Open lippytak opened 10 years ago
Tried to do something like this years ago at Bread for the City in DC, just using Google Voice. totally didn't work. So yeah, it's a good idea... that said, i wouldn't be surprised if something like FrontlineSMS already offers this kind of functionality...
Does Twitter still work over SMS at 40404?
Yep! (just confirmed)
Why do you ask? What are you thinking? Privacy is an important consideration here and anonymity of answers is an important feature of certain use cases.
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 8:34 AM, migurski notifications@github.com wrote:
Does Twitter still work over SMS at 40404?
— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/codeforamerica/health-project-ideas/issues/8#issuecomment-41811683 .
Textizen currently offers something similar to this functionality. You can create lists based on people who have previously texted into the system or upload a CSV of phone numbers, and then send out surveys to them, either immediately or scheduled.
I was thinking that Twitter might offer a way to deal with this, but did not consider the privacy implications. Phone numbers would be hidden I expect?
And here's a 'funder one pager' I just wrote for my current boss in case she wants to pursue funding later.
@gangleton I totally agree that Textizen can support most if not all of this. When you have a minute take a look at the first two use cases below...do you think Textizen is the right product for them? My gut is that if an org can't get up and running for free in 5 mins with complete clarity of what the thing does ("text questions to your clients right now") then it's not quite the right fit for the orgs I'm talking about here. With that said maybe the better approach is to go get $$ to add specific feature sets to Textizen.
Summary TinyText is a simple Q&A tool over text message. It lets you ask questions to dozens of people at once and receive aggregated answers in real time. It's the easiest way for nonprofits to get feedback.
Most nonprofits have a large and diverse group of stakeholders. These include donors, volunteers, and clients, among others. Currently it's difficult for nonprofits to receive effective, actionable feedback from these stakeholders. Organizations typically get feedback from a combination of annual surveys, board meetings, suggestion boxes, review websites like GreatNonprofits.org, and ad hoc conversations with stakeholders. Most of these methods are costly, time consuming, and infrequent. As a result, most feedback is not actionable; it does not directly inform short-term decisions. TinyText provides immediate, actionable feedback.
Use cases
There are certainly many other use cases along these lines. Some of the benefits of text message Q&A compared to email or phone are:
Product features Before discussing specific features, I want to describe how TinyText might fit into the already large and scattered ecosystem of text message communication/survey products.
First, TinyText is a simple, single purpose product for small nonprofits. It's not a platform. It's a tool. By "product," I mean the marginal cost of giving access to an additional organization is near zero. The organization can sign up in one minute for free and then pay a small ongoing fee by volume to send more messages over time. There are already many products that can send and receive groups of text messages. These include Salesforce, Textit.in, Trext.me, and Textizen to name a few. I encourage you to try each of these out right now and ask yourself whether they support the right balance of simplicity/features for a poor nonprofits with a small nontechnical staff. TinyText would differentiate itself by what it does not do.
For example, TinyLetter is a micro version of Mailchimp. Mailchimp does everything that TinyLetter does and much more, but there is still a healthy market for TinyLetter. Similarly, TinyText would be a micro version of Trextit.in (for example).
Current prototype features include:
Future features would probably include:
More convos, more use cases:
For these teacher/student use cases, a retrospective on classtalk may help us avoid similar pitfalls. @scottsil if you have time to review this thread and offer some perspective that would be awesome. What were the primary uses of classtalk? Were teachers engaged? Students? Was there a business/sustainability model? Why didn't it work out? Any reflections you can offer would be super helpful so we don't needlessly go down a path that didn't work before. Thanks!
(not exactly a health idea, but nowhere else to dump this stuff right now so bear with me!) BLUF: TinyText: Ad hoc group Q&A via SMS. The simplest feedback tool for nonprofits. Link: Brain dump below. Project Needs: Everything...fund, dev, design. Status: Prototyped but not actively working on it.
Details
Part of my work with GreatNonprofits I built a little SMS feedback app/demo and shopped it around to a small handful of nonprofits. After talking to a bunch of orgs but deciding not to pursue this within my GNP contract (too little time/diff org priorities), I'm pretty convinced there's a market/opportunity for basically TinyLetter for SMS: Mailchimp is to TinyLetter :: as Textit.in (or Trext.me or Promptly) is to TinyText
Here's a functional TinyText prototype that you can play with.
The basic use case is: Imagine you're a small (<10 staff) nonprofit that does mostly direct service stuff. Tax prep. Health care. Educational workshops. Scholarships for kids. You have ~50-200 clients. Currently most of these orgs do lots of high effort, high touch comms via phone and email. They gather very little feedback or quality improvement...maybe one survey at the end of the year. TinyText is a dead simple way for them to do light touch, adhoc Q&A with clients via SMS. Send a question to the group and receive responses in almost real time. Imagine one light touch per week ("How was your first semester? Can we help with anything right now?") vs. one hour-long phone call per semester. I have ~3 orgs who seemed pretty excited to use this basically as-is pending a few basic feature requests. Lots of simple pricing models...like first 100 msgs free then 2c/msg or something.
Keep it in the back of your mind for now and let me know if (1) this is actually a bad idea or (2) a funding source/model comes to mind...I'm really not sure who exactly would pay for this to exist.
CCing @andyhull @emilyville - consider watching this repo and adding ideas as they come to mind. See the top chunk here as a mini template.