Seeing the social impact of mobile technology: Experiences of a FrontlineSMS volunteer
One of our volunteers, Molly, in her FrontlineSMS Hero T-shirt 'doing' the FrontlineSMS logo \o/ This photo was taken in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, US.
FrontlineSMS relies on the support of our growing band of dedicated volunteers and interns, who provide heroic amounts of support to help us keep things running successfully. We have a page on our website dedicated to these ‘FrontlineSMS Heroes‘ in order to acknowledge all the great work they do.
There are many different ways to become a FrontlineSMS Hero; volunteers help out with tasks such as user support on our community forum, researching how our software is used, or helping edit our website. We also regularly take on interns who dedicate a few days a week to help out a with specific projects. You can find out more about the current internship roles we have available on our Jobs and Internships page. In this blog post one of our regular volunteers, Molly Redding, shares her experiences of what its like to help out at FrontlineSMS:
I can’t believe I’ve been volunteering with FrontlineSMS for more than a year now! What a great year its been. My volunteer journey started when Laura Walker Hudson, FrontlineSMS Director of Operations, came to speak at my NGO Management course at the London School of Economics. At that time, I’d become interested in the use of mobile technology to support social development projects, so I was thrilled when Laura started talking about FrontlineSMS. I practically bowled her over after class to ask if they needed volunteers, and she kindly took my contact details.
Fast forward a few weeks, and I was on board at FrontlineSMS helping Florence analyze data received from a user survey. Since then I’ve been involved in a variety of projects, all of which have helped me to learn more about FrontlineSMS’s work and the world of ICT4D (information and communications technologies for development).
There are many reasons I love volunteering for FrontlineSMS. First off, is being able to find out about the impact the software is making around the world. FrontlineSMS has found an incredible way to help non-profit organizations make use of affordable mobile technology. I was lucky enough to help FrontlineSMS keep track of the projects using their software, through supporting work on their user survey and their increasingly active user map. This helped me begin to understand the vastly varied uses for this platform. I learned that from agriculture to maternal health, and from California, to Kenya, to the Ukraine; FrontlineSMS is everywhere! Read More
Find answers to Frequently Asked Questions about FrontlineSMS!
FrontlineSMS set up on a laptop. Photo credit: Ken Banks, kiwanja.net
When people first encounter FrontlineSMS software, a number of questions come up again and again, both in person and on our community forum; ‘how do I access the software?’ ‘What does it cost to send and receive messages?’ ‘What can FrontlineSMS be used for?’ We’ve collated the answers to these and many more Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on FrontlineSMS in a brand new user resource.
In keeping with our ethos of user-driven innovation, our community forum (a key source of inspiration for the FAQ) is a place where FrontlineSMS deployers both get help, and help each other. Members also contribute their own ‘tips and tricks’ on how to overcome certain challenges with our software, and so we have included them in a special section in the FAQ. We hope that by collating the FAQ we will help empower and encourage more users to reach out and support each other in the community.
This resource is by no means exhaustive; it is an organic resource which we will continue to add to with input from our user community. Your feedback and suggested additions are very welcome, and we look forward to continuing to build up this resource over time. Please do take a read through the FAQ, and let us know what you think and if it’s helpful for you!
We would like to take this opportunity to offer huge thanks to our previous Community Project Assistant, Lisa LaRochelle, for her amazing work in pulling this FAQ together, and also to Jordan Hosmer-Henner at TechChange for helping initiate the idea.
This resource would of course not have been possible without the input of our fantastic FrontlineSMS user community, so huge thanks to all of you! \o/
Visit the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
Visit and/or join our community forum.
Faster Channels of Communication: A Radio and SMS Initiative in NE Kenya
Infoasaid has recently shared some news about an initiative with Save the Children in Wajir, Kenya, which is using FrontlineSMS to communicate with field workers and community representatives. Meanwhile, the radio is being used to share information about health, education and food security.
The objective of Infoasaid – a consortium of Internews and the BBC World Service Trust - is to improve how aid agencies communicate with disaster-affected communities. The emphasis is on the need to deliver information, as aid itself, through the most appropriate channels. You can read more about Infoasaid’s work on their website http://infoasaid.org/
The article is republished below with permission, or read the original post here.
Members of the Wajir Community. Photo Credit: Infoasaid
Infoasaid has helped Save the Children to improve its two-way communication with half a million drought-affected people in Northeast Kenya.
The project uses mobile telecommunications and community radio to establish new and faster channels of communication between the aid agency and remote rural communities.It was launched in Wajir County, close to the Somali border, in the fourth quarter of 2011 and will run during the first six months of 2012. Read More
FrontlineSMS Listed at Number 47 in the Global Journal’s “Top 100 Best NGOs”
FrontlineSMS is excited and honoured to be featured in The Global Journal’s list of Top 100 Best NGOs, which was announced earlier this week. It is fantastic to receive this acknowledgement for the important role FrontlineSMS is playing in leveraging mobile technology to support social change across the world. We have lots planned for 2012, and so this announcement is a great start to what is going to be a big year! For more information on this announcement please see below or you can visit the Global Journal webpage, too.
Here is how the Global Journal announced their ‘Top 100 Best NGOs‘ list:
“The Global Journal is proud to announce the release of its inaugural ‘Top 100 Best NGOs’ list. The first international ranking of its kind, this exclusive in-depth feature will no doubt stimulate debate, while providing academics, diplomats, policymakers, international organizations and the private sector an insight into the ever changing dynamics and innovative approaches of the non-profit world and its 100 leading actors.
This is what they said of FrontlineSMS, and the reason why we are in the list:
“In 2005, Ken Banks [FrontlineSMS Founder] was working to help authorities engage and communicate with the public on wildlife conservation efforts in South Africa without relying on the Internet. Realizing he needed a system that could send, receive, and organize SMS text messages through a mobile device and laptop, the original concept of FrontlineSMS was born.
For remote areas in developing countries where individuals can at best access a mobile phone signal, the simplicity of FrontlineSMS is central to its appeal. A free, open-source software platform that works without an Internet connection by connecting a device such as a cell phone or GSM modem with a local phone number, FrontlineSMS has been downloaded 20,000 times and is being used in 70 countries worldwide. From facilitating the real-time dissemination of market data to coffee farmers in Aceh, to supporting Iraq’s first independent news agency and being used to monitor elections and prevent vote rigging in the Philippines, Afghanistan and Nigeria, users have driven the development of new features to support positive social change in over 20 sectors.
As the FrontlineSMS community has expanded, so too has the ‘family’ of sector specific projects the organization has, which are adapting and extending the software for specialized use in finance, education delivery, healthcare, community radio and legal services.”
You can read more about this announcement on the Global Journal website here.
FrontlineSMS is shaped by our diverse user community: We want to hear from you!
By Florence Scialom, FrontlineSMS Community Support Coordinator
Some FrontlineSMS users 'doing' the FrontlineSMS logo. Photo credit: Ken Banks, kiwanja.net
“Focus on the user and all else will follow,” has been one of our main mottos here at FrontlineSMS ever since the original version of our software was built in 2005. Yet it is undeniable that, as we gear up for a big year in 2012, the face of the FrontlineSMS user is more diverse than it was when we first started out. Ken Banks, the Founder of FrontlineSMS, has often said to the team here that he was excited when one person downloaded FrontlineSMS back when he first made the software available; at the end of 2011 the number of people who had downloaded FrontlineSMS passed the 20,000 mark.
As our user base continues to grow, our user-focused ethos is more important to us than ever. We strongly believe that our direction should continue to be guided by our passionate, innovative, and richly varied user community. That is why we would love to hear your views in our latest FrontlineSMS user survey. We want to hear your feedback on our user resources and our software, so that we can feed your opinions into our planning for 2012. Even if you aren’t using FrontlineSMS actively at the moment, your opinions still matter to us, and we’d love to hear any views and experiences you’d like to share about FrontlineSMS in our survey.
Our user map, showing where FrontlineSMS is being downloaded and used across the world
We have seen our software used in so many different ways – election monitoring, maternal health support, citizen engagement, education, coordination of humanitarian response, to name just a few – and in so many places – Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Cote d’Ivoire, Canada, the UK are just some of the locations we’ve documented use of FrontlineSMS in within the last year. This is both very exciting and somewhat challenging for us; we would like to ensure that FrontlineSMS software and user support continues to meet the needs of our users, whatever those users now look like. The fact that our user community is growing makes it even more important for us to hear feedback, so we can serve increasingly varied and changing user needs.
Some of the team here wearing FrontlineSMS T-shirts
And we’d like to say thank you – fill in the survey, and you’ll be in with a chance of winning a limited-edition FrontlineSMS T-shirt. For the next four weeks we will also be choosing one lucky survey respondent each week to win an unlocked, FrontlineSMS-compatible USB GSM modem. In addition, we will choose another lucky prize winner to get a copy of the well-known book, SMS Uprising, signed by our very own Ken Banks. (All those who have filled out the survey already will also be in with a chance of winning these prizes). So, as well as the opportunity to feed in to our 2012 strategy you could win some very exciting prizes! All this for just 5 minutes of your time – what have you got to lose? Read More
