Kenyan educational charity The Dignitas Project required a rapid technology response to schools shutting down in Nairobi during Covid-19.
The coronavirus pandemic had a big effect on education. With schools around the world shutting their doors, the challenge was to help local leaders of learning to support families throughout the crisis.
We helped The Dignitas team by identifying conversational technologies that could be used to automate key information.
Our solution – The Dignitas Project digital assistant is helping local hubs of learning by giving their local leaders a simple and effective way to understand how to continue to support families and children. We helped them deploy this through the widely available Facebook messenger platform.
We kicked off the project process using our rapid deployment framework – Ideal for Pilots, MVPs and POCs – as well as simpler, but high-impact live initiatives. This condenses the conversational business strategy, design and development sprints into a 2-week launch cycle – against a typical work cycle of 8-12 weeks.
We worked very closely with the senior management team at the Dignitas Project on deploying the most effective digital assistant solution in the shortest available timeframe – making platform, content and conversation design decisions rapidly.
A continuous prototyping loop with the key team and the local education leaders ensured feedback was prioritised – and fed back directly into the mini-sprints.
Modules for key topics were set up as hub content, from which the local leaders could access easily. This helped them continue educating and supporting the families within their hub group.
We included a number of interaction and feedback points in the assistant to ensure the content and instruction on how to continue with their teaching was clearly understood, features included;
- Live chat with a coach – 1-to-1 and group
- Evaluation questions before and after each module
- Weekly updates with new module content such as Parental guidance,
- Monitoring child wellbeing and having a growth mindset during Covid
- Creative video and interactive downloads and content
The teaching assistant was launched on Facebook Messenger – due to its reach and ease of updating. Local leaders could access it through a link that introduces the assistant and its functions. They could then receive relevant content on how it can help them continue their teaching through the module interactions, and further supported with automated and live coach functions.
Data captured was sent securely to the Dignitas Project team, from where evaluation and reflection information could be reviewed – using this data to inform better content and improved flow for users. Ultimately, the assistant is only useful if the local leaders understand how to use it, find it actually useful and can use it as a communication tool to support them (and the families they support) through a challenging time. The assistant has supported thousands of people through the local hubs.
The Digital assistant supported Dignitas through the Covid pandemic. It helped to support families through the work that local leaders in Nairobi do to keep children learning, through a very difficult time.
We provided training forday-to-day running of the assistant (content, updates, data handling) to the team at Dignitas.
What to do next
We can help automate and improve customer and client experience with conversational technology. Voice, chat, app or web based solutions can help you to engage your funders, donators and service users. Get in touch to find out how.
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