Nick Scott, Head of Digital at MSF Spain, writes about how the organisation had nice success with the implementation of chatbots because the COVID-19 pandemic unfold the world over. Together with Toni Matas, director at Persualia, Nick spoke about their expertise at #FRO2021 from The Useful resource Alliance.
In March final 12 months, our world modified from someday to the subsequent. At MSF Spain, we knew that the lives of our confined audiences had modified massively. Their days lived on-line. Work on-line. Faculty on-line. Even events on-line.
It was an opportunity for us to strive a brand new advertising and marketing technique: inbound advertising and marketing.
COVID-19 would require us to launch digital-only advertising and marketing campaigns. Most of those could be campaigns based mostly on interruption by advertisements, by which communication with a possible donor was fast, and the response we sought – a donation – was speedy. And we knew they’d work, as a result of emergency campaigns do work properly on digital. There’s urgency, the difficulty is well-known, and the necessity is obvious.
However there was additionally a chance to strive one thing completely different. For the primary time ever, the factor that almost all pursuits MSF – medical-humanitarian motion – was additionally the factor that a majority of individuals in Spain. These had been individuals who had been dwelling by a medical-humanitarian emergency in their very own nation, and these shared pursuits are the core of sturdy communication.
4 days after the primary lockdown was carried out, we acquired one thing surprising by e-mail. It was an inside doc, containing a sequence of suggestions to assist workers handle their emotional and psychological well being within the face of the pandemic.
With the arrival of this doc, we noticed a novel alternative. We already knew that psychological well being was a key theme for our audiences. A sequence of movies we’d launched providing recommendation on psychological well being in a pandemic was getting attain we hardly ever noticed with our content material, being seen by a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals. We noticed the chance to create a marketing campaign that doesn’t ask for one thing however moderately presents it. A marketing campaign that doesn’t chase, however attracts.
An opportunity to strive a brand new software: chatbots
We additionally had an opportunity to check a brand new sort of channel that we knew had the capability to be extremely partaking: chatbots. We had been already in negotiations with an company that specialised within the space of chatbots and conversational advertising and marketing and had been satisfied of their potential. Why chatbots?
- They’re very versatile. You should use them to adapt to the wants and responses of every consumer with completely different journeys, and work with completely different goals with every chatbot (consciousness, engagement, conversion, and so on.)
- Customers perceive the chat format. Chatbots really feel much like broadly used instruments like WhatsApp and, in contrast to with touchdown pages, customers solely should course of one piece of data at a time when partaking with them
- They’re extremely optimisable. Each click on is a knowledge level. It’s simple to grasp the place persons are being engaged and the place they aren’t so that you could rapidly and simply adapt and alter every bit of textual content and each level of interplay
- They will include many types of media and content material. Customers don’t want to depart the chatbot to expertise all the things from textual content and video to video games, information seize, and extra
Introducing our chatbot for psychological well being in lockdown
We launched our chatbot initially of April in 2020. The “bot” was really one in all our crew members: Maria Cecilia from our psychological assist unit – we even included her image to reassure customers and make the expertise really feel private. The content material she delivered was based mostly on MSF’s inside psychological well being assist doc, however rewritten as a sequence of tales within the punchy conversational textual content type of chatbots. It provided recommendation on eight potential types of emotional stress, with plenty of illustrations to interrupt up the textual content and convey it to life.
Moreover, we created a downloadable lockdown package that provided recommendation and steering based mostly on the guidelines contained inside the chatbot expertise, together with different assets. Customers who give their contact particulars to obtain the package are registered for a follow-up e-mail journey, which is the inbound advertising and marketing a part of the equation. Those that gave their particulars had been additionally given an outline of MSF’s operations and the prospect to make a direct distinction by donating to assist the combat in opposition to COVID-19.
We added the newly-created chatbot to our coronavirus net pages. Resulting from their excessive rating in Google for the search phrases “epidemic” and “coronavirus”, these pages had been receiving hundreds of distinctive guests daily, making certain sturdy preliminary engagement with the chatbot. We additionally posted in regards to the bot on our social media channels, realizing we may count on large attain on any content material referring to psychological well being and COVID-19.
Along with e-mail advertising and marketing, we additionally developed Fb advertisements to advertise the chatbot and attain an viewers past our most conventional supporter base. Throughout the first three weeks, we achieved very promising outcomes:
- Over 100,000 arrived on the level of first interplay
- 71,000 noticed one of many emotional suggestions
- 7,700 leads (2,000 outdoors Spain)
- 78 donors (€3,350 donated)
- 33 common donors
One of many bot’s best successes was WhatsApp, the place it was shared tens of hundreds of occasions. On one event, a message despatched by me and one other member of my crew to high school mother and father teams on WhatsApp went world wide; hundreds of individuals from Guatemala and Mexico had been reached by forwarded messages. Months later, we heard from our psychological assist crew that we’d had sufferers from a centre in Guatemala congratulate our docs on the chatbot!
The chatbot has since been tailored into completely different languages and contexts. However, as lockdown has change into much less strict and the viewers utilizing the unique bot in Spanish has dropped, the price of advertisements has continued to rise. So, now we have continued to optimise and now must revisit our technique to plan how we are going to use the bot in an always-on means, in a time when COVID-19 is not going to be such an element.
A primary (of many) forays into the world of chatbots
In our digital response to COVID-19, we didn’t cease at only one chatbot. Throughout 2020, we went somewhat chatbot-crazy, releasing a number of bots to fulfill a wide range of completely different goals: peer-to-peer fundraising, engagement, recruitment, common donor acquisition, and extra. Throughout our speak at #FRO2021, we talked delegates by the seven superpowers of chatbots and the way MSF Spain employed each to check this newest software in our arsenal.
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