One of our major strengths is the wealth of knowledge and experience we have nurtured and supported within our user community. The FrontlineSMS team interacts and engages regularly with our vibrant and dynamic community of users, and encourages them to actively participate; through our buzzing community forum, which now has over 2,000 members, as well as through contributing guest blog posts and case studies.

FrontlineSMS has been downloaded over 20,000 times and it is now being used in over 70 countries across the world, as shown in results of our user survey. Our users have continued to define FrontlineSMS by applying the software in creative ways, driving the development of new features and innovating for positive social change in all sectors —disaster response, human rights monitoring, community radio, health, education and agriculture, to name just a few. We recognize that it is vital to maintain focus on our user community; it is those who use our software on the ground that have made the FrontlineSMS story a success.

If you are looking for photos of FrontlineSMS in use, we have created sets of high-resolution photos on our Flickr page.

FrontlineSMS use cases from the field:

Transparency and Governance: Nigeria, Reclaim Naija Election Incident Report System

Agriculture: Indonesia, Fish Marketing Information System

Emergency Response: Haiti, Ayiti SMS SOS helpline service

Information Management: Kenya, UN’s OCHA Kenya team

Community Radio: Niger, Chad, Nepal and Cambodia, Share views of local issues on radio programs with SMS

For more, see our user guest posts and in-depth case Studies.

User quotes

“We use FrontlineSMS to share news headlines, notifications of events, and we also encourage a two-way dialogue… In so doing we believe we extend the conversation to people living on the margins of access to information.”

Bev Clarke, Kubatana, Zimbabwean Civil Society Organization

“By leveraging basic tools already available to most NGOs – computers and mobile phones – FrontlineSMS enables instantaneous two-way communication on a large scale. It’s easy to implement, simple to operate, and best of all, the software is free. You just pay for the messages you send in the normal way.”

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, http://www.jhuccp.org/node/1037

“Based in Africa in a country where broadcast technology is controlled by a dictatorial government, this software has enabled me to communicate with the public at large. I am able to run my project without drawing unnecessary attention to myself—a good thing in this neck of the woods.”

Anonymous Frontline SMS user in central Africa, http://www.movements.org/how-to/entry/frontlinesms/

FrontlineSMS Heroes

In addition to engaging our user community, we have also identified our FrontlineSMS Heroes—those individuals who actively volunteer to provide support to each other on our user forum and throughout our community. Celebrating the contributions of these active users helps us to represent the interactive and supportive nature of our user community; which is something that helps make FrontlineSMS unique. For access to our community-generated content, see Resources.

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