How to use FrontlineSMS to send text messages to multiple stakeholders
From Shareideas
Contents |
What is FrontlineSMS?
FrontlineSMS is a piece of software, downloadable from the FrontlineSMS website, which allows the sending and receiving of text messages between NGOs and their stakeholders via a laptop or personal computer and an attached mobile phone. Stakeholders can be anyone from health workers, human rights campaigners, staff or community groups, and the messages could be health education-based, reports on human rights violations, election monitoring reports, job announcements, meeting arrangements, market prices or wildlife alerts, among many others. Most group messaging tools are web-based and not appropriate solutions for organisations working in remote areas, or places with unreliable telecommunications infrastructure, or areas with no internet connectivity at all. FrontlineSMS gets around this by using the mobile phone network to send and receive the messages. Crucially, this also allows recipients of messages to reply, not always possible (or cost-effective) with web-based alternatives.
What can it do?
FrontlineSMS allows NGOs to communicate with their stakeholders, and for their stakeholders to communicate with them, via text message. Stakeholders can be placed in groups – either geographically or by theme – and for single messages to be broadcast to entire groups from anywhere with a mobile phone signal. It also provides survey functionality – community members can be asked to register an opinion on a local issue, vote, or report specific events, and these results can be exported into programs such as Excel. An auto-reply feature also allows set messages to be sent out automatically to mobile phones, triggered by keywords, and this could provide a basic market prices system, for example. A monitoring console allows heavier users – perhaps a radio station soliciting opinions or comments from listeners – to display incoming messages on a large display for reading out live over the air.
How easy is it to use?
The software has been tested and trialled by a wide range of NGOs since its release in 2005, and it has proved very popular as a simple, entry-level, works-out-of-the-box introduction to text messaging.
The process for using FrontlineSMS is:
1. Download the software from the FrontlineSMS Download page
2. Install the software on a laptop or personal computer
3. Acquire a dedicated handset – a Nokia, for example – to use with the system
4. Acquire a USB cable to connect the handset to the computer
5. Insert a local SIM card into the phone, and connect it to the computer via the cable
6. Configure FrontlineSMS, based on the simple instructions on the Download page
7. Create user groups, and begin adding numbers
8. Start texting
How has FrontlineSMS been used?
FrontlineSMS has been in use since 2005 but only hit headline news when a Nigerian NGO – the Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) – used it to help monitor the 2007 Nigerian Presidential elections. See the Citizens Use SMS to Monitor Nigeria's Presidential Election case study for further details. More recently it has been used to help circumvent government reporting restrictions in Pakistan. As at December 2006, FrontlineSMS had been used by NGOs in over 40 countries around the world
