Another year has gone by, marking four years since Glific’s inception. We are now at an exciting stage where NGOs are scaling their operations using our platform, bringing new challenges, opportunities, and learning experiences—something we are thoroughly enjoying. This milestone is also a time for reflection: to celebrate what went well and identify areas for improvement.  

How Far We’ve Come!  

Let’s begin with our “mini-influencer” moment of the year—Glific crossed 100 million+ messages exchanged! (Akhilesh from our team kept refreshing the stats, eagerly waiting for this incredible milestone). It is indeed a proud moment for all of us to know that the platform we are building has enabled so many meaningful conversations, impacting more than 1.4 million last-mile beneficiaries. Milestones like these reaffirm our commitment to empowering NGOs and communities through effective communication.  

We’ve continued to grow in terms of NGO partnerships, onboarding 54 new organizations this year, bringing the total to 125 Glific Accounts (119 NGOs). This year, we also saw a notable 58% growth in our LinkedIn followers, gradually strengthening our social media presence.

Platform Development

With a growing number of NGOs, the demand for innovative features and enhancements has also risen. Among several updates (Template flows, Auto Translate etc) we did this year, two stood out: OpenAI File Search and WhatsApp Groups Integration.  

– Open AI- File Search: Earlier, we partnered with Jugalbandi to provide NGOs with the option of AI integration with Glific. However, after Jugalbandi shut down mid-year, we introduced the Open AI File Search feature within Glific UI, which lets one upload documents to assistant to use as a knowledge base. This makes it easier to get accurate, document-based responses, which can then be sent through Glific. 

NGOs have also experimented with GPT Vision (Blog) and LLM Voice capabilities integrated with Bhashini (Blog), which hold promising potential for future pilots.  

– WhatsApp Groups Integration: Until last year, the Glific platform only enabled one-to-one conversations through the chatbot. However, with the new WhatsApp Group Integration feature, NGOs can now automate conversations in WhatsApp groups, opening up new avenues for user communication. Organizations like Avanti Fellows, Arogya World, and Reap Benefit have already started using this feature.

Glific also updated its avatar (look) this year to enhance the user experience. 🙂 The new UI has received positive feedback from our partner NGOs as well.

Breaking Boundaries

We strongly believe that WhatsApp chatbots can empower last-mile communication not only in India but globally. This year, we onboarded our first international NGO– Rwanda Youth and have since partnered with seven international organizations from Africa and Malaysia.  

As part of our effort to better understand ecosystems outside of India and share our work, our team attended two sprints led by The Agency Fund (in partnership with Project Tech4Dev) in Kenya and Bengaluru enabling collaboration with Africa-based organizations and learning about their ecosystems.You can read more about our team members’ experiences from Kenya and Bengaluru in these blogs.

This year, Glific has gone beyond boundaries, not only through the NGOs we serve but also through our platform. Our developers had the opportunity to present Glific at the International Elixir Conference, which was a proud moment for all of us.  

Meetups with NGOs

Meetups with the NGOs we work with are something we always look forward to, as they give us a chance to better understand their needs and challenges. This year has been one of our best in terms of meeting NGOs.

We kicked off 2024 with the Glific Sprint in Goa, hosting our largest Sprint (yet), with 15 NGOs using Glific joining us. It was a 2.5-day semi-structured learning event featuring demos from various organizations on their work, new feature introductions by the Glific team, and brainstorming sessions on challenges related to data, onboarding, and user engagement. We also collected feedback and ideas from NGOs, which helped us prioritize features for our roadmap. You can read more about it here. Also, read a blog written by Sheetal from KEF on how they are growing with Glific Sprints! 🙂

Though there were many takeaways, two key highlights stood out from the Sprint:

• Mumbai-based organizations (Bandhu, Saturday Art Class, TRRAIN) discussed the need to meet more frequently in Mumbai to collaborate and learn from each other, which they eventually did later in the year.
• While Civis and TAP were discussing sharing some useful flows with each other, they suggested we facilitate this kind of sharing for all organizations so that the community could benefit, not just two organizations.

One of the main objectives of our Sprint is to foster collaboration and strengthen the ecosystem. Seeing this small yet powerful collaboration was a reassuring sign of the direction we’re heading in.

As not all NGOs can attend the Sprint, we decided to meet NGOs in their cities in August. With our 1-day city meetups in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, we met more than 25 NGOs, including representatives from other cities who came to attend. Sessions on User behavior (Fogg’s Behavior Model) and LLM/Bhashini integrations received positive feedback for their effectiveness. We’re definitely considering hosting city meetups more frequently next year.

Our largest NGO meetup of the year was the “Tech4Impact Chatbot Accelerator.” This program (formerly called Bootcamp) is designed to address NGOs’ concerns about starting with chatbots—such as fears of integrating technology, lack of knowledge or support, and budget constraints for experimentation. This was our third and largest cohort, with 24 new NGOs across 6 sectors (55+ participants) taking part in a 2-month program, starting with a 2-day workshop in Delhi. Read more about it here

The workshop received great feedback from participants (NPS-70), and what was most heartwarming was the joy, excitement, and even a few happy dances we saw as NGOs successfully created their first chatbot flows.

“I liked the engagement of the team in understanding and breaking down the problem statement. The team is well versed with tech and has a deep understanding of the development space and the Indian context (didn’t anticipate the later to be this strong, kudos to the team 🙂”- Harshvi, Sol’s Arc

“Workshop was a good balance of learning from others and doing things yourself! Felt like it really brought the 70-20-10 learning principle to life!”- Shivani, KER – Teach for India

In addition to meetups, our team has spent some time (though we’d like to spend much more) visiting NGO offices and field locations to work closely with them. This year, we visited the offices of INREM, KEF, SNEHA, Quest Alliance, and Udhyam to collaborate with their teams in person. You can also read the blog by Tejas, our Product Manager, about his visit to the INREM off-site in Anand.  

Deep Work with NGOs:

Glific is primarily a SaaS platform, but we have been offering consulting services to organizations with limited capacity or those wanting to build new features on Glific since its inception. This year, in addition to the consulting work we did with 15+ NGOs, we launched a new initiative called “Fractional Product Manager (fPM)”. In this initiative, we work as a product manager for organizations, dedicating a fraction of our time (e.g., 12 hours a week). The goal is to work more closely with NGOs, understanding their needs, identifying gaps, and solving problems that extend beyond the platform itself, including processes, user research, capacity building, onboarding, and data analysis.

The work we have done (and are doing) with organizations like Quest Alliance, SNEHA, Udhyam, and Commutiny is giving us deeper insights into how NGOs operate. We aim to apply these learnings to improve the platform and services we provide. This is already happening—the insights gained from our work with Veddis Consulting nudged us into focusing consolidated efforts towards building a new AI platform. 

Expanding Impact Beyond the Core Team

One of the core beliefs at Glific is that the product and its impact should not be limited by the size of our team. To align with this vision, we partnered with organizations like 10x Impact Labs and Social Bytes this year. These organizations will serve as implementation partners, supporting NGOs using chatbots with Glific with Consulting work. We look forward to strengthening these partnerships to create a meaningful and lasting impact.

Continuing last year’s tradition, we also worked with a few college students from Stanford University and Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) as interns. They contributed to developing new features and onboarding NGOs during the Accelerator program.

“My time at Glific taught me that no matter the challenge, empathy and teamwork are crucial.”
– Srushti Pawar, Second-year student at SRCC (Full blog here)

Working with these students was not only a valuable learning experience for them (Blog) but also for us, especially for team members mentoring for the first time. Read our developer Amisha’s blog about her first mentoring experience.

Planning for Growth and Sustainability
Glific is now a Meta Tech Partner, giving Meta visibility into the NGOs that are onboarded and using Glific as their solution. We have also successfully migrated all NGO accounts to the Gupshup Cloud API, paving the way for potential new features such as WhatsApp Flows and WhatsApp Icebreakers.

We are also on our path to being GDPR ready. This will enhance data security and reduce the risk of data breaches for NGOs. We hope to close this before the end of the year.

“While we celebrate our achievements, we also reflect on areas for improvement, embracing challenges and lessons along the way”

What Could Have Been Done Better

While we continue to learn and improve with every query we get from NGOs or through our internal processes, there were four significant lowlights this year that impacted the NGO experience with the platform or their operations:

1. We rushed the release of the template flows feature to meet the Accelerator timeline. Unfortunately, this led to bugs and the need for a redesign. In hindsight, we could have planned and tested the feature more thoroughly before the release. Here is a Blog on our learnings & reflections.
2. We experienced issues while transitioning to OpenAI as the LLM service provider, which took time to iron out and make responses reliable enough for NGOs to take to the ground. In this process one of our NGOs SNEHA’s chatbot operations got impacted.
3. A bug with the “Trigger” feature led to some triggers failing in Arogya World’s chatbot, which meant messages didn’t reach their users (over 250) on time.
4. We are still struggling to resolve a long-standing bug with the “Simulator/Preview” feature. Despite multiple fixes, the issue persists. We remain hopeful of finding a breakthrough solution for this in the coming year.

Overall, growth, collaboration, and learning defined our journey in 2024.

2025- Here we come 😉