforms, receiving close to 380k consultations on Viksit Maharashtra policy outreach. Civis continues to be an exemplary story of government partnership and use of WhatsApp to mobilize civic action. Read more here

More than a word of thanks 

We are excited to have new team members—Tanu Prasad, Fawas Chemba, Shijith K, Priyanshu Singh—joining us and strengthening our engineering and product teams. Also here is a shoutout to the old hands who moved on from the Glific team—Gautam Prakash, Anandu P—leaving us with a ton of memories and valuable contributions towards the platform and the community. 

Now to the OGs: We are grateful to the NGO leaders, NGO team-members, Glific users, and funders of Glific who continue to push us and trust us with being the channel for reaching and delivering impact one conversation at a time. All of this means little without the fire you carry within your soul to make a difference.

For anyone who made it till here, I wish you a happy, prosperous, successful and joyful 2026.