Facebook recently announced that WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users – 20% of the world’s population! – sending more than 60 billion messages every day.
- In India and Brazil, 80% of small businesses are already using WhatsApp to communicate with their customers.
- In Zimbabwe, WhatsApp alone was responsible for half of all internet traffic in the country last year.
- In Central and South America and South Africa, WhatsApp has erased the digital gender gap prevalent in almost every other digital tool.
If you are not using WhatsApp in your programs, you are missing out on a key messaging platform to reach your constituents.
Please RSVP now to learn how you can use WhatsApp in your programs at the next Tech Salon DC.
What is Your WhatsApp Business Strategy?
Many programs already use WhatsApp to communicate with key staff and form peer-to-peer learning and support groups.
- In South Africa, USAID used WhatsApp to co-design educational campaigns for the dapivirine ring to reduce HIV infections
- In Zambia, IntraHealth International uses WhatsApp to help rural nurses and midwives connect with each other for support and mentoring day and night.
- In Kenya, DAI uses WhatsApp to help agricultural extension agents share pictures of farmer issues, and link farmers with buyers.
- In Brazil, elite doctors used WhatsApp to track Zika symptoms and discover its link to microcephaly birth defect.
And now we can do so much more with WhatsApp.
Facebook has just launched WhatsApp Business for small and medium businesses to connect with their customers. We can use this same tool to connect with our constituents, using features like:
- Business Profiles with useful information about our programs, like contact details, physical location, and website.
- Messaging Tools like automated greeting messages and quick replies to frequently asked questions.
- Messaging Statistics to show simple metrics like the number of messages read to find what’s working.
- WhatsApp Web to send and receive messages on the desktop.
Praekelt.org has even launched WhatsApp for Social Impact to help us all leverage the new WhatsApp Business solution for our programmatic needs, and they’ll be at the WhatsApp Tech Salon DC.
What is Your WhatsApp Mitigation Strategy?
We owe a great debt to Facebook and WhatsApp for building tools that are scaling to billions of our constituents. They are realizing the dream of a global digital village, and we are enjoying the fruits of their efforts.
As long as we play by their ever-changing rules, give up our most intimate data, and accept that they can decide to go a different direction at any time, stranding us and our programs. The internet is littered with technology that was abandoned, bought out, shut down at a moment’s notice.
Before we get too enamored by WhatsApp, we should think long and hard about what we are giving up in migrating to the platform.
If you’ve read this far, you really should RSVP now to join the next Technology Salon on using WhatsApp for international development.
I don’t think most users are even aware they are giving up their “most intimate data” when they use platforms like WhatsApp.