Read on if:

-You are an Education focused non-profit organisation

-You work with teacher-educators – training them with content and collecting feedback or progress of training and want to know how a chatbot can help

– You are curious about how an organisation used Whatsapp Chatbot to scale their impact

About us:

Saturday Art Class is a non-profit, visual arts & social-emotional learning (SEL) based education organisation. Our vision is to create a world where children are inspired to create with confidence. To achieve this, we work with & within the system to implement visual art & SEL programs to build skills to thrive in children. 

In Indian schools, Visual Arts is a required subject with a dedicated time slot each week. The challenge is that there aren’t enough art teachers within the system to provide children access to art. As a result, regular class or subject teachers end up conducting art classes, but they often lack the tools and support required. Hence, Saturday Art Class partners with educational institutions and organisations across the nation to train educators and build their capacities in visual arts and SEL facilitation as part of our Art for Educator Program. We have designed a well-contextualised and scaffolded visual art and SEL curriculum that focuses on mindset building and creating safe space of expression for children from Grades 1 to 8.

Along with that, we conduct research in visual arts and SEL engagement outcomes for our children and conduct stakeholder engagement and awareness workshops.

WhatsApp Chatbot to scale:

Since 2021-2024, Through our flagship Art for Educator program we have trained 950+ educators reaching 53,000 children and are now leveraging WhatsApp chatbot to scale and sustain our reach and engagement with educators.

To scale our work, we realised that along with our training, we needed an effective tool for the dissemination of our resources and an efficient support and communication channel with our educators. Our goal for technology was to ease the delivery of art class plans, and digital resources, and collect feedback and artworks of our children from the classrooms. We also recognised the need to support the educators with help requests they may have regarding the art class plans, facilitation or the chatbot.

In our first two years (2021 -2022) of leveraging technology, we managed to reach 250 teachers, using Google Drive links to deliver lesson plans. However, this became very cumbersome for us to monitor if the teachers were executing the art class plans and if they were facing any issues while doing so., we began to look for an easier way to deliver the art class plans as our goal for this academic year (2023) was to scale and register 600 educator-teachers. We heard about the WhatsApp chatbot. We began to research and explore it and felt confident that it could be a good solution to address our needs. We started our account with Glific, leveraging our existing team to build and maintain the chatbot.

In May 2023 we conducted a pilot with 10 educators of one of our partners. The aim of this pilot was to understand how the bot will fit within our context, to test our flows and to understand if they are easy to use for our users. Post this we launched our chatbot with all our partner educators.

This is how we have designed our chatbot

The WhatsApp chatbot has flows – a conversation roadmap that guides how a chatbot interacts with users, outlining the order and structure of the questions and responses to achieve a specific goal or provide information. Our chatbot had these flows

1.      Educator Registration – the flow registers educators by asking them details such as Name, city, number of students in their classrooms, the grade they teach, partner name etc.

2.      Art class plan and resources delivery – We provide educators 20 art class plans for the academic year and resources such as charts and videos that aid the educators in executing the art lesson plans.

3.    Feedback, Check for understanding and progress collection – After delivery of an art class plan, we do a check for understanding to know if the educator has understood the art class plan, we ask for 3 images from the educators to understand if the educator has executed the art class plan and how the students have responded and created their artwork based on the lesson plans. Periodically, we gather detailed feedback from educators on how easy it was to teach, as well as their and the children’s experiences etc. 

4.   Help flow – To make it easy for any educator to ask for help, in case they are unable to understand the next steps. 

This was the flow of information between the chatbot flows. Being modularly connected, they seamlessly passed on information necessary for the other flow between each other  – 

Leveraging features in Glific– In building these flows, we leveraged these easy to use features in Glific –

1.  Easy to build graphical flow builder – Glific has a graphical interface where we can double click to create nodes, drag and connect nodes and insert interactive messages like buttons. It also allows multilingual content in the same flows.

2.  Modular flows – Glific allows you to create flows and link them in other flows – resulting in a modular design. These modular flows made it easy for us to create complex flows in an easy to maintain way

3.  Keywords and setting contact profile values – Keywords can trigger flows and by default set some values in the users contact profile

4.  Google sheet integration to write and read from google sheets so it made the access to information for the team easy.

5.  Multilingual flows – we were able to quickly get English, Hindi and Marathi chatbot flows running

6. Interactive messages with clickable buttons and lists to simplify and ease the user experience of interacting with the bot, while reducing errors in submitting data

  

Our Journey with Art Connect (Saturday Art Class Chatbot) to date:

We aimed to reach 600 teachers this academic year and hit 450 teachers mid-academic year. While we were using the chatbot, we hit some challenges which we were able to solve quickly thanks to the simplicity of making changes in the Glific product.

1.   The chatbot training and onboarding took 20 minutes when done in person, with a group of 30 educators. They were entering different spellings or using acronyms when entering the partner name, city, and school name as part of the registration flow. The registration flow had 7 questions which took time to fill as well. We ended up modularising a flow to only handle keywords (we called this the Keyword Parser – read more here – it), and pre-fill values based on the keyword so that errors reduced along with the number of questions the teacher-educators had to fill. For example, if you used “TFIM” to start the chatbot flow, the flow set Marathi as the default language, TFI as the partner name, and Mumbai as the City. This meant that the errors in responses for these 3 questions were eliminated and the teachers only had 4 questions to fill as part of the registration flow. We brought down the in-person training time to 10 minutes (50% reduction), reduced errors in 3 key questions (100% reduction), and got feedback from the educators that the registration felt easy (100% benefit).

2. The retrieval of data for our team needed to be simplified – instead of querying a database or manually extracting information from the chat windows, we leveraged Glific’s ability to connect to Google Sheets. 

For example, in our teacher-educator registration flow – all registration data submitted by the teachers went into one Google Sheet, which we found very easy to access in real-time. The ease of being able to see in real-time, on the Google Sheets app on our phones, and the number of registrations as they happened during the in-person training made the facilitator’s work of ensuring everyone completed registration very easy. This had another benefit we didn’t anticipate. 

We have also attached Google Sheets with every art class plan. So, whenever an educator finishes an art class plan, the bot updates a Google Sheets document with completion data. This helps us keep count of the art classes conducted by our educators.

3. Experimenting with Putting data into Google Sheets also made it easy for us to experiment with Validation. Before every in-person training, our partners submit details of the teacher-educators attending. Instead of manually checking if the details are correct post-teacher-educator registration, we automated checks on teacher-educator details submitted about teachers by the partner before the start of our engagement against the teacher-educator details entered by the teacher-educators themselves during their registration through the chatbot, saving our time and effort. We were able to achieve a similar ease in efforts with post-lesson plan delivery submissions of proof.

4. Asks for help by educators could take time for responses or get missed – so they were sped up in a novel way. We used Glific’s ability to send Staff members a message on whatsapp to relay in real time the name, number, exact ask for help of the educator who asked for it, with a link to the educator’s chat window. While only 8-12 educators used it so far to ask for lesson plans and content, it made us very sure of the power of 2 way communication, especially around help and support and integrating it as a key feature in our bot offering.

What the Art Connect (Saturday Art Class Chatbot) unlocked for us:

The chatbot made leveraging technology simple for us, and simple for our educators. Our educators now feel happy with the technology component of our work – they feel that the Art class plans and other digital resources are in their pocket (thanks to WhatsApp on their phones). We are currently in the process of doing a study into understanding our educators’ perception of using the bot to help us keep it contextualised and design it in a way that addresses the gaps.

Onward in our journey of scale:

When we got an opportunity to scale into Madhya Pradesh this academic year, starting with a month long pilot with 5,000 DIET teacher-trainees, we were sure of being able to “go for it”, thanks to 2 factors – our confidence in our curriculum and methodology, and in our chatbot’s ability to deliver what we need at scale with ease! We are currently preparing for this scale, and look forward to growing.

Contact us to learn more, see a demo or to join hands with us. If you are on Glific, we can share our flows so you can import and test them out and would love to hear your thoughts and see your work on the same!