As we wrap up another year, it’s time to reflect on Glific’s journey throughout 2023. This year has been filled with understanding the needs of NGOs, developing features to cater to those needs, and creating meaningful impact. Let’s take a closer look at the key highlights that have defined our progress.

This year brought forth two significant milestones that we are proud of. Firstly, Glific celebrated the creation of its 100th account since its launch in 2020. In the span of 2023 alone, we created 34 new accounts, serving over 28 NGOs. 

Secondly, our Glific Chatbots have reached over 1 million beneficiaries since their inception. These milestones reaffirm our work to empowering NGOs and communities through effective communication. The number of beneficiaries reached has more than doubled compared to last year. In 2022, there were 498,007 users, while in 2023, the number increased to 1,010,221.

With an increase in the number of beneficiaries reached, the total number of messages exchanged through the Glific platform has also been around four times higher compared to last year. In 2022, there were 2,231,383 messages exchanged, while in 2023, the number increased to 8,349,848.

As the usage of the Glific platform has been increasing, we have become more responsible and proactive in understanding our NGOs and their users—identifying their pain points, needs, and feedback on the platform to make it even better for the NGOs and end beneficiaries.

Even this year, we continued our tradition of meeting and working with NGOs in person. We conducted three sprints in Goa, Kochi, and Udaipur. These sprints continued to provide us with valuable insights and enabled organizations to learn from each other.

While conducting sprints, we also realized that not every organization would have the bandwidth to attend. Therefore, we decided to visit their cities and engage with them, creating an environment akin to a mini-sprint. We organized three city meetups in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, where the majority of our NGOs are located. This initiative allowed us to meet with 15 NGOs, facilitating fruitful discussions and cross-learning opportunities. Additionally, we conducted two field visits with two of our NGOs (Digital Green-Jharkhand, India Literacy Project) to gain a better understanding of their programs and end beneficiaries. These meetups, field visits, and our ongoing consulting work (we worked with 12 organizations this year) have helped us build and enhance features.

We have developed a total of 11 features (including A/B testing, ChatGPT integration, and Glific Mobile app as well as a ticketing system and an internal dashboard, among others) and have made numerous small and significant enhancements (such as the template dashboard and bulk HSM uploads) to the Glific platform. These improvements continue to ease the work of NGOs.

Here, we would like to extend a huge shoutout to the C4GT students who interned with us during the summer and actively contributed to the development and enhancement of features. We have merged a total of 45 pull requests into the Glific codebase and resolved a total of 42 backend issues thanks to the four C4GT contributors. The icing on the cake is that 3 out of the top 5 students in the C4GT Community Leaderboard were students who worked with us (Tech4Dev).

One feature that has been a highlight for us is the ChatGPT integration with Glific. It’s not just a highlight because of the wide range of capabilities it offers, but also because it helped us build a strong partnership with Jugalbandi. Additionally, we have won a Cisco grant this year, which has enabled us to conduct more experiments with LLMs (Large Language Models) in collaboration with NGOs. Therefore, we have initiated an LLM cohort where we are collaborating with 16 NGOs to harness the power of LLMs to make chatbots even more impactful. Furthermore, we have conducted in-person sessions for the cohort during the Kochi sprint.

Having a decent knowledge base in place provided us with an opportunity to experiment with GPT in our Discord support system. We developed an AI-powered chatbot on Discord that responds to user queries based on our documentation. Any further assistance is then provided by our support team.

We continued to educate and empower organizations on what Glific/chatbots can accomplish by hosting monthly webinars titled “Level Up with Glific.” In these webinars, we cover new Glific features and showcase NGOs that have conducted interesting experiments (such as Dost Education), along with a few partners like Bhashini. Additionally, we have enhanced our documentation, including both written and video tutorials, although we believe there is still room for improvement in this area.

In our commitment to empowering NGOs with knowledge and resources, we conducted monthly webinars, boot camps, and collaborated with organizations like Dasra to reach new audiences. We conducted three bootcamps in total, held in Goa, Mumbai, and Delhi, where we worked with 16 NGOs in person to get their chatbots up and running within two days. These bootcamps also provided us with a good understanding of the challenges faced by new NGOs and how they navigate through their chatbot pilot 

Before the year ended, Glific also received a code security certificate from Andhra Pradesh Technology Services Limited (Government of AP Undertaking), which is an important step forward in ensuring that we build amazing Digital Public Goods that are useful beyond Project Tech4Dev and India. 

Overall, 2023 was a year of growth, collaboration, and impact for Glific. However, as Robert Frost says, “Miles to go before I sleep.”