Mobile. Social. Change

FrontlineSMS lowers barriers to driving transformative social change using mobile technologies. We build and distribute free and open-source software; provide support and resources to our users, and draw on our users experiences to inspire others.

We believe in giving local people ownership of the tools they need to change their world for the better. We have never monitored an election, or run a healthcare clinic, but our users have —and we help them to use mobile technologies in their work, without dictating how our software should be used.

By using available technology—affordable laptops and basic mobile phones—we help organizations in both economically developed and under-developed countries to overcome communication barriers they face.

For more specific activities, see FrontlineSMS in Action.

Building software

Our FrontlineSMS group-messaging software works with a laptop connected to a mobile phone or modem. This setup allows our users to send, receive and manage text message interactions with communities of people. Our software is open source, works without Internet access, is easy to set up, simple to operate and free to access. Our goal is for our software to be accessible, intuitive and powerful; letting you use SMS, the most widespread digital platform on the planet, to manage people, deliver services, and share and collect information. For more information, see Software.

Supporting our users

We support organizations using FrontlineSMS in their social change work by sharing our best practices on project implementation and design from six years of learning from our users.  We respond to and answer questions on our active online user community and provide a library of free resources about using FrontlineSMS.

For users whose needs go beyond this support, we can help design systems and projects, train staff on how to use the system, and help evaluate programs. We also offer technical troubleshooting services and can modify and extend the software to users’ specifications. For more information, see FrontlineSMS in Action.

Providing thought leadership

FrontlineSMS has established a reputation as a leader on mobile integration, partnerships and project implementation. We have been meeting increasing demand for this insight by sharing our analysis of the sector, speaking and participating at events and by offering consulting services and training. For more information and to contact us about this, see Additional Support Services.

See more of our FrontlineSMS story: Story, Family, Users, Software, Team, Media, Credits, Contact us